The Waste Land and Other Poems
Publisher's Description:
 | While recovering from a mental collapse in a Swiss sanitarium in 1921, T. S. Eliot finished what became the definitive poem of the modern condition, one that still casts a large and ominous shadow over twentieth-century poetry. Built upon the imagery of the Grail legend, the Fisher King, and ancient fertility cults, The Waste Land is both a poetic diagnosis of an ailing civilization and a desperate quest for spiritual renewal. Through pastiche and collage Eliot unfolds a nightmarish landscape of sexual disorder and spiritual desolation, inhabited by the voice (literary, historical, mythic, con... |
Publisher's Description:
 | The central theme of the novel is the sexual jealousy of Louis Trevelyan who unjustly accuses his wife Emily of a liaison with a friend of her fathers. As his suspicion deepens into madness, Trollope gives us a profound psychological study in which Louis obsessive delirium is comparable to the tormented figure of Othello, tragically flawed by self-deception. Against the disintegration of the Trevelyans marriage, a lively cast of characters explore the ideas of female emancipation and how to distinguish between obedience and subjection. Although himself no supporter of womens rights, in this no... |
The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
Publisher's Description:
| This collection of stories of the literary life bears out Jamess famous assertion that Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . By the 1890s, his own middle years, James was feeling particularly depressed by his lack of a sizeable, responsive audience in what he called an age of trash triumphant. Fiction should be undertaken as an art or not at all. These stories, several of them elaborate Jamesian games, are all concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The Figure in the Carpet, the motif and title story, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of d... |
Publisher's Description:
| A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places ... This was the new metropolitan disease Trollope set out brilliantly to expose in The Way We Live Now. His milieux are the Citys financial institutions, Londons exclusive West End squares and drones clubs populated by languorous aristocrats, all offering rich pickings for the unscrupulous speculator, whether in the marriage or the money market. Among the unscrupulous are the hack-writer Lady Carbury, her son Felix and, above all, Melmotte, a financier of uncertain origins and Napoleonic r... |
Publisher's Description:
 | Sir Frank Kermode has been writing peerless literary criticism for more than a half-century. Pieces of My Mind includes his own choice of his major essays since 1958, beginning with his extraordinary study of "Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev" and ending with a marvelous consideration of Shakespeare's Othello and Verdi-Boito's Otello. Important essays on Hawthorne, on Wallace Stevens, on problems in literary theory and analysis, on Auden, on "Secrets and Narrative Sequence," and three previously unpublished essays (including one on "Memory" and one on "Forgetting") fill... |
Publisher's Description:
 | A major reassessment of the great English novelist This impressive new book by the celebrated British critic Frank Kermode examines hitherto neglected aspects of the novelist E. M. Forster's life and work. Kermode is interested to see how it was that this apparently shy, reclusive man should have claimed and kept such a central position in the English writing of his time, even though for decades he composed no fiction and he was not close to any of his great contemporaries--Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce. Concerni... |
Publisher's Description:
 | In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—including, of course, its theater. Then Kermode focuses on Shakespeare himself and his career, all in the ... |
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