Gabriel García Márquez

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Adalaide Morris

"The writing of H.D. is so linguistically rich and multilayered in structure that it has had almost as many interpretations as it has interpreters, from Freudians to feminists, from classicists to postmodernists. In How to Live/What to Do, however, Adalaide Morris removes the work of this iconic poet, dramatist, and novelist from compartments into which it has historically been placed. As she examines the "ongoingness" of H.D.'s writing, Morris makes an eloquent and compelling case for a consideration of poems - all poems - as forms of cultural mediation, instructive historical documents that engage the reader in wide-ranging contemporary debates and use their acoustical richness to generate tangible cultural effects."--Jacket.

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Hassan Melehy

"Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word "poetics." But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous "spontaneous prose" only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice.Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Québec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home"-- "A reassessment of Jack Kerouac's poetic theory and practice from the perspective of their central yet most overlooked component: the fact that he thought and worked in two languages, his native French and his adopted English"--

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Paul Debreczeny

This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Part Two exposes the extent to which individuals' aesthetic responses are conditioned by their social environment. The aura surrounding the personality of an author is the subject of Part Three, in which the author shows how Pushkin's death in a duel with a foreigner contributed to his emergence as a symbol of the Russian nation, and how deep-seated anxiety about national identity gave rise to the Pushkin myth and to the canonization of the poet as martyr. Throughout the book, theoretical arguments are buttressed by close readings of Pushkin's works, especially The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Eugene Onegin, Poltava, Egyptian Nights, and several lyric poems.

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Patricia D. Maida, Nicholas B. Spornick

A Study of Agatha Christie's Detective Fiction. This book explores the inter-relationships between Agatha Christie and her works to seek the wholeness in the Christie experience. The authors perceive an integration in personal experience and moral and aesthetic values between the woman and her art.