Samuel Johnson's critical opinions

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Andrew Hadfield

"This book guides students through the historical contexts, key figures, texts, themes and issues in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature." "The English Renaissance, 1500-1620 sets out the historical and cultural contexts of Renaissance England, highlighting the background voices and events which influenced literary production, including the Reformation, the British problem, perceptions of other cultures and the voyages to the Americas." "Short biographical essays on key writers of the period explain their significance and explore a variety of perspectives with which to approach them. In-depth analyses of a number of well-studied texts are also provided, indicating why each text is important and suggesting ways in which each might usefully be read. Texts featured include Astrophil and Stella, Dr. Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Othello, The Tragedy of Miriam, The Unfortunate Traveller and Utopia." "The volume charts the intricacies of English Renaissance literature, taking in such themes as women, gender and the question of homosexuality; the stage; printing and censorship; and humanism, education and rhetoric. Attention is also drawn to current debates in Renaissance criticism, such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Thus the book provides students with an unparalleled foundation for further study." "Fully cross-referenced, with a useful chronology, glossary and suggestions for further reading, this much-needed guide conveys the excitement of reading Renaissance literature."--Jacket.

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Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

This is the first study of puritan women's place in early modern intellectual culture. Puritan women have suffered a double prejudice: that women were excluded from male culture, and that puritanism was hostile to many forms of culture. This collection argues that early modern women's puritanism formed and developed rather than prohibited their substantial and leading contributions to their culture. The essays introduce recently discovered writers such as Elizabeth Isham and Elizabeth Melville and new analyses of well-known writers such as Lady Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Locke, and also highlight the local, national, and international dimensions of early modern puritan culture. With a foreword by N. H. Keeble and afterword by David Norbrook and fifteen essays by leading scholars of early modern literature and history, this collection reveals an intellectual culture characterized by networks of patronage, translation, manuscript circulation and correspondence. - Publisher.

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Paul Fussell

In this classic work, Paul Fussell illuminates the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, focusing primarily on the literary means by which The Great War has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. Drawing on the work of important wartime poets such as David Jones and Wilfred Owen, on the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden, and on numerous other personal records housed in the Imperial War Museum, this award-winning volume provides an intimate and intensely poetic account of the event that revolutionized the way we see the world. It has been hailed as "humanly wise and compassionate" (Saturday Review), "original and brilliant" (Lionel Trilling), "bright and sensitive" (The New Yorker), and "probing, sympathetic, and illuminating" (The New Republic). It is an undisputed classic of cultural criticism. (from Amazon)

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Julius Rowan Raper

By the mid-195Os, when Saul Bellow published Seize the Day, French existentialism and the phenomenological view of humankind that underlies it had become popular enough in the United States and England for leading novelists to begin dealing critically with its fundamental assumptions. Taking as its starting point the critique of existentialism's phenomenological background derived from Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, Julius Rowan Raper's Narcissus from Rubble delves into the intellectual assumptions that lie behind eleven of the most influential and challenging novels created by Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Jerzy Kosinski, John Barth, and Lawrence Durrell. Raper sees the central conflict of twentieth-century humanistic inquiry as the modern opposition between psychology and philosophy. He dramatizes the competition in the novels between the phenomenological model of human behavior and a variety of models associated with psychoanalysis, especially those created by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Heinz Kohut. He argues that despite numerous efforts to fuse phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the two conceptions of personality have been fundamentally opposed to each other since Husserl's original description of phenomenology. The book underscores the irony that while much contemporary literary criticism continues to draw on a phenomenologically based view of character derived in part from the essays of Jacques Lacan, our leading novelists for a quarter century have been warning us in major novels such as Henderson the Rain King, V., and The Magus of the rage, compulsiveness, emptiness, pointlessness, fragmentation, and associated dangers to which taking a phenomenological stance may contribute. Raper finds that all six novelists worked through the intellectual maze that Freud called narcissism, as well as through the hazards of self-transcendence, to a new understanding of narcissism that is less judgmental and more perceptive than Freud's earlier formulation. It is this struggle--first to comprehend the dangers of the self-transcending tendencies of our culture, and then to become completely true to ourselves beyond the roles imposed on us by life--that creates the drama Raper detects as the common component in the works studied in this book. Raper's approach offers exciting insights into some fascinating and difficult literary texts. By revealing the common concern on which they rest, he provides the reader with an illuminating way to approach other contemporary works of literature.