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William Goddard is here to help. He taught Shakespeare for decades as much-loved professor at Swarthmore College, and here he distills that experience into an accessible, engaging companion to the plays. Across two volumes, Goddard covers all of Shakespeare's plays and brings fresh insight to familiar characters, scenes, and verses. Goddard writes, "The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little citadel of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night" Shakespeare's candle still burns, and with Goddard's help we can all see it brighter than ever.

William Goddard is here to help. He taught Shakespeare for decades as much-loved professor at Swarthmore College, and here he distills that experience into an accessible, engaging companion to the plays. Across two volumes, Goddard covers all of Shakespeare's plays and brings fresh insight to familiar characters, scenes, and verses. Goddard writes, "The greatest poetry has always depicted the world as a little citadel of nobility threatened by an immense barbarism, a flickering candle surrounded by infinite night" Shakespeare's candle still burns, and with Goddard's help we can all see it brighter than ever.

Volume 1, Contexts and Paradigms, chronologically surveys Tenney's creative development and output. Wannamaker begins each section with biographical, aesthetic, and technical context that illuminates a distinct period in Tenney's career. From there, he analyzes a small number of pieces that illuminate the concerns, characteristics, and techniques that emerged in Tenney's music during that time. Wannamaker supplements the text with musical examples, graphs, and diagrams while also drawing on unpublished material and newly available primary sources to flesh out each work and the ideas that shaped it.

A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.  

Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's significant post-1959 experimental works (excepting pieces covered in volume 1). Wannamaker includes technical information, an analysis of intentions and goals, graphs and musical examples, historical and biographical context, and thoughts from Tenney and others on specific works. Throughout, he discusses the striking compositional ideas found in Tenney's music and, where appropriate, traces an idea's appearance from one piece to the next to reveal the evolution of the composer's art and thought.

A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.

How Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain—and Mark Twain became a myth.

The Mythologizing of Mark Twain explores the enduring fascination with one of America's most celebrated literary figures and examines how Samuel Langhorne Clemens became the cultural icon known around the world as Mark Twain. Bringing together a distinguished group of scholars, this thought-provoking collection investigates Twain not simply as an author, but as a powerful symbol whose life, works, and public persona have become inseparable from larger ideas about American identity, humor, democracy, individualism, and national character.

Readers and critics have long recognized Twain's literary genius, yet explaining the origins and significance of that genius remains an ongoing challenge. The essays in this volume address that challenge by exploring the many ways Twain has been interpreted, celebrated, debated, and transformed into a mythic figure. They examine how his writings helped define an American literary tradition while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a broader cultural mythology that continues to shape public perceptions of the United States and its history.

Rather than seeking a single interpretation of Twain, the contributors employ a range of critical approaches to illuminate the complexity of both the man and the legend. Their analyses reveal how the boundaries between Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, and the popular image of "America's author" have often blurred, generating new layers of meaning for successive generations of readers and scholars.

The Mythologizing of Mark Twain is an essential resource for students and scholars of American literature, cultural history, and literary criticism. By examining the evolution of Twain's reputation and influence, the collection offers a deeper understanding of how literary figures become cultural myths and why Mark Twain remains one of the most enduring voices in the American imagination.

Scholars have long been fascinated by the creative struggles with genre manifested throughout Dostoevsky’s career. In The Novel in the Age of Disintegration, Kate Holland brings historical context to bear, showing that Dostoevsky wanted to use the form of the novel as a means of depicting disintegration brought on by various crises in Russian society in the 1860s. This required him to reinvent the genre. At the same time he sought to infuse his novels with the capacity to inspire belief in social and spiritual reintegration, so he returned to some older conventions of a society that was already becoming outmoded.

In thoughtful readings of Demons, The Adolescent, A Writer’s Diary, and The Brothers Karamazov, Holland delineates Dostoevsky’s struggle to adapt a genre to the reality of the present, with all its upheavals, while maintaining a utopian vision of Russia’s future mission.

In Nadine Gordimer's view, the novel can present history as historians cannot. Moreover, this presentation is not fictional in the sense of being “untrue.” Rather, fiction deals with an area of activity usually inaccessible to the sciences of greater externally: the area in which historical process is registered as the subjective experience of individuals in society; fiction give us “history from the inside.” Gordimer's novels give us an extraordinary and unique insight into historical experience in the period in which she writes.

The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology is a pioneering work of feminist literary criticism that subjects the life and writing of George Orwell (1903–1950) to a sustained and rigorous feminist analysis. Published in 1984—the same year as the famous date in Orwell's most celebrated dystopian novel—the book examines all of Orwell's major novels, essays, and journalism and argues that his widely celebrated reputation for moral authority and plain-speaking democratic decency is fundamentally undercut by a pervasive and condescending attitude toward women.

Author Daphne Patai contends that Orwell's work is saturated with a male ideology so deeply embedded as to be largely invisible to mainstream criticism, which had long treated Orwell as an exemplar of intellectual honesty and political courage while overlooking the gender assumptions that structure his writing. Drawing on feminist theory and close textual analysis, Patai systematically traces the ways in which Orwell's androcentrism—his tendency to place men and male experience at the center of human life—shapes not only his fiction but also his essays, autobiographical writings, and political commentary.

