by Sanford Sternlicht (1992)
"Stephen Spender is the last of the great British poets of the "Thirties". This group, lead[sic] by W H. Auden, used their art as an expression of political sympathy and solidarity with the oppressed and impoverished. Now spanning more than five decades, Spender's work--including The Still Centre and Collected Poems--has earned him both popular praise and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Although first a poet, Spender has made landmark contributions to literary criticism, prose fiction, political theory, and autobiography."--BOOK JACKET. "Stephen Spender, the first book-length study of the entire Spender canon, discusses all genres of the author's work. Sanford Sternlicht begins by providing the reader with a well researched, biographical sketch of the poet's development over several decades. He also includes a lengthy and insightful discussion of Spender's influential role as literary and political critic. By treating this multifaceted writer's craft, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and sexuality in a Modernist context, the book fully illustrates Spender's place in the British literary pantheon."--BOOK JACKET.
Brian Neve
"In 1999 Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement; it was a controversial award, for in 1952 he had cooperated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, for which he was ostracized by many. Kazan's life and work in the cinema are due a reassessment - one that is presented by Brian Neve in this book, drawing on neglected archive sources, including Kazan's own papers, and situating Kazan within the culture and politics of his times."--Jacket.
essays by Dena Merriam and Eleanor Munro
Carole A. Feuerman's sculpture combines superrealist technique with a humanist approach to her subjects. This first monograph on her work is filled with David Finn's dramatic photographs covering two decades of her work, including many enlarged details and multiple views, providing a cinematic, almost three-dimensional experience. The work - in resin, cast marble, bronze, and other materials, often painted - ranges from early erotic reliefs through full-scale sculptures of athletes and nudes. Her women at their toilette are sculptural tours-de-force, yet their intimacy recalls Degas's works on similar themes. Recent fragments and body mappings are experiments with abstraction, deconstruction and conceptualism, at the same time that they explore the emotional life of their subjects penetrating to their spirit. All of Feuerman's work reflects the two aspects of her vision. Her work is motivated by questions about the nature of reality, and her remarkable skill as an artist leads the viewer to the same questions. Yet beyond the simulacrum of reality, Feuerman also manages to convey the feeling behind the intense physicality, the passion and sensuality behind the seemingly mundane pose.
Mireille Blanchet-Douspis
L'influence de l'histoire contemporaine dans l'¿uvre de Marguerite Yourcenar propose de montrer que, loin d'e tre seulement un e crivain classique qui s'inte resse a l'histoire du passe , Marguerite Yourcenar ne cesse d'e voquer l'histoire contemporaine et en subit nettement l'influence. La confrontation avec les historiens re ve le que Le Labyrinthe du monde refle te avec fide lite les e ve nements politiques, les re alite s sociales et les mentalite s du XIXe me et du de but du XXe me sie cles. Dans la repre sentation des sie cles passe s se profilent tre s fre quemment les pre occupations que vivent les contempora.
Brenda Daly
Joyce Carol Oates's authorial voice is lavishly diverse. In her works she divides herself into many voices, many persons. This up-to-date examination of Oates's novels argues that the father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers. Oates's struggle to resist and transform male-defined literary conventions is often mirrored by the struggles of her female characters to resist and transform social conventions.