Edition statement taken from text, page 4 of cover.

A comprehensive survey of mirror-imagery in English literature from the thirteenth to the end of the seventeenth century.

House as a Mirror of Self presents an unprecedented examination of our relationship to where we live, interwoven with compelling personal stories of the search for a place for the soul. Marcus takes us on a reverie of the special places of childhood--the forts we made and secret hiding places we had--to growing up and expressing ourselves in the homes of adulthood. She explores how the self-image is reflected in our homes/ power struggles in making a home together with a partner/ territory, control, and privacy at home/ self-image and location/ disruptions in the boding with home/ and beyond the "house as ego" to the call of the soul. As our culture is swept up in home improvement to the extent of having an entire TV network devoted to it, this book is essential for understanding why the surroundings that we call home make us feel the way we do. With this information we can embark on home improvement that truly makes room for our soul.

By revisiting globalization using an analysis of metaphors, such as 'global village' and 'network society', this volume sheds new light on overlooked dimensions of global politics, redresses outdated conceptualizations, and provides a critical analysis of existing approaches to the study of globalization.

In this classic study, Harvard professor Reuben Brower guides the reader from noticing the alluring details of a well-made poem, novel, or play to attending to the encompassing ways in which the writing achieves its greatness. "Not only does Brower begin his book with a lyric, but he deliberately chooses a very short one indeed, as if to show how much can be said about the smallest of poetic 'figures' looked at closely. The poem is "The Sick Rose", one of William Blake's best-known songs of experience ... Brower's task is to show how the poem is 'imaginatively organized,' by which he means that, to read it, we must sense the 'extraordinary interconnectedness among a relatively large number of different items of experience." -- From the Foreword by William H Pritchard

This study is concerned with the function of the mirror metaphor in texts by three modern African-American authors. Wright's photo-text 12 Million Black Voices, Baldwin's early essays, and Ellison's novel Invisible Man go back to the time before the Civil Rights Movement when their authors envisioned social and cultural integration in the American melting pot rather than a separate literature of their own. In this context the mirror metaphor leads directly to the thematic core of each text in which issues of visibility, social recognition, the formation of self-images, and the power of stereotypes play central roles. In close readings the author shows how the mirror metaphor functions as a means to model the relationship between self and other and serves to shift the readers' attention to the complex, yet largely invisible machinery of representation.

In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naïve notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.