BiblioVault - Books about Literary Criticism

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9479 books about Literary Criticism and 310 start with O
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9479 books about Literary Criticism and 310 9479 books about Literary Criticism
310 start with O start with O

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The Outward Mind

Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature

Benjamin Morgan

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

After a chance meeting with a shaman in Colombia, Ilan Stavans, the highly regarded literary scholar, found himself in the Amazon rainforest. He had reluctantly agreed to participate in a religious ceremony that involved taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca. Even though he considered himself a skeptic and a rational intellectual, as someone whose worldview was defined by his education and his heritage as a Mexican Jew, Stavans found that the ritual pushed him to reconsider many of his basic understandings, including his perceptions of indigenous cultures in Latin America, as well as his career as teacher, thinker, and artist. This one-act play is delivered in the form of a lecture that mimics the author's startling spiritual journey. The book includes twenty-five bold images, in color and black and white, which capture the author's performance of the play.

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Over the Rainbow

Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature

Edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Over the Rainbow is lively, engaging, and thoughtful. More to the point, the field of children's literature needs such a collection."
---Katherine Capshaw Smith, University of Connecticut

In spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature ---including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace---while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.

Over the Rainbow collects essays by Jes Battis, Robin Bernstein, Thomas Crisp, June Cummins, Elizabeth A. Ford, Sherrie A. Inness, Christine A. Jenkins, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Biddy Martin, Robert McRuer, Claudia Nelson, Jody Norton, Tison Pugh, Catherine Tosenberger, Eric L. Tribunella, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Andrea Wood. These pieces will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's literature, American Studies, LGBTQ and queer studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Cover art: Original title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. New York: George M. Hill, 1900.

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Ovid before Exile

Art and Punishment in the Metamorphoses

Patricia J. Johnson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

The epic Metamorphoses, Ovid’s most renowned work, has regained its stature among the masterpieces of great poets such as Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus. Yet its irreverent tone and bold defiance of generic boundaries set the Metamorphoses apart from its contemporaries. Ovid before Exile provides a compelling new reading of the epic, examining the text in light of circumstances surrounding the final years of Augustus’ reign, a time when a culture of poets and patrons was in sharp decline, discouraging and even endangering artistic freedom of expression.
Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art—specifically poetry—changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid’s final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses, responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.

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Ovid's Causes

Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses

K. Sara Myers

University of Michigan Press, 1994

Ovid’s Causes offers a new reassessment of the poet’s longest and most difficult poem, the Metamorphoses. This poem has long been denied epic stature because of its stylistic and thematic diversity. K. Sara Myers demonstrates that the poem must be understood as the inheritor and interpreter of the Roman tradition of cosmological epic. She situates the poem in the traditions and conventions of Roman poetry and considers the ways in which it both fulfills and overturns the expectations of the epic genre.

The first and final chapters of this book examine the scientific and cosmological framework of the poem. Ovid’s juxtaposition of scientific and mythological explanations is an aspect of his sophisticated manipulation of truth and fiction, and of the claims of philosophical poetry and mythological poetry.

This illuminating study presents much useful material for students of Roman poetry or of Greek literary influences that profoundly influenced its development. Students and scholars of ancient poetical traditions will likewise find much of interest.

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Ovid's "Heroides" and the Augustan Principate

Megan O. Drinkwater

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

43 BCE, the year after the assassination of Julius Caesar. While the Roman republic had seen many conflicts, it was this civil war, headed by the vengeful triumvirate of Mark Anthony, Marcus Lepidus, and Octavian, that irrevocably transformed Rome with its upheaval. What followed was years of fighting and the eventual ascendancy of Octavian, who from 27 BCE onwards would be best known as Caesar Augustus, founder of the Roman Principate.

It was in this era of turmoil and transformation that Ovid, the Roman poet best known for Metamorphoses, was born. The Heroides, one of his earliest and most elusive works, is not written from the first-person perspective that so often characterizes the elegiac poetry of that time but from the personae of tragic heroines of classical mythology.

