Murder fascinates readers, and when a woman murders, that fascination is compounded. The paradox of mother, lover, or wife as killer fills us with shock. A woman's violence is unexpected, unacceptable. Yet killing an abusive man can make her a cultural heroine.In Double Jeopardy, Virginia Morris examines the complex roots of contemporary attitudes toward women who kill by providing a new perspective on violent women in Victorian literature. British novelists from Dickens to Hardy, in their characterizations, contradicted the traditional Western assumption that women criminals were "unnatural." The strongest evidence of their view is that the novelists make the women's victims deserve their violent death. Yet the women characters who commit murder are punished because their sympathetic Victorian creators had internalized the cultural biases that expected women to be passive and subservient.Fictional women, like their real-life counterparts, were doubly guilty: in defying the law, they also defied their gender role. Because they were "unwomanly," they were thought worse than male criminals -- more vicious and more incorrigible. At the same time, they often got special treatment from the police and the courts simply because they were women. These contradictory attitudes reveal the critical significance of gender in defining criminal behavior and in fixing punishments.Morris provides literary and historical background for the novelists' ideas about women killers and traces the evolving notion that abused or misused women were capable of using justifiable -- if unforgivable -- violence. She argues that the criminal women in Victorian literature epitomize the ambivalent position of women generally and the particular vulnerability of a deviant minority. Her book is a valuable resource for readers concerned with criminology, literature, and feminist studies.

Spanish Golden Age drama as an expression of morality falls between the extremes of art-for-art's-sake and utilitarianism. According to Spanish literary critics of the 16th and 17th centuries, drama imitated reality, the subject and domain of philosophy. The integration of drama and scholastic moral philosophy was an important aspect of the critical theory of this era, which held that art should both teach and delight. Through close textual analysis of representative plays, this book examines the artistic fusion of natural-law philosophy and drama. It demonstrates the relationship between ethics and the central ideological themes of these works, illustrating that an awareness of the doctrines of natural law ethics is crucial to an enriched comprehension of the drama of Golden Age Spain.

The importance of the ethics of form in literature has only recently gained broad recognition and has thus far been explored mainly from the position of moral philosophy and critical theory. Leona Toker develops a narratological approach to the subject, based on studying "reticence" in works of fiction.Reticence consists in narrative techniques through which writers create information gaps that build interest, enhance tension, and control the reader's comprehension of theme, character, and event. Using novels by Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Conrad, Forster, and Faulkner, Toker demonstrates how the withholding of information affects readers' attitudes, stimulates their reassessment, and leads to a self-critical reorientation -- and how such manipulation of attention has specific ethical and aesthetic significance.Drawing on descriptive poetics, reader-response criticism, and information theory, Toker marks the parallel situations of the characters in the fiction she analyzes and of the readers who encounter it, and presents a novel approach to the issue of first and repeated readings. The inquiry into the twofold role of the reader opens the discussion of narrative techniques to ethical issues.Through her analysis of silences in representative works Toker makes a meaningful contribution to modern narrative study and offers new insights into a number of familiar novels. This well informed, sensitive, and judicious study will appeal to scholars interested in narrative theory and ethical criticism and to students of Faulkner and of the classical English novel.

Calderón, the great dramatist of Spain's Golden Age, was a skilled writer of comedy. His serious dramas have long been highly regarded in the English-speaking world, but his many sparkling comedies are an untapped reservoir for the contemporary theater. The four plays in this volume, three of which appear in English for the first time, have been translated by Kenneth Muir, the noted British scholar and director. These are comedies of intrigue. They turn on mysterious, quarrels, and jealousies, and they abound in complication and misunderstandings, yet in the end all is explained, to the delight of the audience. Muir's long experience with acting and directing and his keen ear for the nuances of the English language, together with his perceptive critical scholarship, have enabled him to produce a text that actors can speak naturally, and that modern audiences can enjoy as did the audiences of seventeenth-century Spain. The graceful, poetical dialogue and the masterly stagecraft of Calderón are undiminished in these deft translations.The plays featured are From Bad to Worse, The Secret Spoken Aloud, The Worst is Not Always Certain, and The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Name. Ann L. Mackenzie has provided an introduction to each play and notes on the text that will be useful to the actors and directors who seek to present these comedies as they were intended -- on the stage.

