Recent work in critical theory

Style, Winter, 1995 by William Baker, Kenneth Womack

Gillies, John. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Gillies explores Shakespeare's geographical imagination and defines an interconnection between Renaissance geography and the theater that evolved from their shared dependence upon a "poetic" and ethical geographical tradition during that era. Through examinations of the icons and emblems endemic to contemporary cartography from the Renaissance, Gillies provides a semiology for reading the exotic geography of Shakespeare's plays and the social and historical consequences of the maps and geographical arguments of the time.

Godsalve, William H. L. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Making an Opera from Shakespeare's Comedy. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1995.

Godsalve captures the efforts of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears as they labored during the late 1950s to adapt Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to the operatic stage. Godsalve traces the stages of development of their collaboration using Britten's libretto for the opera and examines the way that he restructured Shakespeare's play in order to render it even more manageable as an opera, while also analyzing the manner in which Britten and Pears attempted to create formal and psychological meaning in their innovative score. The volume concludes with a useful appendix to the contents of the Britten-Pears library in Suffolk, England.

Gregg, John. Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994.

Gregg offers the first full-length analysis of Maurice Blanchot's theories of transgression, focusing particularly upon Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus myth and the works of Georges Bataille. In addition to positing Blanchot's theory as a paradigm for exploring the textual relationship between author, work, and reader, Gregg addresses Blanchot's theories regarding the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, the literary appropriation of death as a narrative construct, and the portrayal of Biblical figures in literature.

Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Groden and Kreiswirth's guide to literary criticism features 226 alphabetically arranged entries devoted to elucidating literary and critical terminology, providing biographical data regarding influential theorists, and isolating significant critical texts and genres within the contemporary theoretical debate. Groden and Kreiswirth supplement their entries with valuable primary and secondary bibliographies of scholarship.

Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Habegger explores the fascinating and complex relationship between Henry James, Sr., and his gifted progeny of American thinkers and artists - William, the psychologist and philosopher; Alice, the noted diarist; and Henry, Jr., the renowned novelist. In addition to exploring Henry James, Sr.'s troubled public and private history, Habegger examines the father's engagement with radical Calvinism, his affinity for both authoritarian and democratic systems of government, and the complex and competing drives for success that motivated his conflicting ambitions for both himself and his children.