Showing papers on "Theme (narrative) published in 1972"

Geographical ecology; patterns in the distribution of species

Abstract: First published in 1972 and now available for the first time in paperback, this book is the summation of the life work of one of the most influential scientists of our time. Of permanent interest in the history and philosophy of science, it is also frequently cited in the current ecological literature and is still up-to-date in many categories. "The theme running through this book," MacArthur wrote, "is that the structure of the environment, the morphology of the species, the economics of species behavior, and the dynamics of population changes are the four essential ingredients of all interesting biogeographic patterns." Written in his beautifully lucid style, this work will continue to be read by anyone concerned with biological ideas.

Incest: a synthesis of data.

Abstract: The incest taboo is a moral imperative; its force reflects a cross-cultural preoccupation with the incest theme. The importance of this subject in psychiatric theory and practice justifies a concer...

Ibsen, the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Henrik Ibsen : the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995

Romantic Imagery in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Abstract: A LTHOUGH KATE CHOPIN'S The Awakening has in recent years elicited considerable commentary, critics have tended to construe her theme much too narrowly. As George Arms points out in his discussion of the book, it is too often seen in terms of the question of sexual freedom,' and in at least one analysis, it is read as a strongly feminist novel.2 To be suire, some critics, like Per Seyersted, recognize that the book has broader implications than these, but even he stresses unduly the theme of "female self-assertion" which he sees as underlying all of Chopin's works.3 No one would want to deny, of course, that this theme is indeed present in both The Awakening and many of her short pieces. The awakening of Edna Pontellier must surely be seen in part as her sexual arousal by Robert Lebrun during the summer on Grand Isle, one that resembles in some ways the arousal of Athenaise or the awakening of Caline in their respective stories in A Night in Acadie. The latter character, in particular, is specifically "awakened" from sleep by the sudden stopping of a railroad train from which steps the young artist whom she later seeks in the city.4 But too much emphasis on this aspect of The Awakening will distort both Chopin's meaning and her accomplishment. For Kate Chopin reserves neither the word nor the experience for women alone, nor is it always seen in her works in a sexual context. In "A Rude Awakening," a story in Bayou Folk, Sylveste Bordon is shocked into assuming responsibility for his family by

The mystery of unity: theme and technique in the novels of Patrick White,

Abstract: iv

Children's use of Humor in Psychotherapy:

Abstract: Instances of humor are analyzed in regard to theme, target, form, function, and relationship to the child's personality and development

The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art: A Study in Theme and Structure of Jean Toomer's Cane

Abstract: JpUBLISHED IN I923 by Boni and Liveright, Jean Toomer's Cane was an instant failure. Although praised by the literary avantgarde of the twenties (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, to name a few), the novel sold only 500 copies in the first year. From one point of view, it is strange the novel fared so badly, for it was experimental in the manner of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, whose influence is quite noticeable in Cane,' and it antedates by two years the publication (also by Boni and Liveright) of Hemingway's In Our Time, whose form it most distinctly resembles. Also, given the emergence of "exotic Harlem" and an interest in things Negro, the public seemed ready for a novel like Cane, or at least so felt Horace Liveright.2 Still, the novel failed, and Toomer began a slow retreat into obscurity. With the revival of interest in black literature, its reputa-

Democratic humanism & American literature

Abstract: Democratic Humanism and American Literature illustrates the interplay between democratic assumptions and literary performance in the America's classic nineteenth-century writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Poe, Whitman, Twain, and James. Harold Kaplan suggests that these major figures' works are linked by the myths of genesis of a new political culture. Challenged by the democratic ideal, and committed to it, they wrote prophetic books in the American liberal tradition and endowed its ethical intelligence. The task of stating a new and undefined freedom was always implicit and often in the foreground of the writing of these nineteenth-century giants. As the author describes the situation, "the free man had to decide in what sense he was bound by nature or could master it; in what sense he was committed to his society and could reconcile his freedom with it." These classic writers devoted their work to examining this dialectic of values; Kaplan sees their complex and polarized democratic consciousness as seminal in the imaginative tradition they generated. What is unique in that tradition of values is the rivalry of criticism with affirmations of faith. "The highly original ethical trait involved here is based on the capacity of a political society to use its negations against itself and survive." The author suggests that in our own time moral judgments are more likely to be the province of activist politics than literature. His new introduction relates the theme of the book to cultural and political developments in the American experience of modernity and adds a discussion of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to the figures treated in the original edition. Since tendencies to develop ideological and idiosyncratic responses to extrinsic events have grown stronger over time, it is more important than ever for scholars and students alike to recover a "moral imagination" - the force that gave rise to the great literary works of the nineteenth century. To describe that force is Harold Kaplan's goal in Democratic Humanism and American Literature.

