Ireland's greatest poet, William Butler Yeats, was also perhaps the most outstanding poet to have written in English since Wordsworth. Many of his early poems - wistful, mysterious and suffused with Pre-Raphaelite imagery - are of haunting beauty. But in the early 1900s Yeats became disillusioned with this twilight, imaginary world and turned his thoughts increasingly to reality. Directing his energies to the twin causes of the Irish literary renaissance and of Irish national independence, he evolved a new style - austere, but capable of sustained magnificence. Micheal Mac Liammoir and Eavan Boland trace Yeats' long and eventful career, covering such episodes as his directorship of the Abbey Theatre and service in the Irish Senate, as well as his poetic activities. They analyze, with acuteness and humor, the contradictory qualities of a genius who was both lovable and forbidding, worldly and unworldly, a practical mystic and a superstitious realist.

The essays in this volume represent some of the best new thinking about the crucial relations between visual representation in film and human subjectivity. No amount of empirical research into the sociology of actual audiences will displace the desire to speculate about the effects of visual culture, and especially moving images, on viewing subjects. These notions of spectatorship, however hypothetical, become extremely compelling metaphors for the workings of vision within the institution of cinema. Viewing Positions examines the tradition of a centered, unitary, distanced, and objectifying spectator's gaze; investigates the period when film spectatorship as an idea began; and analyses gender- and sexuality-based challenges to the homogeneous classical theory of spectatorship. It makes available critical understandings of spectatorship that have, until now, largely eluded cinema studies.

Format: Trade Paper ISBN-10: 0374520291 ISBN-13: 9780374520298 Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux488 pages Language: English

The Cambridge Companion to Milton will provide an accessible and helpful guide for any student of Milton, introducing readers to both the scope of Milton's work and the range of current approaches to it. The Companion's eighteen contributors have written informative, stimulating, often argumentative essays that will provoke thought and discussion both in and out of the classroom, on all the important aspects of the background to, and substance of, Milton's life and work. The Cambridge Companion to Milton offers in a single volume the responsible and diverse introduction to Milton that undergraduate students, together with their professors, are looking for.

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The first great epic poem in the English language, The Faerie Queene is a long and complex allegory that presents the first-time reader with many difficulties of allusion and interpretation. This book, designed as a handbook to be consulted by students while reading the poem, is the only convenient and up-to-date guide available. Religious and political contexts are explained, while the analysis of Spenser's literary techniques encourages close reading. This revised edition takes account of recent developments in Spenserian criticism, and brings the guidance on further reading up to date.

A readable guide to the works of Shakespeare includes solid, but never too simplistic, information about the Bard's language, life, and loves for those who want to learn about Shakespeare without wading through a morass of academic criticism. 35,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis' trail—conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence—perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

This is a collection of the writings of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincy and others, describing the life of the Wordsworths and their circle when they lived at Grasmere in the Lake District. The book starts with a description of William's early life, but its main focus is on the years 1799-1813, that period of sustained creativity when William and his sister Dorothy returned to the lakes and mountains of their childhood memories. Penelope Hughes-Hallett interweaves photographs and her own descriptions with extracts from William's poems, Dorothy's journals and the writings of a host of other contemporaries, to evoke a place and a time which became inspirational in the development of English literature. Penelope Hughes-Hallett's other books include "My Dear Cassandra", an illustrated selection of the letters of Jane Austen.

A delightful, yearlong literary companion for book lovers, filled with birthdays, anniversaries, and amusing anecdotes, all from the world of books and authors. 202 illustrations, 33 in color.

The author of Mother Tongue offers an affectionate and informative look at the origins of American English, including why strippers' apparel is called a G-string and what—or who—is the real McCoy. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. Tour.