Dancing is as old as humanity. It has always been a way of expressing intense emotions and indicating the influence of transcendental powers. At the beginning of human history the individual and the world formed an organic unity, but as a result of social development this original state ceased to exist. Dancing can restore that unity and reabsorb the Dancer into the Universe. For William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, who differ from one another in so many respects, dancing and the figure of the dancer became important symbols. Apart from the detailed analysis of the works, this book offers a cultural-historical access to the characteristic productions of the fin-de-sicle period, recalling the performances of Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinski, Anna Pavlova, and the other famous or ill-famed dancers. For the two Irish artists the dancer, balancing on the borderlines of everyday reality and the transcendental world, of body and soul, of the relationship of the masses and the a

This book asserts that Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), and shows how Wilde’s image and intellect set in train a powerful influence within Yeats’s creative imagination that remained active throughout the poet’s life. The intellectual concepts, metaphysical speculations and artistic symbols and images which Yeats appropriated from Wilde changed the poet’s perspective and informed the imaginative system of beliefs that Yeats formulated as the basis of his dramatic and poetic work. Section One, 'Influence and Identity' (1888 – 1895), explores the personal relationship of these two writers, their nationality and historical context as factors in influence. Section Two, 'Mask and Image' (1888 – 1917), traces the creative process leading to Yeats’s construction of the antithetical mask, and his ideas on image, in relation to the role of Wilde as his precursor. Finally, 'Salomé: Symbolism, Dance and Theories of Being' (1891 – 1939) concentrates on the immense influence that Wilde’s symbolist play, Salomé, wrought on Yeats’s imaginative work and creative sensibility.

This dissertation examines the early philosophical receptions to the work of Jacques Derrida, structuring the receptions in the form of an archive. The monograph is composed of three main sections: The Non-Locus of the Archive, The Derrida Archive, and Conclusion: The Margins of Philosophy. The Non-Locus of the Archive examines three ways of conceptualizing the archive: the archaeological or Foucauldian concept as a reaction to the traditional history of ideas, the traditional archive model Foucault attempts to replace, and a deconstructive model which is the first stage in critiquing this traditional/archaeological binary opposition. The Functions of the Derrida Archive are briefly introduced, and the whole issue of the philosophical receptions is related to Derrida's comments on "Colleges and Philosophy" and the essay "The Principle of Reason." The Derrida Archive is divided into Critical and Supporting Receptions. This is an analysis of the Functions that the monograph finds working

"The dissertation focuses on one of the most debated prophecies of Blake, The Four Zoas. The approach is basically psychological and, before the main thesis is elaborated, a brief survey is given about the most frequently studied parallels, such as Freud and Jung. The dissertation then proceeds to examine a new aspect: a parallel is drawn between the hypotheses of Lipot Szondi, disciple to Freud, and Blake's visionary universe. Szondi's System of Drives helps illuminate several questionable passages of Blake's dream vision, furthermore, as the parallel points out, an interesting change is discernible in Blake's concepts about Enlightenment and Rationalism, whereby the previously rejected ideas become integrated into a fourfold world of wholeness and intellectual sanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"The present work uses the standard version of principles and parameters theory of Universal Grammar to address second language acquisition issues. It is assumed that comparative analysis of Hungarian and English based on the model enables the researcher to formulate precise and testable questions and the empirical research provides reliable answers." "The investigated area is the acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses by L1 Hungarian learners of L2 English. This area of grammar causes problems: most of these are proficiency-determined, but there are some which are observable even at fairly advanced levels. In the given framework it is postulated that some properties of parameters set differently for the L1 can be reset to the new language, whereas other properties seem to resist re-setting and remain non-native-like in the interlanguage of even near-native L2 English speakers of L1 Hungarian." "The book may interest pure and applied linguists, psycholinguists as well as practising teachers as it attempts to offer a possible answer to the often made observation: there are parts of L2 grammar which are relatively easy to acquire despite the language differences, yet there are several features that remain faulty or misunderstood despite teacher and learner effort."--BOOK JACKET.

The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries but also Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe on the other. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years.

Analysis of British and German prose fiction written between 1916 and 1937, with different ideological points of view. Authors represented include, from Germany, Fritz von Unruh, Josef M. Wehner, Werner Beumelburg, Arnold Zweig, and from Britain, Alec J. Dawson, Alan P. Herbert, Arthur D. Gristwood, Frederic Manning and David Jones.

This book is one of those rare combinations of intellectual brilliance, stylistic clarity, and sheer verve. The book contains a series of major works of American short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James as occasions for a mode of reading in which the readers aim is to establish an intimate relationship with the special arrangement of words in a text, governed by a trust in a happy coincidence of moments in which one might recognize the words relevance to ones life. Dr. Kllay calls this a good encounter, a term she adopts from the writings of philosopher Stanley Cavell. In her detailed, theoretical introduction, Dr. Kllay lays bare her scholarly debt, primarily to the writings of Cavell himself and to the work of literary critic Wolfgang Iser, as she further develops and clarifies the idea of the good encounter. Here she identifies the good encounter with a particular trope, which appears within the tales themselves, and which also

This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it