The Doctors in "Rappaccini's Daughter"

Abstract: DESPITE THE DIVERSITY AND WEALTH of critical commentary on "Rappaccini's Daughter," the earliest interpretation of the tale as a polemic against science has remained curiously unchallenged. While critics no longer view this theme as the central meaning of the story and while they identify the villain variously as Rappaccini, Baglioni, or Giovanni, their conclusions generally agree that Hawthorne had a contemptuous distrust of science which he personified in one scientific evildoer after another.1 This view is supported by

Browning's experiments with genre

Abstract: In his article on "The Ironic Pattern of Browning's Paracelsus," F. E. L. Priestley observes that "one of the main aspects of the technical revolution accompanying the development of Romanticism is a highly experimental approach to genre."' As Priestley's student, Hair expands this suggestion into a study of Browning's technical development between Pauline and The Ring and the Book. Since much of Browning's career was dedicated to beating down old generic barriers and building the forms of modern poetry, Hair's subject is clearly crucial and one which Browning critics, absorbed in character, rhetoric, and theme, all too often neglect. But it is also a difficult subject, requiring precision in defining elusive abstractions, intimacy with the history of poetic forms, and sensitivity to the structural principles of specific texts. It is more disappointing than surprising, then, that Hair's book does not live up to the promise of its title. The book focuses on how Browning combined and changed lyric, drama, and narrative in his successive attempts to delineate "incidents in the development of a soul" and to function as a "Marker-see" for his readers. Hair proceeds chronologically, treating Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello as experiments in lyric, drama, and narrative, respectively. He argues that in each of these early poems Browning tried to tailor the traditional genre to accommodate his perennial fascination with the intricacies of the human psyche. In Paracelsus, for instance, the expected external action, characterization, and plot give way to dialogue which charts the rise and progress of a mood. In these early poems, Browning also explored the relationship between poet and reader and grew gradually to believe that the poet must not announce an insight but rather stimulate the reader's "cooperating fancy" to assemble the insight for himself. Sordello provided the forum in which Browning expounded this theory of the poet as "Maker-see," aired his ideas about the various poetic genres, and admitted his predilection for "incidents in the development of a soul." Predictably, Hair's analysis of Sordello, which suggested the key terms of this study, proves more cogent and more clearly germane to the book's thesis than his other interpretations of the early verse. Through many of these pages on the early poems, Hair relies on a particular critical method which he articulates in his preface: "In my investigation of the literary kinds and modes with which Browning worked I have emphasized the literary relations of his poems-the kind of relations that become evident when the literature of the nineteenth century as a whole is surveyed from the perspective of the following century." Among other literary relations, Hair introduces Henry Taylor's Philip Van Artevelde, published fourteen months before Paracelsus, as a more conventional poetic drama than Browning's. Similarly, Pauline is compared

Ford Madox Ford : the critical heritage

Abstract: This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

Abraham and Cyrus: Type and Anti-Type?

Abstract: Typology is usually taken to be a method of understanding the unity of the Old and New Testaments, and presupposes that the revelation in Christ has been fore-shadowed in past historical events. It refers to an important aspect of Old Testament exegesis which attempts to interpret the Old Testament within the New. "The socalled tupoi ... are persons, institutions, and events of the Old Testament which are regarded as divinely established models or prerepresentations of corresponding realities in the New Testament salvation history. These realities ... are designated 'antitypes'" 1). The term "typology" can, however, be used in a broader sense of an analogical way of thinking, which was not specifically concerned with the unity of the Old and New Testaments and which was employed as a method of theological understanding long before that question arose. It is "fundamentally a mode of historical understanding ... man understands himself in relation to a crucial event ... previous events are seen to be an anticipation of the decisive event" 2). The classic example of the latter kind of typology is found in Deutero-Isaiah, in his so-called Exodus-typology. B. W. ANDERSON in his examination of this theme finds that Deutero-Isaiah's "expectation of Yahweh's coming to inaugurate his eschatological rule was shaped according to the pattern of the Exodus from Egypt" 3). DeuteroIsaiah's eschatological pattern, which he had inherited from prophetic tradition, was based on the assumption that the end-time will correspond to the beginning-time (End.eit gleich Urzeit) 4). The exciting

