In Defense Of Reason Primitivism And Decadence A Study Of American Experimental Poetry Maules Curse Seven Studies In The History Of American Obscurantism The Anatomy Of Nonsense The Significance Of The Bridge By Hart Crane Or What Are We To Think Of Professor X

Yvor Winters has here collected, with an introduction, the major critical works--Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense--of the period in which he worked out his famous and influential critical position. The works together show an integrated position which illuminates the force and importance of the individual essays. With The Function of Criticism, a subsequent collection, In Defense of Reason provides an incomparable body of critical writing. The noted critic bases his analysis upon a belief in the existence of absolute truths and values, in the ethical judgment of literature, and in an insistence that it is the duty of the writer--as it is of very man--to approximate these truths insofar as human fallibility permits. His argument is by theory, but also by definite example--the technique of the "whole critic" who effectively combines close study of specific literary works and a penetrating investigation of aesthetic philosophies.

This Companion brings together essays on some fifty-four American poets, from Anne Bradstreet to contemporary performance poetry. This book also examines such movements in American poetry as modernism, the Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance, "confessional" poetry, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

This book explores the false starts and disturbances of Romantic writing in Britain - 'misfits' and misfittings - as both a constitutive challenge to canonical romanticism and a distinctive literary field worth examining on its own account. Misfits include the Shakespeare forger W.H. Ireland, the novel itself, and the culture of Dissent.

This book explores the intertwined history of Emerson and individualism. Charles E. Mitchell begins by examining those who regarded Emersonian individualism with ambivalence or hostility, focusing on the comments of such diverse figures as Henry James, Sr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Van Wyck Brooks, and H. L. Mencken. He then offers an alternative view as reflected in the work of William James, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Carlos Williams. Each of these figures embraced Emerson's claim for the sanctity of the individual and wove it into a social vision that sought to reconcile the paradox at the heart of American life: a simultaneous devotion to the community and the individual, tradition and innovation, order and freedom.