The ends of allegory

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Chelsea Blackbird and Barney Nelson

Celebrated and controversial author Mary Austin (1866-1934) lived in and wrote about her beloved Southwest, a place that has shaped and been shaped by three distinctive groups: Indian, Spanish, and Anglo. Austin discovered in the Southwest that these cultures blended languages, races, and religions, creating what she believed were unique versions of Catholicism, nature worship, ceremonies, and visions. Those beliefs worked their way through her literary criticism, leading her to ground-breaking ideas of place-based influences, narrative techniques, and dramatic development. In Mary Austin?s Southwest, editors Blackbird and Nelson shine light on Austin?s work, revealing her to be a significant trailblazer for literary diversity. With thoughtful introductions to selected writings on Austin?s prose, drama, and poetry as well as an annotated checklist of her published Southwestern literary criticism, this collection is a celebration of a rich mixed heritage as expressed through the written word.--Amazon.com.

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Christopher Palmer

"Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern examines a wide range of Dick's work, including his short stories and posthumously published realist novels. Christopher Palmer analyses the puzzling and dazzling effects of Dick's fiction, and argues that at its heart is a clash between exhilarating possibilities of transformation, and a frightening lack of ethical certainties. Dick's work is seen as the inscription of his own historical predicament, the clash between humanism and postmodernism being played out in the complex forms of the fiction. The problem is never resolved, but Dick's ways of imagining it become steadily more ingenious and challenging."--BOOK JACKET.

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John G. Demaray

The design, staging allusions and symbolism of The Tempest are here freshly reconsidered in light of the drama's historical and theatrical milieu. Demaray maintains that Shakespeare, in composing this play, was not reverting to the "academic" dramatic structures, themes and character types of his early career, but was instead forging from different theatrical traditions a new kind of experimental drama. The Tempest, then, draws upon the European and English spectacle, pastoral, "romance" and dramatic traditions; it emphasizes reformist open symbolism rather than the classical iconography of Ben Jonson; and it points the way to the stylized "heroic" dramas of the Restoration with their exotic themes and staged scenic illusions. Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness pays close attention to genre, structure and issues of printing and textual scholarship. Demaray examines the First Folio printings of The Tempest and of printings of drama, masques, balets de cour, spectacle productions and stage documents. On the basis of these primary documents, Demaray is able to show the influence of the conventions of court presentations on Shakespeare's theatrical references, and to reveal new accounts of the imaginative significance of stage illusions designed by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s.

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Gustav Landauer

Gustav Landauer war ein detaillierter Kenner der deutsch-sprachigen und internationalen Literatur. Zugleich verstand er sich immer auch als Literaturvermittler und Entdecker zeitgenössischer Autoren und Autorinnen. Seine zahlreichen, noch heute lesenswerten Essays, Zeitungs- und Zeitschriftenartikel, Vorträge, Buch- und Theaterbesprechungen belegen dies deutlich. Landauer erkannte rasch, welche gesellschaftliche Sprengkraft etwa der Vermittlung von Dramen – Tragödien und Komödien – vor allem des englischen Schriftstellers William Shakespeare in Schrift und Vortrag sowie auf der Theaterbühne innewohnt. Viele Autoren – Honoré de Balzac, Rabindranath Tagore, Leo N. Tolstoi, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde – hat er, häufig gemeinsam mit seiner Lebensgefährtin, der Lyrikerin Hedwig Lachmann, durch erstmalige Übersetzungen und umfassende Betrachtungen dem deutschsprachigen Kulturleben zur Verfügung gestellt. (Quelle: Edition AV)