Research & Innovation

She selected nineteen stories and twelve poems by some of this century's leading black authors that oblige the reader to observe the complexities of the family in new and provocative ways.

The book follows up on Pearson's collection of biographies of blues musicians, entitled "Sounds So Good To Me."

In reaffirming the importance of the human subject for the study of narrative, Auerbach shows how the first person form, in particular, underscores fundamental problems of literary representation: how fictions come to be made, and the relation between these plots and the people who make them.

Theresa Coletti's study is a rigorous development of a seminal idea: as she states in the Introduction, she wants to show that "out of a concrete rendering of medieval society and intellectual life Eco . . . crafts a distinctly contemporary statement about language and meaning."

Black-Eyed Susans was reviewed in Ms. magazine (March 1976) by Joyce Carol Oates.

Reviewed by Henry-Louis Gates, New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1987 and by Jewell Gomez in The Nation,, April 30, 1987. In The New Yorker, August 5, 2002, writer Hilton Als called Invented Lives an “invaluable study."

In forming a sophisticated view of the relations between Jacobean comedy and life, Leinwand makes a solid contribution not only to Jacobean theater, but, more broadly, to our understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which all literature is produced. Leinwand turns to the plays of Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, George Chapman, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson to see the ways in which Jacobean theater was bound up with contemporary social relations. He measures the attitudes implicit or expressed in the plays toward various London types of the day. These same figures appeared in the commentary of the time and Leinwand raises the question of how realistic stage portrayals were meant to be, and how they were likely to have been received by their audiences. He suggests that most sophisticated playwrights, by making their audiences aware of stereotype, urged them to think beyond it to a fuller sense of their own and other people's identities.

He develops their dynamics in terms of plot and action as he draws out their disturbing philosophical implications. The book relates James to the reaction against 19th-century materialism, which was symbolism, to the potency of decadence, to the century's pulses of mysticism, even to its wave of aestheticized Catholicism, and it brings James up to the edge of the modern abyss.In presenting the distinction between the symbolic richness of positive silences and the decadent void of negative silences, the work provides original scholarship of the highest order, both on James and on the extensive literature of silence, symbolism, and decadence. Silence in Henry James may indeed be a source of integrity, vitality, and fertility, but it plays out its subtle dialectic on the edge of nothingness and sometimes on the brink of collapse.

This study presents an account of the problematics of the book and of the authorial self as they appeared in critical theory in the 1960s-1980s and, previously, in literary modernism and the American literary tradition. It then explores these problematics as they appear across a range of works by the first generation of postmodern American fiction writers. It focuses on a pronounced ambivalence in these works that issued from an assimilation of incompatible precepts from contemporary critical theory, literary modernism, and the American literary tradition. The particular precepts assimilated, moreover, also induced the fiction to conduct a reflexive meditation on the book and the authorial self and on the very ambivalence it reveals towards them.

The book attempts to show a continuity in his work and that Under the Volcano cannot be seen as an unrelated success.