The sheer volume of prolific Spanish novelist and playwright Benito Pérez Galdós's literary production has rendered overall assessment of his body of work all but impossible. The later volumes in his ambitious and popular Episodios nacionales series, in particular, have suffered from scholarly indifference.In this acclaimed study, Brian J. Dendle closely considers the twenty-six novels in this series written between 1898 and 1912. These episodios, Dendle contests, are artistically superior to the earlier volumes and offer a unique opportunity to establish the ideological profile of the mature Galdós.

The concept of woman as having a distinctive nature and requiring a separate sphere of activity from that of man was pervasive in the thinking of nineteenth- century Americans. So dominant was this "horizon of expectations" for woman that the imaginations of our finest novelists were often subverted, even as they attempted to expand the possibilities for women through their fiction.Selecting five American writers -- James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton -- Schriber traces the impact of cultural expectations for woman on the art of the novel from the early nineteenth century through the advent of Modernism. The novels of Cooper and Hawthorne exemplify the male imagination at work before the concept of woman's nature and sphere became burning issues, as they did later in the century. Howells, while attempting to expand woman's sphere in his fiction in response to feminist challenges, in fact demonstrates the recalcitrance of a priori ideas. James, provoked rather than subverted by the ideology of gender, was able to bend the culture's myopia to his own artistic purposes. Wharton's novels, in contrast, document the female imagination seeking aesthetic solutions to the problems of women rather than to woman as problem. Wharton constructs versions of female experience that were either invisible or anathema to her male counterparts.Schriber's discussion centers on those points in each text at which the culture's horizon of expectations drives the decisions and choices of the artist, sometimes to the benefit and sometimes at the expense of craft. Making full use of gender as a category of literary analysis, she recovers the meanings intended by the texts for audiences of their own time, and distinguishes those meanings from their significance for modern readers.Original in its methodology and insights, Gender and the Writer's Imagination provides a model for future literary studies.

Giraldi Cinthio's Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, here translated into English for the first time, was one of the most important critical works of the Renaissance. Written as a defense of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giraldi's discourse is an inquiry both into the nature of poetry and into the characteristics of the "heroic" or epic genre, in which some of the world's richest poems fall.Henry L. Snuggs introduces this translation with an incisive interpretation of Giraldi's critical theory. Giraldi was the first, Snuggs states, to make a significant plea in sixteenth-century criticism for the poetry of that (and our) time. The modern heroic poem cannot imitate the ancient in every respect, he held, for the principles of both decorum and verisimilitude required it to reflect the mores of its own age, although this did not mean the creation of a new genre. That which distinguishes Giraldi as a critic perhaps more than anything else, Snuggs concludes, was his recognition of a poetic unity other than that defined by Aristotle.

The profound impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Western thought has been frequently examined, yet the extent of Goethe's relationship to Rousseau has never before received thorough study. Carl Hammer Jr. here analyzes Goethe's works, paying particular attention to his mature production, to reveal the profound affinities of thought between these two European giants. Scholars have long recognized the direct influence of Rousseau on Goethe's first novel, Werther, but have believed that Goethe's enthusiasm waned thereafter. Hammer, in contrast, finds the affinity revealed even more strongly in Goethe's later works.

In the early years of this century, miners from nearly every country in Europe and Asia Minor migrated to West Virginia to seek employment in its great collieries. With them they brought many folktales and legends of then homelands. Ruth Ann Musick has collected some of the best and most representative of these stories -- never before published in book form -- in The Green Hills of Magic. In many instances, these tales were first related in family circles in the native languages of the tellers, later to be translated by their younger English-speaking descendants. Entertaining in themselves, the stories are also excellent examples of the diverse folk beliefs and cultural patterns of the national and ethnic immigrant groups. The tales are attractively illustrated with more than twenty black-and-white drawings.

