Collects the letters of Wallace Stevens to his wife Elsie as they moved through their relationship as friends, to fiancâes, to husband and wife.

The work introduces the topic of historical writing in fictional and non-fictional contexts, methodologies and approaches. The author analyses historiography and historical novels and shows how a confabulation is evident in these works, and how these are transacting modes in a single paradigm. The book uses the theoretical construct of the “Aesthetics Ethic.” It looks at varied aesthetic contours in lived experience, a given “social ethic,” histories of sensibilities, and what is termed a “narrative ethic”, and goes on to look at “Narrative consciousness and historical experience: Living links,” with analysis comprising narrative consciousness, psychological concepts including subjectivity and objectivity, and “the importance of thought.” The book also introduces a new theoretical model of historical truth apprehension. The examination of fictionalized history and historicized fiction examines aesthetic contours including point of view and the concept of “becoming” in fiction and history; heteroglossia and intertextuality; the conceptions of contingency, metaphor, modality, and chaos; and temporality and rhetoric. It conclude with thoughts and summaries to bring the whole work into focus.

Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens' poetic achievement. The Introduction explains why Stevens is among the world's great poets and offers specific guidance on how to read and appreciate his poetry. A brief biographical sketch anchors Stevens in the real world and illuminates important personal and intellectual influences. The essays following chart Stevens' poetic career and his affinities with both earlier and contemporary writers, artists, and philosophers. Other essays introduce students to the peculiarity and distinctiveness of Stevens' voice and style. They explain prominent themes in his work and explore the nuances of his aesthetic theory. With a detailed chronology and a guide to further reading, this Companion provides all the information a student or scholar of Stevens will need.

First published in 1987, the essays in this volume focus on questions of gender, property and power in the use of rhetoric and the practice of literary genres, and provide a historicised cultural critique. They analyse the links between rhetoric and property, but also representations of women as unruly, excessive, teleology-breaking figures — intermeshing with feminist theory in the wake of Freud, Lacan and Derrida. A wide variety of texts — from Genesis to Freud, by way of Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau and Emily Brontë — are examined, held together by a concern for the entanglements of rhetorical questions of literary plotting, hierarchy, ideological framing and political consequence.

Describes the skills, equipment, and techniques that spies use. Includes activities and experiments.

Mrs Nowottny's chief aim in this 'valuable book which could serve as a useful introduction to practical criticism' is to inquire what it is that makes the language of poetry poetic. The book grows out of the leading trends today in ideas about language and the way is works but to the maters discussed Mrs. Nowottny brings a keen mind of her won and considerable powers as a literary critic. Stressing the continuity of poetry with other uses of language she shows how under the control of the poet's purpose everyday language contributes to the achievement of the most complex and profound effects, and she illustrates these effects with a wealth of examples.