Megan O. Drinkwater illustrates how Ovid used innovations of literary form to articulate an expression of the crisis of civic identity in Rome at a time of extreme and permanent political change. The letters are not divorced from the context of their composition but instead elucidate that context for their readers and expose how Ovid engaged in politics throughout his entire career. Their importance is as much historical as literary. Drinkwater makes a compelling case for understanding the Heroides as a testament from one of Rome’s most eloquent writers to the impact that the dramatic shift from republic to empire had on its intellectual elites.

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Ovid's Literary Loves

Influence and Innovation in the Amores

Barbara Weiden Boyd

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Ovid's poetry has in recent years enjoyed a remarkable renaissance: in particular, there has been a surge of interest in the Heroides, the Fasti, and his exile poetry. Ovid's Literary Loves, by Barbara Weiden Boyd, reopens the Amores for the modern reader. The volume establishes a context for the recent reception of the Amores, and proposes an alternative approach to the collection by discussing recent trends in the discussion of imitation in Roman poetry. A premise basic to most Ovidian studies has been that the Amores are not only imitative, but parodic, both of the elegiac genre writ large and of Propertius in particular. In contrast, Boyd emphasizes the many nonelegiac, non-Propertian features of the collection. Ovid's irony and its consequences are also discussed with special attention to the narrative structure of the three books.
Boyd's thoughtful approach to imitation in Latin poetry brings into prominence the formative role played by Virgil in shaping Ovid's "poetic memory," even in the Amores. The detailed examination of Ovidian extended similes shows how the poet exploits the literary past precisely in order to free himself from generic restraint and to expand the narrow horizons of elegy. Boyd argues that this paradox is the essence of Ovidian poetics.
Ovid's Literary Loves is an imaginative approach to imitation in Latin poetry and makes a significant contribution to current discussions of the subject. This is one of the first contemporary scholarly monographs on the Amores, and it will find a large and welcoming audience of Latinists at all levels of study.
Barbara Weiden Boyd is Associate Professor of Classics, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.

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Owning Performance | Performing Ownership

Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage

Jane Wessel

University of Michigan Press, 2022

In 1710, England’s first copyright law gave authors the ability to own their works, but it was not until 1833 that literary property law was extended to protect dramatic performance. Between these dates, generations of playwrights grappled for control over their intellectual property in a cultural and legal environment that treated print differently from performance. As ownership became a central concern for many, actors fought to possess their dramatic parts exclusively, playwrights struggled to control and profit from repeat performances of their works, and managers tried to gain a monopoly over the performance of profitable plays.

Owning Performance follows the careers of some of the 18th century’s most influential playwrights, actors, and theater managers as they vied for control over the period’s most popular shows. Without protection for dramatic literary property, these figures developed creative extra-legal strategies for controlling the performance of drama—quite literally performing their ownership. Their various strategies resulted in a culture of ephemerality, with many of the period’s most popular works existing only in performance and manuscript copies. Author Jane Wessel explores how playwrights and actors developed strategies for owning their works and how, in turn, theater managers appropriated these strategies, putting constant pressure on artists to innovate. Owning Performance reveals the wide-reaching effects of property law on theatrical culture, tracing a turn away from print that affected the circulation, preservation, and legacy of 18th century drama.

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The Ox-Bow Man

A Biography Of Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Jackson J. Benson

University of Nevada Press, 2006

Walter Van Tilburg Clark, author of the classic novel The Ox-Bow Incident, was one of the West’s most important literary figures, a writer who contributed mightily to the tradition of viewing the West realistically and not through the veil of myth and romance. As a comparatively young man, he published three novels and a collection of short stories, then remained almost silent for the rest of his life, the victim of a paralyzing case of writer’s block. Now Jackson J. Benson, one of the country’s foremost literary biographers, has produced the first full-length biography of this brilliant, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic figure. Based on widely scattered sources—personal papers and correspondence; interviews with family members, friends, and others; and Clark’s unpublished stories and poems—Benson’s biography focuses on Clark’s intellectual and literary life as a writer, teacher, and westerner. Benson masterfully balances his engaging account of the experiences, people, and settings of Clark’s life with a penetrating examination of his complex psyche and the crippling perfectionism that virtually ended Clark’s career, as well as offering up a thoughtful assessment of Clark’s place in Western writing. In these pages, Clark lives again, a warm, complex, and ultimately anguished human being. Benson’s remarkably astute and sensitive biography is destined to be the book that readers and researchers consult first for information about this major western writer.

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