BiblioVault - Books about Donoghue, Denis

Emily Dickinson - American Writers 81

University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers

Denis Donoghue

University of Minnesota Press, 1969

Emily Dickinson - American Writers 81 was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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The House of the Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Harvard University Press, 2009

Following on the heels of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables was intended to be a far sunnier book than its predecessor and one that would illustrate “the folly” of tumbling down on posterity “an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate.” Many critics have faulted the novel for its explaining away of hereditary guilt or its contradictory denial of it. Denis Donoghue instructs the reader in a fresh appreciation of the novel.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The House of the Seven Gables in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Metaphor

Denis Donoghue

Harvard University Press, 2014

Denis Donoghue turns his attention to the practice of metaphor and to its lesser cousins, simile, metonym, and synecdoche. Metaphor (“a carrying or bearing across”) supposes that an ordinary word could have been used in a statement but hasn’t been. Instead, something else, something unexpected, appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich the reader’s experience by bringing different associations to mind. The force of a good metaphor is to give something a different life, a new life. The essential character of metaphor, Donoghue says, is prophetic. Metaphors intend to change the world by changing our sense of it.

At the center of Donoghue’s study is the idea that metaphor permits the greatest freedom in the use of language because it exempts language from the local duties of reference and denotation. Metaphors conspire with the mind in its enjoyment of freedom. Metaphor celebrates imaginative life par excellence, from Donoghue’s musings on Aquinas’ Latin hymns, interspersed with autobiographical reflection, to his agile and perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens.

When Donoghue surveys the history of metaphor and resistance to it, going back to Aristotle and forward to George Lakoff, he is a sly, cogent, and persuasive companion. He also addresses the question of whether or not metaphors can ever truly die. Reflected on every page of Metaphor are the accumulated wisdom of decades of reading and a sheer love of language and life.

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Seven American Poets from MacLeish to Nemerov

An Introduction

Denis Donoghue

University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Seven American Poets from MacLeish to Nemerov was first published in 1975. Volume 9, Minnesota Library on American Writers. Leonard Unger and George T. Wright, series editorsThe Minnesota Library on American Writers, of which this is the ninth volume, is based on collections of pamphlets from the series of University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. This book focuses on seven important contemporary American poets. The subject poets and the respective authors are Archibald MacLeish by Grover Smith, Richard Eberhart by Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Theodore Roethke, also by Mr. Mills, Randall Jarrell by M.L. Rosenthal, John Berryman by William J. Martz, Robert Lowell by Jay Martin, and Howard Nemerov by Peter Meinke.Mr. Donoghue writes an introduction in which he notes that “seven modern American poets demonstrate seven different ways of being an American.” He continues: “It is not my business, nor would it give me any pleasure, to comment on the difficulty of being an American poet: I am neither American nor a poet. But it is my impression that American poets have become more skillful in the art of being themselves; poets born in 1920 or later have had the advantage of seeing a thousand ways in which the job has been done, and the encouragement of such examples. Each poet must still do the work for himself, but he has before him the pioneers from Poe and Whitman to Williams, and he knows by their example what it means to work in the American grain.”In addition to the critical introductions there are selected bibliographies for each of the seven poets.

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