Literature

Hardcover. NY, Garland Publishing, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth stamped in gilt, 327 pages. Clean, bright copy. No dj issued.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A collection of his writings on his home country. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Pinceton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 315 pages. The Western ideal of individualism had a pervasive influence on the culture of the Meiji period in Japan (1868-1912). Janet Walker argues that this ideal also had an important influence on the development of the modern Japanese novel. Focusing on the work of four late Meiji writers, she analyzes their contribution to the development of a type of novel whose aim was the depiction of the modern Japanese individual. Professor Walker suggests that Meiji novels of the individual provided their readers with mirrors in which to confront their new-found sense of individuality. Her treatment of these novels as confessions allows her to discuss the development of modern Japanese literature and "the modern literary self" both in themselves and as they compare their prototypes and analogues in European literature. The author begins by examining the evolution of a literary concept of the inner self in Futabatei Shimei's novel Ukigumo (The Floating Clouds), Kitamura Tokoku's essays on the inner life, and Tayama Katai's I-novel Futon (The Quilt). She devotes the second half of her book to Shimazaki Toson, the Meiji novelist who was most influenced by the ideal of individualism. Here she traces Toson's development of a personal ideal of selfhood and analyzes in detail two examples of the lengthy confessional novel form that he created as a vehicle for its expression.

Hardcover. Princton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Fairy tales, often said to be ''timeless'' and fundamentally ''oral,'' have a long written history. However, argues Elizabeth Wanning Harries in this provocative book, a vital part of this history has fallen by the wayside. The short, subtly didactic fairy tales of Charles Perrault and the Grimms have determined our notions about what fairy tales should be like. Harries argues that alongside these ''compact'' tales there exists another, ''complex'' tradition: tales written in France by the conteuses (storytelling women) in the 1690s and the late-twentieth-century tales by women writers that derive in part from this centuries-old tradition. Grounded firmly in social history and set in lucid prose, Twice upon a Time refocuses the lens through which we look at fairy tales.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon Books, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan boards with pictorial cover in red and black. Sequence of events in Carroll's life and bibliography in back of book. B&w drawings by David Levine. Bright, clean copy, lacks dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 328 pages. William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were-they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Gluck and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved. Clean, like new.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 835 pages. Sergey Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist and gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia after the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd and later hidden at considerable personal risk by the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky. Prokofiev himself smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death in 1953, to be kept in an inaccessible section of the Soviet State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Sviatoslav was allowed to transcribe the voluminous contents. When he and his son Sergei eventually emigrated to Paris, they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Diaries, 1907-1914, the first of three volumes that extend to 1933, covers Prokofiev's years at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the tradition exemplified by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, and Tcherepnin, the brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge, and finally overcome the establishment. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Grove Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 239 pages. Hettie Jones presents an intimate memoir of her life--from her middle-class Jewish family in Queens to her marriage to the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones and her search for her own artistic voice. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 897 pages. John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and - in a concluding section, 'Personal Matters' - paragraphs on himself and his work. Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Dawn Powell, Henry Green, John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, and W. M. Spackman are among the authors extensively treated, along with such more general literary matters as the nature of evil, the philosophical content of novels, and the wreck of the Titanic. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Illustrated in color by the Reys. A reprint of a title first published in 1946. The story of Pretzel, the longest dachshund in the world, his wife Greta and five children. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 176 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front end paper. In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth-coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism-became tools of New Journalism. The New American Novel of Manners explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism.In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane located America's modern-day manners in its semiotics, in the system of signs that envelops us-the blue jeans people wear, the fast food they eat, the decor of the bars they drink in and the rock-and-roll lyrics that play through memories. The new generation of mannerists describe lifestyles that are determined by words and images, by actions that are dictated by what has been read and seen, and patterns of behavior in which life is edited and fictionalized. Klinkowitz reveals a fiction that is once again capable of reflecting the way people live. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 375 pages. B&W photographs and illustrations. Pictorial dust jacket. Green cloth with gilt title to spine. Erratum laid-in. Overall, a clean, tight copy. ohn Betjeman was by far the most popular poet of the twentieth century; his collected poems sold more than two million copies. As poet laureate of England, he became a national icon, but behind the public man were doubts and demons. The poet best known for writing hymns of praise to athletic middle-class girls on the tennis courts led a tempestuous emotional life. For much of his fifty-year marriage to Penelope Chetwode, the daughter of a field marshal, Betjeman had a relationship with Elizabeth Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Betjeman, a devout Anglican, was tormented by guilt about the storms this emotional triangle caused. Betjeman, published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, is the first to use fully the vast archive of personal material relating to his private life, including literally hundreds of letters written by his wife about their life together and apart. Here too are chronicled his many friendships, ranging from "Bosie" Douglas to the young satirists of Private Eye, from the Mitford sisters to the Crazy Gang. This is a celebration of a much-loved poet, a brave campaigner for architecture at risk, and a highly popular public performer. Betjeman was the classic example of the melancholy clown, whose sadness found its perfect mood music in the hymns of a poignant Anglicanism. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, John Murray, 1st, 1899, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, maroon cloth stamped with gilt lettering, 262 pages. Frotis. portrait. A supplemental volume to the two-volume set The Lif and Letters of Benjamin Jowett published in 1897. Name on inside front cover, clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday & Co., 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 180 pages. The author of the Travis McGee series relates his family's experiences with and high jinx of their pets, two tomcats and a goose. 4 leaves of b&w photo plates. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise tight and clean.

