Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies-and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the ... View More...
Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies-and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the ... View More...
Concerned with his students' general inability to get themselves ''heard'' or intelligibly understood, long-time literature professor Wayne Booth reached beyond his initial assumptions of slovenliness and ineptitude to unearth a deeper failure, sprouting from modernist dogmas concerning belief and doubt. Good rhetoric is more than simply effective rhetoric, ''successful in the sense of winning assent regardless of whether assent is justified.'' Divorced from the truth (we're paraphrasing here), such rhetoric is bunk. What Booth's after is the ''art of good reasons'' -- discovering what authent... View More...
In The Company We Keep, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature.But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about many kind... View More...
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today. Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer ... View More...
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book, wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today. Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer ... View More...
Did Flannery O'Connor really write the way she did because and--not in spite of--her Catholicism? Revelation & Convergence brings together professors of literature, theology, and history to help both critics and readers better understand O'Connor's religious imagination. The contributors focus on many of the Catholic thinkers central to O'Connor's creative development, especially those that O'Connor mentioned in the recently discovered and published A Prayer Journal (2013), or in her many letters to friends and admirers. Some, such as Leon Bloy or Baron von H gel, remain relatively obscure to ... View More...
Swallowing the Past is a prose collection about ordinary lives in the ever-changing, postmodern South. A teenage killer ends up a smiling adult bridesmaid. A conservative Christian couple tells the story of a hate crime. A parable about a stolen bike illuminates how lying can be a survival technique. Meeting an old friend at an ATM turns into a meditation on how some people should die. The book closes with "Grace Street," a dream-like, genre-defying novella about the author's encounters with the locals on a poor city block in Richmond, Virginia, which becomes an eye-opening look at the old wou... View More...
The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. "For almost three hundred years," Bottum writes, "the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world--the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves." But now we no longer "read novels the way we used to."In a historical tour de force--the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contempora... View More...
Nicholas Boyle really believes that Christ has ''broken down the dividing wall, abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances,'' (Eph. 2:14 ff) and that this transcending of boundaries applies to sacred and secular literature. ''Read as showing Christ in the moment in which they mark themselves off from their origin in God, secular scriptures become the limit case of sacred scripture, the word of God no longer as an address to us--as God's reply to our prayer--but as the inarticulate groanings of the Spirit within us: as our prayer itself.'' In three stages, Boyle presents a r... View More...
One has to look no further than the audiences hungry for the narratives served up by Downton Abbey or Wolf Hall to know that the lure of the past is as seductive as ever. But incorporating historical events and figures into a shapely narrative is no simple task. The acclaimed novelist Christopher Bram examines how writers as disparate as Gabriel Garc a M rquez, David McCullough, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, and many others have employed history in their work.Unique among the "Art Of" series, The Art of History engages with both fiction and narrative nonfiction to reveal varied strategies of inc... View More...
What if the man you'd loved for years transformed into a ruthless and relentless tormentor, stealing your freedom, threatening your sanity and your safety? This is not a fictional scenario. It is Kate Brennan's life. A well-respected writer and scholar, Kate was wary of getting involved when she met Paul, a wealthy, charismatic businessman with a great deal of free time, but his charm and determination eventually won her over. Once they moved in together, however, Kate discovered the sordid secrets lurking beneath the Mr. Right facade: the serial infidelities, the unbalanced psyche. When she e... View More...
Born in central Russia in 1828, Tolstoy saw action as a soldier before becoming a writer. His two novels, "War and Peace "and "Anna""Karenina," are among the best loved in world literature. Anthony Briggs compares these works and describes many others. He also considers why such a strong character as Tolstoy welcomed into his life two appalling individuals whose malign influence changed him and his literary career forever. View More...
A delightful and hilarious classic about the joys of the table, The Physiology of Taste is the most famous book about food ever written. First published in France in 1825 and continuously in print ever since, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's masterpiece is a historical, philosophical, and epicurean collection of recipes, reflections, and anecdotes on everything and anything gastronomical. Brillat-Savarin--who famously stated "Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are"--shrewdly expounds upon culinary matters that still resonate today, from the rise of the destination restaurant to ... View More...
Giving a voice to a lost generation, this edition features a new introduction by Brittain's biographer. Now a major motion picture starring Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Hayley Atwell, and Taron EgertonMuch of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain's elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war's end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testa... View More...