These ten essays, written over a period from 1950 to 1962, are bound together by their common concern with questions of the meaning of criticism and the larger meaning of literature itself. These difficult questions W.K. Wimsatt treats with characteristic wit and penetration, ranging easily from a broad consideration of principles to incisive comment on individual writers and works.The first part of the book is devoted to a discussion of literary theory. Wimsatt reviews the development of critical dialectic from the German romanticism of Schelling and the Schlegels to the mythopeic bravura of Northrop Frye. Himself a classical ironist, he nevertheless exposes here some of the extravagances of the ironic principle as flourished by the systematic Prometheans.The second and third parts contain essays on more particular topics: the meaning of "symbolism," Aristotle's doctrines of the tragic plot and catharsis, the theory of comic laughter, and the objective reading of English meters. Here too are extended comment on particular writers -- a study of the imagination of James Boswell, an analysis of the comedy of T. S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party, and a contrast in the handling of similar themes by Tennyson and Eliot. The fourth part is a comprehensive statement of the demands and opportunities confronting the critic in his or her role as teacher.

Some of the most famous plays in the English language were performed on the stage of the Rose theater, which stood on the Bankside in Elizabethan London. Henslowe's Rose is the first full-length study of this important theater.Rhodes gives as full an account as the evidence of contemporary pictures and documents permits of those Rose, the method of its construction, its general plan, its repertory of plays, and its staging. From the action of these plays he deduces the form of the stage itself and the nature of its facilities. The total of five openings in the walls at stage-level is of particular significance, since the most widely held conception of the Shakespearean stage has been based primarily on the De Witt sketch of the Swan theater, showing a two-opening façade.The contemporary pictorial evidence used by Rhodes is reproduced in this volume for the convenience of the reader. In addition many sketches and plans illustrate Rhodes's findings, which are summed up in a photograph of a model built to specifications derived from such sources as Henslowe's diary, contemporary pictures of the outside of the Rose, and the Vitruvian theater plan.

Scholars have already demonstrated that Shakespeare 's language abounds in Biblical allusions and references, but Mr. Bryant now undertakes to show us how such details may bear on the full meaning of the plays. Seeking to interpret Shakespeare's plays as Christian poetry, Mr. Bryant has developed in this significant work a new critical approach which may have far-reaching consequences for future Shakespearean scholarship.In an introductory essay the author shows that the typological view of Scripture was a familiar one to the Christians of Shakespeare 's time; he suggests that for Shakespeare, as for many of his contemporaries, the Bible had only one subject -- Christ -- to which everything in both Testaments in some way referred. This interpretation of Scripture, Mr. Bryant believes, had an appreciable effect on Shakespeare's handling of many of the traditional stories on which he based his plays.The author then demonstrates, in twelve essays, how typological patterns may be traced in the plays and how Biblical allusions suggest and strengthen these analogies. In both Richard II and Hamlet, Mr. Bryant finds references to the story of Cain and Abel which give a new focus to his reading of these plays. Passages from the Gospels bear upon his interpretations of Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, and the epistles of St. Paul upon his readings of The Merchant of Venice and the two parts of Henry IV. Mr. Bryant then attacks the popular idea that tragedy is incompatible with Christian doctrine; his essay defining Christian tragedy is illustrated in chapters on Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. The concluding essays deal with Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale as tragicomedies given depth by their Christian materials.Mr. Bryant's fresh and challenging interpretations of these representative tragedies, histories, and comedies will not meet with universal assent, but they are certain to provoke the interest of both scholarly and lay readers. The increasing number of students who wish to trace the relationships between secular literature and Christian thought will find in this pioneer work a new insight into the nature of Christian poetry.

