Books published by Johns Hopkins University Press

In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Looking at the work without novelistic expectations of the illusion of some "keyto unlock the mystery, Norris explores Joyce's rationale for committing his last human panorama-a bit sadder than Ulysses in its concern with aging, killing, and dying-to a form and language belonging to the deconstructive forces of the twentieth century.

Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode.

And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct.

As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."

In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionarythan a "tragic hero."

Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.

He recreates a landscape littered with unfamiliar issues, intractable problems, unattractive choices, and partial solutions, all of which influenced congressional decisions on matters as prosaic as military logistics or as abstract as the definition of federalism.

He was a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.

The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis--the earliest of all medieval dramas--is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.

Even in certain of Moliere's own works, in fact, the comic vision shades into something close to Romantic irony.

Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-in France, England, and Germany-eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself.

As such, it has significant implications for the novel as a genre and for understanding its development in America.

He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

The author casts new light not only on the short lived educational revolution of the sixteenth century but on education in other societies, both past and present.

Based on archival materials in La Rochelle and Paris, the book blends economic, social, cultural, and political history.

Instead, he documents uneven patterns of material progress and growing conflict over work roles among all sorts of laboring people.

Bender's study suggests two highly controversial positons: first, that although Hopkins is one of the most original voices in English, his poetry is within a tradition insufficiently recognized by modern critics; and second, that the effect of careful and sympathetic study of classical literature can induce quite the opposite of a neoclassical style in English.

Furthermore, while political machines are often regarded as nondemocratic and corrupt, Allswang discusses the strengths of the urban machine approach-chief among those being its ability to organize voters around specific issues.

A dedicated chapter features reflections from 105 alumni from the department.

A new view of Mill's celebrated "proof of utilitarianismis developed in the course of the discussion.

He then tries to show how the concept of meaninglessness, when interpreted in the manner he suggests, can be profitably used by philosophers, despite the many persuasive objections to its use that philosophers have raised in their disputes over it.

This story is significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.

Roosevelt, Father Charles Coughlin, and Fiorello La Guardia.

Taking Swift as his main example, Paulson examines the dualism of satire in its most interesting and ambiguous modes, and as the embodiment of rhetorical devices that are as complex mimetically as they are rhetorically.