Hardcover. Burlington VT, Ashgate , 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 259 pages. Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap.

Hardcover. London, Jonathan Cape, 1st, 1934, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth faded on spine and cover edges, gilt lettering on spine. 315 pages, b&w photographic plates. Some fifty essays, reviews, studies and other short pieces, including a section devoted to Williamson's travels in North America and passages from 'The Sun in the Sands' which do not appear in the 1941 book of the same name. No markings.

Hardcover. London, Seeley And Co., reprint, 1895, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth with gilt lettering and decoration, 296 pages. B&w frontis portrait with tissue guard. Ex-lib with stamping, bookplate to endpapers, interior clean.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 3rd pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 541 pages. It wasn't all black or white. It wasn't a vogue. It wasn't a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance--or blamed for corrupting it--George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States. What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas's anthropology, Park's sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism--ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the "New Negroes." This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, green cloth covers with faded gilt title on spine, 426 pages. A collection of profiles on great thinkers and writers through the ages. B&w frontis of Walt Whitman, 9 other b&w portraits. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 76 pages. Annie Dillard's collection of observations of events over three days from her location on a small island in Puget Sound. Stated 1st edition, no number line (1st printing). There is soiling/discoloration to boards (not visible under dust jacket), small chip to bottom of dj spine, clean interior.

Softcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover 320 pages. The second volume in Frank's monumental five part biography of the great Russian writer. No date on copyright page. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Dublin, The Cuala Press, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, one of 425 copies, publisher's device vignette by T. Sturge Moore on title page, minor offsetting to endpapers, else unmarked internally, publisher's cloth-backed blue boards, paper label on spine is chipped, black lettering to upper cover, blue endpapers, spine and extremities slightly toned, else very good. One of 425 copies, printed at the Cuala Press, with the date misprinted as 'MCMXXVIV' on the title page (as noted by Wade). The Cuala Press originally started out as the Dun Emer Press in 1903, founded by Evelyn Gleeson. Influenced by the Gaelic revival occurring in Ireland, it promoted Ireland's cultural heritage, while at the same time training women to work in a useful trade. Eventually the two sisters of W.B. Yeats took over the press, continuing Gleeson's work, and renaming it The Cuala Press in 1908. No dust wrapper, as issued. There is some tanning/foxing to last 8 pages including colophon.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 202 pages. Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life. Intensely reserved, Ginzburg said that she "crept toward autobiography stealthily like a wolf." But she did openly discuss her life and her work in an extraordinary series of interviews for Italian radio in 1990. Never before published in English, It's Hard to Talk about Yourself presents a vivid portrait of Ginzburg in her own words on the forces that shaped her remarkable life-politics, publishing, literature, and family. This fluid translation will join Ginzburg's autobiography, Family Sayings, as one of the most important records of her life and, as the editors write in their preface, "the last, unexpected, original book by Natalia Ginzburg."

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light tan cloth with green lettering and decoration. No dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. A memoir of a year in rural Pennsylvania. Clean copy.

Softcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 137 pages, light blue wrappers. An uncorrected proof. The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.

Softcover. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 165 pages, French text.

Hardcover. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 2nd printing, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 259 pages. Biography by Issac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Paintings and drawings by Raphael Soyer. Slight yellowing to pictorial dust jacket, else a lovely copy in clear mylar cover.

Hardcover. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1st, 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 493 pages. Sun-fading to dust jacket spine, two small closed tears to front cover. Faint foxing to edges, previous owner's signature on front end paper, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton , 1st, 2014-09-22, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 765 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Softcover. Mancheser, U.K., Manchester University, Reprint, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Softcover, 221 pages. Foreword by George Melly. Highlighting on two pages. B&W photos and illustrations. Street Noises combines the diverse materials of mass culture with literary and archival sources, to produce an innovative and critical re-reading of twentieth-century Paris as the city of the people and of cultural modernity. It concentrates on popular song and opera, cultural theory and records of police surveillance (such as the unpublished archives concerning the sexual mores of sailors in Toulon), sensational weekly magazines (including the weekly Detective Magazine with its remarkable photomontage) and writers of the Academie Goncourt. The author picks out their common realisation of the experience of the city, also showing how the faits divers and the entertainment industries frame the writing of a Benjamin, a Colette or a Genet. Rifkin reworks modern critical theory through these sources, reflecting on its relation to the production of mass cultures.

Hardcover. New York, Viking Press, 1st, 1973, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 276 pages. Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 352 pages, several b&w woodcut illustrations. Black cloth spine with marbled boards, top edge gilt. Minor corner wear.

Hardcover. Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin and Company, Limited Ed., 1904, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 251 pages. Limited Ed. #205/750 copies. SIGNED BY BURROUGHS. Slight sunning to covers, else a clean, tight copy. Volume 1 only.

