Mary Ann Taylor-Hall's highly acclaimed first novel, Come and Go, Molly Snow, introduces us to Carrie Marie Mullins, a gifted Kentucky bluegrass fiddler and singer in the Hawktown Road band. After moving to Lexington to develop her talents, Carrie becomes infatuated with the band's leader, Cap Dunlap. Her romantic distraction prevents Carrie from saving her five-year-old daughter, Molly, when she careens down the driveway and is killed by a truck. Overwhelmed with grief, Carrie breaks down. Cap finds Carrie in this state of distress and takes her to Ona and Ruth Barkley, two elderly sisters living in an old farmhouse. It is on the sisters' farm that Carrie is able to slowly come to terms with her heartache and guilt over Molly's death. As she picks up the pieces of her shattered life, Carrie draws on the two women's friendship, her inner strength, and finally, the healing power of music.

What Comes Down To Us features twenty-five of Kentucky's most accomplished contemporary poets. Together they serve to illustrate the diversity and richness of poetry being written today in the Commonwealth. The poems were collected by Jeff Worley, a poet who has lived in Kentucky for more than two decades. Although the subject matter of the poems transcends the state's borders, the collection communicates a strong sense of Kentucky as a place. Worley's introduction places contemporary Kentucky poetry in the context of the state's rich literary tradition, and the poet biographies include their reflections and, often, their poetic approach and technique.

From the legendary poet Oisin to modernist masters like James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, Ireland's literary tradition has made its mark on the Western canon. Despite its proud tradition, the student who searches the shelves for works on Irish women's fiction is liabel to feel much as Virginia Woolf did when she searched the British Museum for work on women by women. Critic Nuala O'Faolain, when confronted with this disparity, suggested that "modern Irish literature is dominated by men so brilliant in their misanthropy. .. [that] the self-respect of Irish women is radically and paradoxically checkmated by respect for an Irish national achievement."While Ann Owen Weekes does not argue with the first part of O'Faolain's assertion, she does with the second. In Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, she suggests that it is the critics rather than the writers who have allowed themselves to be checkmated. Beginning with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and ending with Jennifer Johnston's The Railway Station (1980), she surveys the best of the Ireland's female literature to show its artistic and historic significance and to demonstrate that it has its own themes and traditions related to, yet separate from, that of male Irish writers.Weekes examines the work of writers like E.OE. Sumerville and Martin Ross (pen names for cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin), Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Molly Keane, among others. She teases out the themes that recur in these writers' works, including the link between domestic and political violence and re-visioning of traditional stories, such as Julia O'Faolain's use of the Cuchulain and Diarmuid and Grainne myths to reveal the negation of women's autonomy. In doing so, she demonstrates that the literature of Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish women presents a unified tradition of subjects and techniques, a unity that might become an optimistic model not only for Irish literature but also for Irish people.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890--1937) has been described variously as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the Gothic horror tale, and one of the father of modern supernatural fantasy fiction. Published originally in pulp magazines, his works have grown in popularity since his death, so that more than thirty editions are currently in print.Yet only recently has Lovecraft received serious attention from literary critics. And until now no one has examined his work from a post-structuralist perspective. Donald Burleson fills that void, for the first time in an extended study bringing the resources of deconstruction to bear on the works of this modern gothicist.In an introductory overview, Burleson gives an unusually readable account of deconstruction theory and terminology, a field all too often discussed in densely opaque fashion. He goes on to deconstruct thirteen Lovecraft stories, delving into their fascinating etymological mazes, abundant ambiguities, and shifting levels of meanings. His lively and remarkably jargon-free readings explore Lovecraft's rich figurality to unprecedented depths.At the same time Burleson develops the view that in practicing self-subversion and structural displacement, literary texts perpetuate themselves. His final chapter explores the broad themes running though Lovecraft's fiction, arguing that these themes in themselves prefigure the deconstructive gesture.This insightful and provocative volume will go a long way toward displacing the label of popular writer and establishing Lovecraft as an important figure in American literature.

After keeping school for six years at the forks of Troublesome Creek in the Kentucky hills, James Still moved to a century-old log house between the waters of Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch, on Little Carr Creek, and became "the man in the bushes" to his curious neighbors. Still joined the life of the scattered community. He raised his own food, preserved fruits and vegetables for the winter, and kept two stands of bees for honey. A neighbor remarked of Still, "He's left a good job, and come over in here and sot down."Still did sit down and write -- the classic novel River of Earth and many poems and short stories that have found their way into national publications. From the beginning, Still jotted down expressions, customs, and happenings unique to the region. After half a century those jottings filled twenty-one notebooks. Now they have been brought together in The Wolfpen Notebooks, together with an interview with Still, a glossary, a comprehensive bibliography of his work by William Terrell Cornett, and examples of Still's use of the "sayings" in poetry and prose. The "sayings" represent an aspect of the Appalachian experience not previously recorded and of a time largely past.

Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers -- some seeking a muse, others a cause -- traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners themselves. He examines portrayals of miners from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Matewan and The Kentucky Cycle. The most comprehensive study on the subject to date, Writers and Miners investigates the vexed political and creative relationship between activists and artists and those they seek to represent.

These eleven original essays by well-known eighteenth-century scholars, five of them editors of James Boswell's journal or letters, commemorate the bicentenary of Boswell's death on May 19, 1795. The volume illuminates both the life and the work of one of the most important literary figures of the age and contributes significantly to the scholarship on this rich period.In the introduction, Irma S. Lustig sets the tone for the volume. She reveals that the essays examining Boswell as "Citizen of the World" are deliberately paired with those that analyze his artistic skills, to emphasize that "Boswell's sophistication as a writer is inseparable from his cosmopolitanism." The essays in Part I focus on the relationship of the Enlightenment, at home and abroad, to Boswell's personal development. Marlies K. Danziger restores to significant life the continental philosophers and theologians Boswell consulted in his search for religious certainty. Peter Perreten examines Boswell's enraptured study of Italian antiquity and his responses to the European landscape. Richard B. Sher and Perreten document the personal and aesthetic influence of Henry Home, Lord Kames, Scottish jurist and leading Enlightenment figure, on Boswell. Michael Fry discusses Boswell's relationship with Henry Dundas, political manager for Scotland, and Thomas Crawford examines Boswell's long-standing interest in the volatile political issues of the period, including the French Revolution, through his correspondence with William Johnson Temple. In evaluation Boswell's performance as Laird of Auchinleck, John Strawhorn documents his efforts to improve the estate by use of new agricultural methods.The essays in Part II study aspects of Boswell's artistry in Life of Johnson, the magnum opus that set a standard for biography. Carey McIntosh examines Boswell's use of rhetoric, and William P. Yarrow offers a close scrutiny of metaphor. Isobel Grundy invokes Virginia Woolf in demonstrating Boswell's acceptance of uncertainty as a biographer. John B. Radner reveals Boswell's self-assertive strategies in his visit with Johnson at Ashbourne in September 1777, and, finally, Lustig examines as a "subplot" of the biography Johnson's patient efforts to win the friendship of Margaret Montgomerie Boswell. An appendix by Hitoshi Suwabe serves scholars by providing the most exact account to date of Boswell's meetings with Johnson.

The mythological, folkloric, and religious beliefs of Western culture have resulted in a long and ongoing history of esoteric themes in theatre from the Middle Ages to the present in Spain and the America. Now Robert Lima, a noted comparatist, brings to bear on this material his wide knowledge of the world of the occult. Lima defines the terms "occult" and "occultism" broadly to embrace the many ways in which humans have sought to fathom a secret knowledge held to be accessible only through such supernatural agencies as alchemy, angelology, asceticism, astrology, demonolatry, divination, ecstasy, magic, necromancy, possession, Santeria, séances, voudoun, and witchcraft. The dramatic works covered range from medieval materializations of Hell to the Golden Age plays of Lope de vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, to modern stage works by Valle-Inclán, García Lorca, Casona, Miras, and a number of significant Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean dramatists. The concluding comprehensive bibliography of the drama of the occult is invaluable.

Mention southern drama at a cocktail party or in an American literature survey, and you may hear cries for "Stella!" or laments for "gentleman callers." Yet southern drama depends on much more than a menagerie of highly strung spinsters and steel magnolias. Charles Watson explores this field from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots through the southern Literary Renaissance and Tennessee Williams's triumphs to the plays of Horton Foote, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Such well known modern figures as Lillian Hellman and DuBose Heyward earn fresh looks, as does Tennessee Williams's changing depiction of the South -- from sensitive analysis to outraged indictment -- in response to the Civil Rights Movement.Watson links the work of the early Charleston dramatists and of Espy Williams, first modern dramatist of the South, to later twentieth-century drama. Strong heroines in plays of the Confederacy foreshadow the spunk of Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield. Claiming that Beth Henley matches the satirical brilliance of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Watson connects her zany humor to 1840s New Orleans farces.With this work, Watson has at last answered the call for a single-volume, comprehensive history of the South's dramatic literature. With fascinating detail and seasoned perception, he reveals the rich heritage of southern drama.

