This work shows how seventeenth-century English lyric poets were able to control the way that their poetry sounds when read aloud, and thus to influence emotional force and meaning. It begins by criticizing the contemporary treatments of meter. It then gives a theoretical and descriptive account, based on Dwight Bolinger's analysis of English intonation, of how and why iambic pentameter uniquely permits a poet to achieve both a regular rhythm and an expressive variety in intonation. The rest of the book consists of close readings of poems by Surrey, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and others to show each poet controlling intonation to achieve his own voice and thus his relationship with an implied listener. The work concludes by discussing the changing cultural context at the end of the century in which witty, intimate utterances yielded to the more public voice of Dryden, Pope, and the Augustan heroic couplet. Now retired, John Cooper taught at Portland State University.

Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

The nature of silence is hard to grasp. This book serves to systematize this concept and explore it in the works of three major poets of religious experience: namely, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas. Since these poets worked within a Christian framework, the “silences” they refer to are mainly those emerging in the context of the relationship between God and man in a post-Christian climate. The book’s textual analyses place special attention on the dynamics between thematic and structural manifestations of silence, and are situated at the crossroads of the poetics, philosophy and theology. In this first study bringing together the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot and Thomas, the three poets, each in his unique way, emerge as poetic ministers, practitioners, and producers of silence, who try to find a new language to talk about the Ineffable God and one’s experience of the divine.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Stories and Sketches" by Harriet S. Caswell. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.

Two worlds – one visible, the other invisible. A shooter is on the loose in a small Midwestern suburb, chased by the FBI and local police. A credible ISIS plot brews to neutralize America on the world stage. While the forces of darkness rally a campaign to influence the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, the President of the United States works to save his country from imminent destruction. Concurrently a mysterious figure arises, The Bookseller, to speak truth into the lives of Paul and Samantha, two college students at the crossroads of an epic battle between light and darkness. The curtain which separates the visible from the invisible is suddenly opened, revealing the conflict, tactics and methods of the opposing forces – and how they continually impact our lives. Be cautioned, however, that although this is a work of fiction, it often crosses the line to truth – not in personalities or the events described, but how we might view these events if we could see everything that happened, both the visible and invisible, simultaneously. For those brave enough to search for the truth, The Curtain is an adventure behind the veil, deep into the spiritual realm.