Hardcover. London, Chatto and Windus, 1st, 1960, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 260 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on front flyleaf. Hardcover. Gilt title on spine. Covers bound in purple cloth. Boards have a touch of age wear at edges. Gutter split at title page, otherwise, binding tight. Clean inside. Edges and preliminary pages have some age-yellow and foxing. Still in great shape for its age.

Hardcover. NY, Harper Collins, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 233 pages. Authors, illustrators, and poets describe their childhoods, approaches to creating children's books, and career paths.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Clean. "Once in a while a great book appears which through the author's strength of vision and freshness of language, allows is to see the world anew, OUT OF MY DEPTH--mixing memoir, sport, metaphysics, and playful contemption--is just a book. Several years ago noted author Paul West took a look at himself and saw a man who loved the water but couldn't swim." - dust jacket copy.

Hardcover. Colbyville, Vt., Silver Print Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 162 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. B&w photography throughout. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Colophon Press, 1st, 1930, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Unpaginated. Hardcover with lightly tanned pages. Cover boards show light soil. Articles include: Colophons by Ruth S. Granniss; Firsts, Issues and Points by George H. Sargent; On Breaking Type by H.L. Mencken; Whitman and the War's Finale by Emory Holloway; Illustrating "Huckleberry Finn" by E.W. Kemble; Irving's Washington and an Episode in Courtesy by George S. Hellman; On Being Published by Sherwood Anderson; Chartreuse by A.R. Stavenitz; An Unrecorded "Pilgram's Progress" by Gilbert McCoy Troxell; The Bookplates of Bruce Rogers by William A. Kittredge; Getting Into Print by William McFee.

Hardcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pages. Oversize hardcover art book. This is the first publication of the complete body of noted Polish Author and artist Schulz's known artwork. A great engraver-draftsman, Schulz earned his living as a menial art teacher. He was one of the first Modern writers to incorporate his own drawings in his stories, one of which, "The Age of Genius", is about his artistic childhood. "His art, like his writing, is deeply infused with a sense of personal and cultural degradation, an ominous, prescient aura of the horrors in store for the fragile and rapidly disappearing world in which he lived.

Hardcover. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1st UK, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an edgeworn , unclipped dust jacket. A biography of poet Harry Crosby, who inexplicably took the life of another man's bride of six months, and subsequently his own life, in 1929. INSCRIBED BY WOLFF on the blank prelim page: "To the yeoman of Chittenden, and to Steve, from the guy whose fat they pulled from the fire/Geoffrey Wolff/Repayment Day, 1977/Waitsfield, Vt".

Hardcover. NY, George H. Doran Co., 1st, 1916, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, Small octavo, tan boards with paper labels on top cover and spine. 93 pages. Doyle's account of visiting the military fronts during World War I. Clean, some scraping to paper covered board on rear otherwise very good.

Softcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, reprint, 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 398 pages. Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers is loved and remembered, most notably, for the creation of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. As this biography attests, Sayers was also one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford, a playwright, and an essayist--but also a woman with personal joys and tragedies. Here, Reynolds, a close friend of Sayers, presents a convincing and balanced portrait of one of the 20th century's most brilliant, creative women. 30 b&w photos. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putman's Sons, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a nice, unclipped dust jacket, 447 pages. B&w photos. Although he aspired to Princeton, Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff (aka Shaw) had to settle for local Brooklyn College, where he seems to have enjoyed football more than his studies. From his mid-20s, however, Shaw (1913-1984) was a highly regarded New Yorker short story writer ("The Girls in Their Summer Dresses") and left-wing playwright ( Bury the Dead ), and later became a successful Hollywood script writer and novelist ( The Young Lions ; Rich Man, Poor Man ). This sympathetic, objective biography, by a Vanity Fair contributing editor, convincingly shows how Shaw's career, character and fiction, influenced more by Hemingway's lifestyle than by his writing, were marked by incongruities. Far from abating with age, his romantic and alcoholic appetites overwhelmed him. Years of high living in Europe, surrounded by adoring friends, softened his self-judgment, and he took to writing "fluffy essays for swells." The New Yorker dropped him, and "serious" critics panned his novels. Shnayerson capably contrasts Shaw's inclinations and personality with his subject matter and literary output, and is especially astute at explaining the complications of being a commercially successful midcentury American writer. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, New Directions, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, second printing, 316 pages plus index, sewn paperback cover price $2.45, very good lightly used copy.

Softcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st pbk, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 530 pages. Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern. Clean, bright copy, as new.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 184 pages. Saving the Text cuts through Jacques Derrida's complex blend of philosophy, commentary, and elaborate wordplay to ascertain his place in the history of criticism and the significance of Glas as a literary event. Distinguished critic and scholar Geoffrey Hartman explores the usefulness of Derrida's style of close reading for English and American scholarship and establishes its relevance to the division that has arisen between European and Anglo-American critical approaches.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Brothers, 1st, 1946, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a dust jacket that is taped to covers, 554 pages. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, repriny, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 290 pages. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system forinterpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. Clean copy.