In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself --the words to the song--leave him, as he lets each go, the wind carrying most of it, some of the words, falling, settling into instead that larger darkness, where the smaller darknesses that our lives were lie softly down." --from "Riding Westward" What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? What is the difference, Phillips asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

Dominic Baker-Smith has been a leading international authority on humanism for more than four decades, specializing in the works of Erasmus and Thomas More. The present collection of essays by colleagues throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States examines humanism in both its historic sixteenth-century meanings and applications and the humanist tradition in our own time, drawing on his work and that of scholars who have followed him. Contributors include Andrew Weiner, Elizabeth McCutcheon, and Germaine Warkentin. Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ton Hoenselaars is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utrecht.

On a frontier torn by war and renegades, they carried a cargo more valuable than gold... Miners dug for fortunes. Soldiers died on open plains. And a few brave men drove the wooden freight wagons into the wild land. Now, master Western novelist Ralph Compton tells the real story of the tough-as-leather men who blazed the way into the untamed frontier. Once they drove longhorns. Now Mac Tunstall and his band of Texans must take a shipment of Winchesters by rail and wagon all the way to the U.S. Army in Austin. But from the moment the wagoneers set out, violence and treachery stalk their trail. From Dodge to the Brazos, half the outlaws on the frontier are aiming to get hold of an arsenal that could blow the West wide open. And Mac and his men don't see one danger until it's too late-four beautiful, headstrong women determined to share a trail of courage and tears all the way to the end.

This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.