Literary texts are more or less obliged to make reference to entities beyond themselves. Drawing on other texts, ideas previously written, or on the resources of language, they make their attempts to communicate, entertain, and enlist sympathy, or even to offer counsel. Some texts profess an a priori vision, others adopt a style of reporting only contingencies. A dialogic relation can be posited between the ideal and the real, heaven and earth, imagination and reason, langue and parole, essence and substance, poetry and prose. The poetic and creative impulse is engaged with an ever present need to purify the dialect of the tribe. The topics in Visions and Revisions reflect writersâ (TM) labours with form at whatever distance from the original sources of inspiration. The authors discussed include William Blake, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, William Golding, John Irving, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Hilary Mantel. Verbal by definition, texts make use of other texts and are dependent on the cultural matrix. Readers are also writers in one kind or another. In both modes they may gain impetus or inspiration by re-visioning their origins as well as their ends. This book will offer readers new ways to understand the literary creations of some writers with affinities to the Western spiritual, and specifically Christian, tradition.

Companion to the Book of Literary Terms, an indispensable handbook, revised and updated for today's users.

Poetry. African American Studies. Native American Studies. When Thoreau wrote in his Journal in 1841, "Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets," and when Whitman describes Leaves of Grass as a "language experiment," they are expressing an approach to poetry that never ceased and has grown continuously during recent decades. This groundbreaking anthology from the early 1970s takes such an approach in presenting the poetry of the North American continent, from pre-Columbian times to the present. It includes many recognized poets of the period, though appearing here in often unexpected contexts, and others who have been overlooked but whose contributions to the development of poetry are revolutionary. Starting from their own moment, the editors have read back into the more distant past and selected from broad American traditions works that had thitherto been considered outside the realm of poetry proper: the native poetry of the American continent, African-American sermons, blues and gospels, and the sacred, often innovative poetry of such radical religious groups as the Shakers. The book takes its title from William Blake's poem presenting the American Revolution as not only a powerful, promising and problematic historical event but the birth of a new development in man's consciousness--one that finds complex expression in the poetry of a continent. Selections mostly appear non-chronologically in juxtapositions suggesting what T. S. Eliot called the "simultaneous order" of all poetries of all times.

Collected under the theme of «Visions and Revisions», the papers included in this volume examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. Divided into three parts - poetry, prose and culture - this diverse volume reflects the dynamics of change in literature and culture, enabling investigation of the multifaceted canon.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Inspired by Preib’s daily life on the job, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself. The book follows Preib as he transports body bags, forges an unlikely connection with his female partner, trains a younger officer, and finds himself among people long forgotten—or rendered invisible—by the rest of society. Preib recounts how he navigates the tenuous labyrinths of race and class in the urban metropolis, such as a domestic disturbance call involving a gang member and his abused girlfriend or a run-in with a group of drunk yuppies. As he encounters the real and imagined geographies of Chicago, the city reveals itself to be not just a backdrop, but a central force in his narrative of life and death. Preib’s accounts, all told in his breathtaking prose, come alive in ways that readers will long remember.

Gathering reviews and essays which examine Rich's poetry and prose, this text also looks at how critical opinion about her works has changed.