The book is organized around a series of thematic and textual investigations. An introductory chapter establishes what Patai calls “the Orwell myth”—the cultural phenomenon by which Orwell's personal authority as a moral and political guide has been constructed and sustained. Subsequent chapters examine specific dimensions of Orwell's work and biography, including his experience of empire and the masculine codes embedded in his writings about colonialism; his treatments of vagabondage, manual labor, and working-class masculinity (notably in works such as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier); and the androcentrism running through Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which Patai argues that the novel's treatment of women, sexuality, and the body reflects deeply patriarchal assumptions. The book also addresses Orwell's essays and journalism, situating his gender ideology within the broader context of mid-twentieth-century British patriarchal culture.

At the time of its publication, The Orwell Mystique was one of the first book-length feminist examinations of Orwell, and it generated significant scholarly debate. It remains an important and frequently cited work in both Orwell studies and feminist literary criticism.

Filmmaker David Lynch asserts that when he is directing, ninety percent of the time he doesn't know what he is doing. To understand Lynch's films, Martha Nochimson believes, requires a similar method of being open to the subconscious, of resisting the logical reductiveness of language. In this innovative book, she draws on these strategies to offer close readings of Lynch's films, informed by unprecedented, in-depth interviews with Lynch himself.

Nochimson begins with a look at Lynch's visual influences—Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and Edward Hopper—and his links to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, then moves into the heart of her study, in-depth analyses of Lynch's films and television productions. These include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, and Lynch's most recent, Lost Highway.

Nochimson's interpretations explode previous misconceptions of Lynch as a deviant filmmaker and misogynist. Instead, she shows how he subverts traditional Hollywood gender roles to offer an optimistic view that love and human connection are really possible.

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian

This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

When British writers Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil named Barbara Pym one of the twentieth century's most underrated authors in a 1977 Times Literary Supplement survey, they started a Barbara Pym revival that continued unabated in Great Britain and the United States. Barbara Pym's delightful tales of jumble sales and parish meetings, her ironic insights into the relationships between women and men, have won a devoted following. Indeed she is often compared to that most accomplished author of comedies of manners, Jane Austen.

The Pleasure of Miss Pym is a critical study of Pym as comic writer and of the links between her life and autobiographical writings and her fiction, written with a liveliness of style and tone that matches Pym's own. Not only does Charles Burkhart provide perceptive discussions of Pym's life and novels, he also illuminates the worldview represented in her work, the unique nature of her comedy, her religion, her place within the history of the novel, and her penetrating insights into male-female relationships. All of Pym's work, including the 1986 posthumous publication, An Academic Question, is intelligently surveyed here. Scholars of contemporary English literature will derive both instruction and pleasure from this elegantly written study, as will Pym's admiring readers, for whom it is also intended.

The Roman writer Cornelius Nepos was a friend of Cicero and Catullus and other first-century BCE authors, and portions of his encyclopedic work On Famous Men are the earliest surviving biographies written in Latin. In The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos, Rex Stem presents Nepos as a valuable witness to the late Republican era, whose biographies share the exemplary republican political perspective of his contemporaries Cicero and Livy. Stem argues that Nepos created the genre of grouped political biographies in order to characterize renowned Mediterranean figures as role models for Roman leaders, and he shows how Nepos invested his biographies with moral and political arguments against tyranny.

This book, the first to regard Nepos as a serious thinker in his own right, also functions as a general introduction to Nepos, placing him in his cultural context. Stem examines Nepos' contributions to the growth of biography, and he defends Nepos from his critics at the same time that he lays out the political significance and literary innovation of Nepos' writings. Accessible to advanced undergraduates, this volume is addressed to a general audience of classicists and ancient historians, as well as those broadly interested in biography, historiography, and political thought.

Between 1890 and 1930, the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, experienced a liberal revolution and a worker's movement—key elements in shaping the Ecuadorian national identity. In this book, O. Hugo Benavides examines these and other pivotal features in shaping Guayaquilean identity and immigrant identity formation in general in transnational communities such as those found in New York City.

Turn-of-the-century Ecuador witnessed an intriguing combination of transformations: the formation of a national citizenship; extension of the popular vote to members of a traditional underclass of Indians and those of African descent; provisions for union organizing while entering into world market capitalist relations; and a separation of church and state that led to the legalization of secular divorces. Assessing how these phenomena created a unique cultural history for Guayaquileans, Benavides reveals not only a specific cultural history but also a process of developing ethnic attachment in general. He also incorporates a study of works by Medardo Angel Silva, the Afro-Ecuadorian poet whose singular literature embodies the effects of Modernism's arrival in a locale steeped in contradictions of race, class, and sexuality.

Also comprising one of the first case studies of Raymond Williams's hypothesis on the relationship between structures of feeling and hegemony, this is an illuminating illustration of the powerful relationships between historically informed memories and contemporary national life.