BiblioVault - Books about Minotaur

Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man

Essays on Jorge de Sena

George Monteiro

Tagus Press, 2020

An undisputed giant of twentieth-century Portuguese letters, writer and literary critic Jorge de Sena (1919–1978) spent the most productive decades of his life away from Portugal, teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the essays gathered in this collection, George Monteiro deftly weaves together his readings of Sena's poetry and prose, both literary and critical, with evidence drawn from the deep well of Sena's biographical archive, focusing in particular on his Brazilian and U.S. years. This expansive overview of Sena's unparalleled career, intended to commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth, is also a tribute to Monteiro's own remarkably voluminous and far-reaching body of work on the intersection of Portuguese and Anglo-American literary studies.

[more]

Minotaur

Poetry and the Nation State

Tom Paulin

Harvard University Press, 1992

One of the most powerful poets of his generation consolidates his reputation as an exceptionally forthright and astringent critic in this book that analyzes the relationship between English-language literature, especially poetry, and nineteenth and twentieth-century politics. Tom Paulin's criticism stays on track, always responsive to a work's characteristic genius and sensitive to its social setting.

Each of these essays—on poets ranging from Robert Southey and Christina Rossetti to Philip Larkin, from John Clare to Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes, with a few excursions into the poetry of Eastern Europe for contrast—is informed by a love for poetry and a lively attention to detail. At every turn, Paulin demonstrates the intricate connection between the private imagination and society at large, simultaneously illuminating the kinship between the literature of the past and of the present. He also relates the poetry to themes of nationhood and to ideas about orality, speech rhythms, and vernacular background. Minotaur exemplifies the sort of general, accessible criticism of the arts that will interest a wide range of readers.

[more]

Seduction of the Minotaur

Anaïs Nin

Ohio University Press, 2014

“Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian’s recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed…. With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.”

Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anaïs Nin’s continuous novel known as Cities of the Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary. As Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she must free the “monster” that has been confined in a labyrinth of her subconscious.

This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Anita Jarczok, author of Inventing Anaïs Nin: Celebrity Authorship and the Creation of an Icon.

Swallow Press publishes all five volumes that make up Cities of the Interior: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur.

[more]