Crime and Myth: The Archetypal Pattern of Rebirth in Three Novels of Dostoevsky

Abstract: T NHE SALIENT dimension of Dostoevsky's creativity in his later phase is his obsessive esthetic and metaphysical concern with ultimate violence. Indeed, in his great novels, the prominence and urgency of the theme of murder become the cachet of his creative method. Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov embody a reassertion and an elaboration of this compelling concern in terms of both their thematic import and structural pattern. Murder is presented as an act generated exclusively by the rational mind of the murderer. It is a product of pure intellection, a rationally argued "calculated" act of violence; and as such it can be characterized as "le crime parfait" in the sense Albert Camus uses the term in his dialectics of murder-that is, "le meurtre legitime" as distinguished from "le meurtre de fatalite," or crime of passion.' The very urgency with which these works all insist that "le meurtre est la question" (Camus, p. 15) makes us pause to inquire into the dynamics of the organizing pattern around which the themes of crime appear to be structured. This underlying pattern reflects the archetypal scheme of rebirth through transgression followed by suffering, or expiation, which informs the central myth of Christianity, the Fall of Man and his Redemption. And in accordance with the metaphysical esthetics characteristic of his post-exile Weltanschauung,2 his Pascalism-nay, his dread of man's autarkic intellect3-Dostoevsky constitutes the "crime of reason" as the transgression, but also as a potential felix culpa in his version of the Fall and Redemption as applied to modern man. Despite the occasional probings of several critics into the themes of rebirth or regeneration in Dostoevsky's oeuvre, his major fiction has not been systematically explored for the thematic and structural relevance of the archetypal pattern of rebirth. My purpose is to isolate and follow the movement of this pattern in terms of its individuation in each of the three novels under study. 1 will consider the characters' existential role only in terms of their involvement in the metaphysical scheme of rebirth. In the significantly entitled Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky gives his first imaginative statement of what Allen Tate would call "a cosmic extension of the moral predicament."4 It is a Russian intellectual and, by extension, "man under the aspect of modernity,"5 a "superman," whom Dostoevsky features as a supreme aggressor in terms of human law and as a metaphysical transgressor against divine and universal order. His act of aggression is presented as "sanctioned" by the "rational" imperative of his intellect, his transgression as an experiment in "uttermost and final freedom."6 Seeking, thus, to establish his protagonist in his "relationship to God,"7 Dostoevsky will resort to the archetypal scheme. In his proud and solitary intellection, Raskolnikov contemplates a venture that he presumes will say "a new word."8 Impelled by a rational "idea," an "excrescence" of his intellect, he conceives a "logical" crime, claiming the right of an "extraordinary" man (pp. 248-49; Pt. iII, Ch. v) to establish his own ethical norms and values. Specifically he asserts that this extraordinary man "may in all conscience authorize himself" to commit crime "if it is necessary . . . for the fulfillment of his ideas" (p. 250). Raskolnikov's rational mind breaking loose from the common bonds of humanity, a mind driven by concupiscentia invincibilis-that concupiscence of reason that Lev Shestov deems the very cause of the Fall of Man9-will prompt him "to dare" (p. 401; Pt. v, Ch. iv) and "to permit his

Childhood as theme and symbol in the major fiction of Ana María Matute

Abstract: 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., was part of the material being photographed the photographer followed a definite method in "sectioning" the material. It is customary to begin photoing at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue photoing from left to right in equal sections with a small overlap. If necessary, sectioning is continued again beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete.

The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan

Abstract: Afghanistan has always been a mountainous crossroads. Through it have come merchants with indigo and Chinese silk, Alexander the Great, nomads from the Steppes, colonies of Buddhist monks, great Moghul conquerors and the ill-fated armies of the British Raj. In this book, Peter Levi, a classical scholar and a poet, seeks the clues which each migration left, and it is this quest that gives the book its theme. How far East did Alexander really establish himself? Who built the great Upland castle that exists on no map? Could the sculptors of Athens really have influenced the early Buddhist artists?