Literature Criticism

Hardcover. Peacham VT, The Perpetua Press, 1st, 2002, Hardcover in the publisher's cream-colored linen over boards with spine and upper board gilt-stamped black leather labels. No dust jacket, as issued. 88 pages, only 500 copies printed. A collection of interviews done with Shaw from 1924 - 1945. Bright and clean copy.

Hardcover. London, W. H. Allen & Co., 1st, 1883, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth-covered boards with gilt titles to spine and gilt titles and gilt rules to front board. Prefatory note by Bertha Thomas plus 247 pages plus four-page publisher's advertisements for titles in the Eminent Women Series to the rear. Previous owner's name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY/Oxford UK, Routledge, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial boards, 190 pages. This book examines Gore Vidal's lifelong engagement with the ancient world. Incorporating material from his novels, essays, screenplays and plays, it argues that his interaction with antiquity was central to the way in which he viewed himself, his writing, and his world. Divided between the three primary subjects of his writing - sex, politics, and religion - this book traces the lengthy dialogue between Vidal and antiquity over the course of his sixty-year career. Broughall analyses Vidal's portrayals of the ancient past in novels such as Julian (1964), Creation (1981) and Live from Golgotha (1992). He also shows how classical literature inspired Vidal's other fiction, such as The City and the Pillar (1948), Myra Breckinridge (1968), and his Narratives of Empire (1967-2000) novels. Beyond his fiction, Broughall examines the ways in which antiquity influenced Vidal's careers as a playwright, an essayist and a satirist, and evaluates the influence of classical authors and their works upon him. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 321 pages with an index. Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers. The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. Clean copy.

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. London, Vision Press Limited, 1st, 1975, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and soiled dust jacket, 240 pages. A full critical analysis of Grass' plays, poems and novels and viewed in the context of 20th century German literature. No markings.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 349 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press , 1st, 1977, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth covers, silver lettering, 152 pages. Light pencil marking in text.

Softcover. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 355 pages. Softcover with light edgewear to paper wrappers. In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers--Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe--demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 88 pages. Clean copy. First Printing stated.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st US, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 222 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Black & white illustrations throughout. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. US, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 229 pages. Light edgewear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others.

Hardcover. Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 1st, 1963, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. No dust jacket. 384 pages, b&w illustrations. The biography of an influential critic gives a vivid picture of American cultural life from the 1880s to the 1920s. INSCRIBED BY ERIK HUNEKER, SON OF JAMES on the front fly leaf. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 516 pages. A biography of a brilliant literary figure, a poet, critic, political and social reformer of mid-nineteenth century America. Clean copy.

Softcover. Durango CO, Logbridge-Rhodes, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 150 pages, b&w illustrations. Poems by Wright, with letters, interviews, memoirs, elegies, a chronology, and bibliography. Light fade to spine, otherwise clean copy.

Hardcover. Burlington, VT, Ashgate Publishing, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 162 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket.

Hardcover. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 160 pages. This book offers eleven essays on Fante's career, ranging from close thematic analysis of individual stories and novels to broadly informed assessments of Fante's life and art in the context of his times. Major areas explored in the book include Fante's treatment of the Italian-American experience; his relationship to other American writers of the 1930s and beyond; the deeply Catholic nature of Fante's fiction; his unique and still-seminal vision of Los Angeles; and his lifelong concern to render in fiction both the comedy and the horrors of the writing life. Clean copy.

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 701-909. Articles include: Philip Gordon on Ayn Rand. Louis F. Helbig on Struwwelpeter: an inquiry into the effects of violence in children's literature. French folk songs. D. L. Ashliman on the American Indian in German Travel Narratives and Literature. Clean.

Softcover. Bowling Green OH, Journal of Popular Culture, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, pages 1-258. Articles include: The tragedy of Bert Williams, mystery writer John D. MacDonald, Edward R. Murrow's WW2 radio broadcasts, the dance marathon craze, Spider-Man - Superhero in the Liberal Tradition, others. Clean.

Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 200 pages. Joyce Cary long a popular author among discriminating readers, is gaining a wider audience for his novels every year. This critical study of his work considers the developing relationship between his matter and his manner. It especially emphasizes his growth as artist and thinker. Looking closely at the language and structure of Cary's books, the author examines all the novels- the African ones, the historical ones, and the two trilogies most of them in detail. To gain an overall view he also considers Cary's nonfiction and some as yet unpublished material. While this study is essentially non-biographical, it does analyze Cary's interpretations of history, sociology and politics as they are gathered from the actions and words of his colorful characters. One of the most intriguing features of Dr. Wolkenfeld's book is the dialogue between characters of the various novels, where likenesses as well as dissimilarities, which reveal so much about Cary as a writer, become evident. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 2nd pr., 1926, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pale orange cloth with title on spine label. Former copy belonging to COUNTEE CULLEN (1903-1946), with his signature on the front fly leaf. Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance. 248 pages, b&w frontis. Small paper scars to front endpapers, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.

Hardcover. NY, Columbia University Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 263 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 3rd pr., 1905, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Two hardcover volumes in worn, soiled dust jackets. Dark green cloth covers with gilt titles to upper covers and spines. As a result of djs, both volumes are bright and clean, 261. 243 pages. No markings.