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Shawcross proposes that the many ambiguities surrounding Milton's dramatic poem Samson Agonistes are intentional: the actual words, the dates of composition, the genre, and the characters - particularly Samson and Dalila but including Manoa, Harapha, and the Chorus. Ambiguity also lies in Milton's presentation of political issues both philosophical and practical, his treatment of gender concepts, the constant questioning of the reader, and the poem's effect. Discussing all these elements, Shawcr...

Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Feminist...

From the shootings at Columbine High School to the JonBenet Ramsey murder to the sentencing of "killer kids," today's media cannot decide if children are objects of fear or in need of protection. Our culture's deep-seated ambivalence toward its young is reflected in a fascinating array of recent fiction that exposes society's collective fantasies and fears.Demon or Doll investigates the ambiguous, contradictory ways childhood has been formulated in the twentieth century and the resulting ambival...

William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture examines the development of William Carlos Williams's poetics, focusing in particular on the relationship between Williams's ongoing fascination with the effects of poetry and prose, and his lifelong friendship with the poet and critic Kenneth Burke.

W. D. Howells once wrote to his friend Mark Twain of ""the black heart's-truth, which we all know of ourselves in our hearts"" -- the dark core of inner life that underlies ""the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirt front."" For Howells, a writer with a lifelong history of psychological disturbances, telling this ""black heart's-truth"" evinced his courage and imaginative spirit. John W. Crowley examines psychological clues in Howells' life in order to...

Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson's connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison's stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide ranging book draws o...

BookD offers a fascinating perspective into the world of publishing. Listen to authors discuss their inspiration behind their books, and hear the story of how these books were transformed from the initial concept. Tune in every other week for conversations with the stars of literature, art, film, music, science and politics. Ever heard of Jilliane Hoffman? She's an ex prosecutor originally from New York who spent 8 years in Florida putting rapists, drug dealers, and paedophiles behind bars or on...

This exciting anthology brings life to a host of previously unheard and talented writers who, through the medium of creative writing, share their individual voices and perspectives relating to gender, race, culture, heritage, ethnicity and identity.

Shopping in Space takes a walk on the wild side of literature to analyse contemporary New York fiction. This is a fiction of urban depravity and moral decay: greed and deviancy, crime, bohemianism, sexual excess, nightlife and narcotics. From the glittering consumer circus of up-town Manhattan to the desperate strategies of the alienated and dispossessed, the city offers unparalleled opportunities to the creative artist. Young and Caveney provide a close reading of a number of writers including...

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow's work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wa...

In recent years, public debate has raged over the issue of maternal choice. While personal testimony and political argument have received widespread attention, artistic representations of birth and abortion have been submerged. Judith Wilt offers the first look at how contemporary writers tell and retell the stories that shape our perceptions about abortion. She reveals that the struggle to plot these painful, complex narratives of choice, control, guilt, loss, and liberation has preoccupied an...

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a m...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist uses data, facts, and science to deliver hilarious, fascinating answers to some of the most famous questions in pop music history.   “Is there life on Mars? Where have all the flowers gone? Pop songs can pose excellent questions and James Ball has given them the answers they deserve.”—The Times (UK)   Some of the most famous questions of our time have come to us in pop songs. “What is love?” “How soon is now?” “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” But do yo...