Masks

Recognizing personal tendencies and developing literary talents enabled Mary Flannery O'Connor to don multiple masks, concealing or revealing segments of herself as she desired. With no memoirs or lengthy autobiographies, O'Connor's published works, letters, manuscripts, along with previously unpublished letters are examined to determine how O'Connor defined herself, not just how other scholars interpret her life and works. In fact, the plethora of criticism is in danger of obscuring the most important authority: O'Connor herself...Carl Jung claimed that adopted personas allow people ways to conform to society acceptably. While O'Connor's personal and social masks were affected by her Southern and Catholic roots, her vivid imagination and artistry fashioned her literary masks, allowing her to explore life's grotesqueness. Some of O'Connor's literary characters shelter self-defining features of her own personality and purpose. O'Connor's masks serve as metaphorical embodiments of her veiled autobiography, illuminating key components of her sense of self and of her literary power. Sharp's exploration of these society-obligatory and self-imposed masks identify O'Connor's goals, struggles, and successes; her critical insight into her own literature; her reaction and responses to family, friends, and acquaintances; and, ultimately, her own success and growth.

That Faulkner was a "liar" not just in his writing but also in his life has troubled many critics. They have explained his numerous "false stories," particularly those about military honors he actually never earned and war wounds he never sustained, with psychopathological imposture-theories. The drawback of this approach is that it reduces and oversimplifies the complex psychological and aesthetic phenomenon of Faulkner's role-playing. Instead, this critical study by one of the most acclaimed international Faulkner scholars takes its cue from Nietzsche's concept of "truth as a mobile army of metaphors" and from Ricoeur's dynamic view of metaphor and treats the wearing of masks not as an ontological issue but as a matter of discourse. Honnighausen examines Faulkner's interviews and photographs for the fictions they perpetuate. Such Faulknerian role-playing he interprets as a mode of organizing experience and relates it to the crafting of the artist's various personae in his works.

Discusses how contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern thinkers and artists are forging a new postmodern vision.

"Madness, Masks, and Laughter: An Essay on Comedy is an exploration of narrative and dramatic comedy as a laughter-inducing phenomenon. The theatrical metaphors of mask, appearance, and illusion are used as structural linchpins in an attempt to categorize the many and extremely varied manifestations of comedy and to find out what they may have in common with one another. As this reliance on metaphor suggests, the purpose is less to produce The Truth about comedy than to look at how it is related to our understanding of the world and to ways of understanding our understanding."

A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.

David Richards examines historical anthropological discourse--specifically writings about and depictions of "savage" peoples by conquering races--as a form of textual practice. Masks of Difference provides detailed readings of individual representations, both artistic and literary, of colonization, including Florida (1564-90) and Scotland (1814), together with extended surveys. What emerges is a composite picture of anthropological representation as a textual genre in its own right, embracing literature, literary theory and colonial/postcolonial studies.

"[Walker's] well-focused, clearly written essays demonstrate the conformity and the challenges to conventional expectations defining 'women poets.' Walker's work makes a significant contribution to an often neglected area of American literary history." -- Library Journal "Based on close reading and explication of the texts, Walker brings fresh insights to each poet."A -- Choice ..". Walker has devised an original analysis that puts a new spin on the works and lives of these poets." -- New Directions for Women Concentrating on Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan, Walker analyzes the highly stylized self-images -- from Lowell's androgyne to Millay's body-conscious romantic -- projected by these women who attempted to renegotiate the terms upon which they could function successfully as poets.

What does it mean when a man writes in the voice of a woman? Haswell finds Yeats's answer in his theory of the creative self as bisexual that arose from his experiment in automatic writing.

This fascinating new study is about cultural change and continuities. At the core of the book are discrete literary studies of Scotland and Shakespeare, Walter Scott, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the modern Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and more recent cultural and literary phenomena. The central theme of literature and popular 'representation' recontextualises literary analysis in a broader, multi-faceted picture involving all the arts and the changing sense of what 'the popular' might be in a modern nation. New technologies alter forms of cultural production and the book charts a way through these forms, from oral poetry and song to the novel, and includes studies of paintings, classical music, socialist drama, TV, film and comic books. The international context for mass media cultural production is examined as the story of the intrinsic curiosity of the imagination and the intensely local aspect of Scotland's cultural self-representation unfolds.

Presents an introduction to Sergei Dovlatov (1941-90) that is closely attentive to the details of his life and work, their place in the history of Soviet society and literature, and of emigre culture during this turbulent period.

In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare's influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely quoting his lines, a Victorian poet may embrace more elusive elements of rhetoric and style, adapting them to his or her own ends. Shaw argues that the most Shakespearean attribute of the Victorian poets is not their addiction to any particular trope or figure of speech but their reticence, the classical restraint of their great monologues, and their sudden descent from grandeur to simplicity. He explores such topics as man-made law versus natural right, Stoic fatalism versus self-reliance, and the sanity of lunatics, lovers, and poets versus the madness of commonplace minds.

In this work, Rosenberg insists again and again that only the individual reader or actor can determine Shakespeare's design of Hamlet's character -- and of the play. To interpret Hamlet's words and actions at the many crises, the reader needs to double in the role of actor, imagining the character from the inside and observing from the outside. Winner of the Theatre Library Association Award for 1993.

This book surveys the poetic endeavor of Keats and urges that his true poetry is uniquely constituted by being uttered through three artificial masks, rather than through the natural voice of his quotidian self. The first mask is formed by the attitudes and reality that ensue from a conscious commitment to the identity of poet as such. The second, called here the "Mask of Camelot," takes shape from Keats's acceptance and compelling use of the vogue for medieval imaginings that was sweeping across Europe in his time. The third, the "Mask of Hellas," eventuated from Keats's enthusiastic immersion in the rising tide of Romantic Hellenism. Keats's great achievement, the book argues, can only be ascertained by means of a resuscitation of the defunct critical category of "genius," as that informs his use of the masks. To validate this category, the volume is concerned throughout with the necessity of discriminating the truly poetic from the meretricious in Keats's endeavor. The Mask of Keats thus constitutes a criticism of and rebuke to the deconstructive approach, which must treat all texts and must entirely forgo the conception of quality.

Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, Mary Renault wrote six successful contemporary novels before turning to the historical fiction about ancient Greece for which she is best known. While Renault's novels are still highly regarded, her life and work have never been completely examined. Caroline Zilboorg seeks to remedy this in The Masks of Mary Renault by exploring Renault's identity as a gifted writer and a sexual woman in a society in which neither of these identities was clear or easy. Although Renault's life was anything but ordinary, this fact has often been obscured by her writing.

A sensitive and penetrating analysis, scene by scene, act by act, of this most complex and ambiguous of Shakespeare's great plays, seen through the eyes of both the literary critic and the student of theatrical history. As in his earlier Masks books, Marvin Rosenberg has gathered impressions from performance reviews from all over the world, comments by actors and directors, and his own personal experience of the play in rehearsal and staging, and has combined these insights with extensive reading of critical essays and consideration of the thoughts and opinions of his literary colleagues to form an illuminating interpretive study. The book also conveys the author's wholehearted enthusiasm for the play and his profound appreciation of Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic genius. The book, left unfinished at Dr Rosenberg's death in 2003, was edited and completed by his wife, Mary.