Understanding Richard Powers

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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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Laura Rattray

"During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was one of America's most popular and prolific writers, publishing over forty books and winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But after her death her work slipped out of favour, and it is only in the last thirty years that her reputation as a literary heavyweight and a great writer has recovered." "Bringing together twelve leading Wharton scholars from Europe and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Wharton's 1913 text, The Custom of the Country. Described as 'her greatest book' by Hermione Lee in her 2007 biography of the writer, and listed by Wharton herself at the end of a long and prolific career as one of her own favorite works, The Custom of the Country arguably remains the author's most complex and controversial novel. The contributions to this collection demonstrate the continuing evolution of Wharton scholarship within modern critical approaches." --Book Jacket.

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Margaret Hubbard

"'Propertius' four books of love-elegies (c. 32 - 12 BC) were produced during the heyday of Augustan literature. His poetry has been noted by modern critics for its striking forms of expression, sometimes tortured syntax, sudden transitions and abstruse allusiveness. Much of this &difficulty&, Hubbard argues, may stem as much from the many impenetrable corruptions in our surviving, comparatively late manuscripts as from Propertius himself. For ancient critics, in contrast with the modern, read him as polished, elegant and amusing. This book presents a Propertius along these latter lines. The four central chapters of this volume deal broadly with the four books, but at the same time raise general issues, such as the unity of Propertius' oeuvre, or his self-acknowledged indebtedness to Callimachus. Throughout Hubbard analyses in detail both extended and shorter passages which are always given in both the original and in a no-nonsense prose translation. There emerges a reading of the poet which renders him immediately accessible to student and general reader, while providing insights equally challenging for specialists."--Bloomsbury Publishing Propertius' four books of love-elegies (c. 32-12 BC) were produced during the heyday of Augustan literature. His poetry has been noted by modern critics for its striking forms of expression, sometimes tortured syntax, sudden transitions and abstruse allusiveness. Much of this "difficulty", Hubbard argues, may stem as much from the many impenetrable corruptions in our surviving, comparatively late manuscripts as from Propertius himself. For ancient critics, in contrast with the modern, read him as polished, elegant and amusing. This book presents a Propertius along these latter lines. The four central chapters of this volume deal broadly with the four books, but at the same time raise general issues, such as the unity of Propertius' oeuvre, or his self-acknowledged indebtedness to Callimachus. Throughout Hubbard analyses in detail both extended and shorter passages which are always given in both the original and in a no-nonsense prose translation. There emerges a reading of the poet which renders him immediately accessible to student and general reader, while providing insights equally challenging for specialists

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Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson

The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended her artistic influences through a supreme understanding of voice, being and subjectivity.