Books in the Alexander Lectures series

This volume contains the Alexander Lectures in University College, University of Toronto, for the session 1945-46, delivered by Samuel C. Chew, Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr College and author of Byron in England and The Crescent and the Rose.

This book examines Coleridge's experiences, moods, thoughts, and reactions as a whole and their relation to his poems and to his prose works, and also to look at many of his own statements made mainly in the privacy of his notebooks about his aims and purposes.

Heilbrun looks at the biographies and memoirs of women who have altered the face of literature and the world, and reveals the ways in which feminism has changed our perceptions of their lives.

The aim of this book is to illustrate the ways in which at various periods English poetry has reflected current views of the human mind, with special reference to such topics as its place in the cosmos, its relations with the body, the connections between sense, passions, and reason, the problem of soul and its possible survival after death.

This book is a study of the three worlds in Chaucer's poetry, raising questions about the kind of truth which resides in each, the literary values which can be extracted from them, their essentail relation to one another, and the perennial problem of appearance and reality.

Delightfully written criticism of the dominant genre of our time as analogous to the symphony. Discusses "Phrase, Character, Incident," "Expanding Symbols," Interweaving Themes," and "Rhythm in E.M. Forester's A Passage to India.

Professor Baker recounts and analyses the relations of the English Renaissance historians to other writers of their time and to the historians of later ages.

The appearance of a fourth printing of The Renaissance and English Humanism indicated the scholarly success this book has enjoyed for more than a decade. As a brief yet thoughtful and eloquent evaluation of the influence of the Christian humanistic tradition upon our culture it has not been surpassed.

These vigorous lectures deal with some of the many ways in which the question of structure in poetry (here synonymous with the whole range of artistic creation in words) can be discussed. Criticism has never been, Professor Clare argues, a single discipline, but a collection of more and less distinct conceptual "languages," within any one of which a literary problem takes on a special solution. The Alexander Lectures for 1952.

In this volume, based on the series of Alexander Lectures she delivered at the University of Toronto, Julia Kristeva explores the philosophical aspects of Hannah Arendt's work: her understanding of such concepts as language, self, body, political space, and life. Kristeva's aim is to clarify contradictions in Arendt's thought as well as correct misapprehensions about her political and philosophical views.The first two chapters describe how Arendt followed an original conception of human narrative, such that life, action, and even thought, are only human when they can be narrated and thus shared with other persons who, through the evocation of memory, complete the story and make history into a condensed sign, into a revelation of the 'who.' The third chapter concentrates on Arendt's work in relation to her twentieth-century contemporaries, especially Isak Dinesen, Brecht, Kafka, and Nathalie Sarraute. In the last two chapters, on the body and the Kantian concept of judgment, Kristeva offers a subtle critical exploration of Arendt's ignoring of the world of the unconscious opened up by psychoanalysis, an exploration that, paradoxically, reveals the political force of Arendt's acceptance of herself as woman and Jew.Kristeva's account of Arendt's 'philosophy of narrative' is clear, coherent, forceful, and often impassioned. Much has been written in North America about Arendt's political work, but little about her more philosophical endeavours. Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative makes a compelling case that Arendt may be the twentieth century's only true political philosopher.