Exploring territory seldom visited by feminist scholars, Ann Messenger in this new book presents eight studies of literary relationships between men and women writers, ranging from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. The essays show men and women working together, praising and criticizing each other's work, borrowing -- and changing -- each other's plots and characters, recording their different perceptions of their common world. From Dryden's praise of Anne Killigrew, through Gay's and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's collaboration on a town eclogue, Thomas Southerne's dramatizations of novels by Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood's version of the Spectator, to Cornelia Knight's sequel to Rasselas, these relationships demonstrate that men and women writers inhabited the same literary world, shared the traditions of the mainstream of English literature. Most of the women have since faded from view. But Messenger suggests the time has come to rediscover them, to reassess their work, and to revise the commonly accepted canon of literature accordingly. Although most of the studies deal with the way women's writing responds to writing by men, the Afterword combats the charge that the women's work is "derivative."Free of critical jargon and ideological strait-jacketing, His and Hers makes some little-known writers available and interesting to specialists and nonspecialists, feminists and traditionalists, alike, while it sheds new light on some of the most familiar figures of the period. The Appendix reprints some of the shorter works which have been analyzed in detail, and summaries in the text help to compensate for the unavailability of some of the women's books. The comparative approach suggests a wide and rich field for further research.

In this guide to the literature on human migration, J.J. Mangalam indexes over 2,000 titles that appeared in English from 1955 through 1962. An important feature of this work is the annotation of nearly 400 major articles on migration. These annotations provide information on the main focus of the study, the hypotheses tested, and any special measuring devices employed. The conclusions are also given, using the authors' words whenever possible. To facilitate the use of this guide the author has compiled an index that lists not only the subjects treated but also the major variables used in each abstracted study; thus the researcher who is interested in the use of certain variables can easily refer to the previous investigation of the influence of these factors upon migration. In a comprehensive introduction, Mangalam surveys the current state of studies of human migration and suggests a theoretical framework by which the vast amount of existing facts from different migration studies can be integrated and given meaning.

The last of four novels that preceded Machado de Assis's famous trilogy of realistic masterpieces, Iaiá Garcia belongs to what critics have called the Brazilian author's "romantic" phase. But it is far more than that implies. Like his other early works, Iaiá Garcia foreshadows the themes and characters of Assis's most masterful novels. Iaiá Garcia intertwines the lives of three characters in a subtly and wryly developing relationship. While the youthful Iaiá is growing into womanhood, a tentative love affair occurs between the aristocratic Jorge and the prideful Estela. This affair is afflicted by ironic shifts of fortune and in time the maturing Iaiá becomes a rival for Jorge's attentions. Assis's portrayal of the relationship among these three characters is a perceptive study of uncompromising pride, thwarted love, jealousy, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and attainment.As the translator, Albert I. Bagby, Jr., contends, the story of Iaiá, Jorge, and Estela reflects the formula that Assis saw as fundamental to human life: "Will and ambition, when they truly dominate, can struggle with other feelings, but they are the weapons of the strong, and victory belongs to the strong." In Assis's view success comes to the strong and failure to the weak. But both inhabit a world that is neutral-neither helping one nor hindering the other. The outcome of events in Iaiá Garcia may not seem entirely optimistic, but neither is it pessimistic. And Mr. Bagby concludes, "Perhaps to understand the optimism of Assis one needs only to be... a hard, pragmatic realist.... "Whether hard realists or unregenerate romantics, readers of this novel will find it a compelling tale of love lost and won. Like his earlier translation of Assis's The Hand & the Glove, Mr. Bagby's English rendering of Iaiá Garcia from the original Portuguese is done with both accuracy and sensitivity.

The masterpieces of medieval Spanish literature have come to be known and loved by Hispanists, and more recently by others throughout the world. But the brilliant illuminations with which the original manuscripts were illustrated have remained almost totally unknown on the shelves of the great European libraries. To redress this woeful neglect, two noted scholars here present a generous selection from this great visual treasury including many examples never before reproduced. John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade have chosen five representative works, dating from the mid-thirteenth century to the late fifteenth, to illustrate the richness of early Spanish narrative art. Together, these five works encompass the entire range of narrative techniques and iconography to be found in medieval Spain, and reflect both foreign and native Spanish artistic tendencies. The authors' analyses of the relation between verbalizations and visualizations will provide students of medieval art and literature a wealth of new information expanding our knowledge of this fascinating period. The beauty of many of the illuminations speaks for itself.