In this original and controversial book, historian and philosopher Reviel Netz explores the development of a controlling and pain-inducing technology-barbed wire. Surveying its development from 1874 to 1954, Netz describes its use to control cattle during the colonization of the American West and to control people in Nazi concentration camps and the Russian Gulag. Physical control over space was no longer symbolic after 1874. This is a history told from the perspective of its victims. With vivid examples of the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the environment, this dramatic account of barbed wire presents modern history through the lens of motion being prevented. Drawing together the history of humans and animals, Netz delivers a compelling new perspective on the issues of colonialism, capitalism, warfare, globalization, violence, and suffering. Theoretically sophisticated but written with a broad readership in mind, Barbed Wire calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of modernity.

Farmer, poet, essayist, and environmental writer Wendell Berry is acclaimed for his ideas regarding the values inherent in an agricultural society. Place, community, good work, and simple pleasures are but a few of the values that form the bedrock of Berry's thought. While the notion of reverence is central to Berry, he is not widely known as a religious writer. However, the moral underpinnings of his work are rooted in Christian tradition, articulating the tenet that faith and stewardship of the land are not mutually exclusive. In Wendell Berry and Religion, editors Joel J. Shuman and L. Roger Owens probe the moral and spiritual implications of Berry's work. Chief among them are the notions that the earth is God's provisional gift to mankind and that studying how we engage material creation reflects important truths. This collection reveals deep, thoughtful, and provocative conversations within Berry's writings, illuminating the theological inspirations inherent in his work.

At the rise of the Tudor age, England began to form a national identity. With that sense of self came the beginnings of the colonialist notion of the "other"" Ireland, however, proved a most difficult other because it was so closely linked, both culturally and geographically, to England. Ireland's colonial position was especially complex because of the political, religious, and ethnic heritage it shared with England. Andrew Murphy asserts that the Irish were seen not as absolute but as "proximate" others. As a result, English writing about Ireland was a problematic process, since standard colonial stereotypes never quite fit the Irish. But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us examines the English view of the "imperfect" other by looking at Ireland through works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Murphy also considers a broad range of materials from the Renaissance period, including journals, pamphlets, histories, and state papers.

The marriage of philosophy and fiction in the first third of Spain's twentieth century was a fertile one. It produced some truly notable offspring -- novels that cross genre boundaries to find innovative forms, and treatises that fuse literature and philosophy in new ways. In her illuminating interdisciplinary study of Spanish fiction of the "Silver Age," Roberta Johnson places this important body of Spanish literature in context through a synthesis of social, literary, and philosophical history. Her examination of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorin, Ramon Perez de Ayala, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Gabriel Miro, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, and Benjamin Jarnes brings to light philosophical frictions and debates and opens new interpersonal and intertextual perspectives on many of the period's most canonical novels.Johnson reformulates the traditional discussion of generations and "isms" by viewing the period as an intergenerational complex in which writers with similar philosophical and personal interests constituted dynamic groupings that interacted and constantly defined and redefined one another. Current narratological theories, including those of Todorov, Genette, Bakhtin, and Martinez Bonati, assist in teasing out the intertextual maneuvers and philosophical conflicts embedded in the novels of the period, while the sociological and biographical material bridges the philosophical and literary analyses.The result, solidly grounded in original archival research, is a convincingly complete picture of Spain's intellectual world in the first thirty years of this century. Crossfire should revolutionize thinking about the Generation of '98 and the Generation of '14 by identifying the heterogeneous philosophical sources of each and the writers' reactions to them in fiction.

The hero of the story is a demonic lover -- dark, handsome, mysterious, and dangerously seductive. The heroine -- beautiful, and innocent -- willingly becomes his victim and is destroyed by him. This story of demon-lover and victim, always charged with passion, has been told over and over, from Greek mythology through contemporary fiction and films. Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction is the first historical and structural exploration of the demon-lover motif, with emphasis on major works of British fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; it will interest those concerned with gender role conflicts in literature and with the mutual influence of oral and written texts of folklore and formal literature.

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."

This volume presents a description of the Neo-Aramaic dialect that was spoken by the Jews of Sanandaj in western Iran, but which is now virtually extinct. The material for the volume was gathered firsthand in fieldwork conducted with the last remaining speakers in Israel. The volume consists of a detailed grammatical description, a corpus of transcribed texts, including folktales, historical accounts and portrayals of customs, and an extensive glossary.