Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan vividly describe the colorful life and times of one of the South's -- and America's -- most important businesses and provide insight into how luck, management practices, and personalities helped the company rise to international prominence.Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, the world's largest independent leaf tobacco dealer, is one of the major buying arms for tobacco manufacturers worldwide, selecting, purchasing, processing, and storing leaf tobacco. The story opens during the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners realized once again the worldwide potential of their native crop.The authors follow the company from its incorporation 1918 through one of the first hostile takeover attempts in American business, to its evolution in 1993 into Universal Corporation, a worldwide conglomerate with a number of products including tobacco.Based on scholarly research and over two hundred interviews with past and present Universal employees, this objective saga reveals much about American business and economic history.

Shakespeare has been viewed by critics both as a secular writer who affirmed the dual nature of man and as a Christian allegorist whose work has a submerged but positive and elaborate pattern of Christian meaning. In Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery, Robert H. West explores the philosophical and supernatural elements of five Shakespearean dramas -- Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Tempest. Through his analysis, West discovers Shakespeare's respect for the mysteries of existence but no clear definition of the philosophical and moral context of his play worlds. An artistic motivation leads Shakespeare to use these elements ambiguously to create a dramatic effect rather than to teach a moral or ideological lesson.

In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse.Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the presentation of young people in love, and the exploitation of theatrical conventions that might provide a guaranteed response. Yet these matters were incidental to his main business in writing comedy: to examine the implications of an action in which human involvement in the process of living provides the kind of enlightenment that leads to renewal and the continuity of life.With rare foresight, Shakespeare presented a world in which women were as capable of enlightenment as the men who wooed them, and Bryant shows how the female characters frequently preceded their mates in perceiving the way of the world. In most of his comedies Shakespeare also managed to suggest the role of death in life's process; and in some -- even in plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest -- he gave hints of a larger process, one without beginning or end, that may well comprehend all our visions -- of comedy, tragedy, and history -- in a single movement.

Rossell Hope Robbins collaborated with Carleton Brown in the publishing of the Index of Middle English Verse in 1943. With John L. Cutler, associate professor of English in the University of Kentucky, he has now compiled a supplement to the Index incorporating those texts published since 1943. At the same time, the two have completely revised the Index by including in the Supplement texts previously neglected. The number of entries has been increased to 6,000, and more than half of the 4,500 original entries have been revised. In addition to this basic revision, the appendices of the Index have been corrected and enlarged, especially the listing and locating of privately held manuscripts. Cross references have been inserted abundantly to facilitate easy use of the combined works. Additionally, reference has been made to related specialized studies.The large number of new entries is attributable not only to prolonged manuscript research but also to a broadening of the original criteria for the inclusion of poems. Rather than cutting off entries at 1500, which the authors felt impaired the usefulness of the original Index, Robbins and Cutler included genres that had not concluded but continued into the sixteenth century, as well as poems with uncertain dates they felt would be important for scholars. The Supplement overcomes these barriers by including the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century manuscripts such as the "Tudor songbooks," verse items of only two lines, and tombstone and church bras epitaphs.

Don Juan Manuel, nephew of King Alfonso X, The Wise, knew well the appeal of exempla (moralized tales), which he believed should entertain if they were to provide ways and means for solving life's problems. His fourteenth-century book, known as El Conde lucanor, is considered by many to be the purest Spanish prose before the immortal Don Quixote of Cervantes written two centuries later. He found inspiration for his tales in classical and eastern literatures, Spanish history, and folklore. His stories are not translations, but are his retelling of some of the best stories in existence. The translation succeeds in making the author speak as clearly to the modern reader as to readers of his own time.

Beginning with a consideration of Malory's ingenious chronology, this study shows that Malory achieved thematic and structural unity by selecting from the great mass of Arthurian legend three narrative strands -- the intrigues of Lancelot and Guinevere, the Grail quest, and the feud between the houses of Lot and Pellinore -- using these to illustrate a single theme -- the rise, flowering, and downfall of an ideal civilization. This selection and use of diverse materials, Charles Moorman asserts, indicates clearly that Malory set to work with a preconceived plan and that he did achieve his purpose, to write the "haole book of Kyng Arthur."

The Book of the Knight Zifar (or Cifar), Spain's first novel of chivalry, is the tale of a virtuous but unfortunate knight who has fallen from grace and must seek redemption through suffering and good deeds. Because of a curse that repeatedly deprives him of that most important of knightly accoutrements -- his horse -- Zifar and his family must flee their native India and wander through distant lands seeking to regain their rank and fortune. A series of mishaps divides the family, and the novel follows their separate adventures -- alternatively heroic, comic, and miraculous -- until at length they are reunited and their honor restored. The anonymous author of Zifar based his early fourteenth-century novel on the medieval story of the life of St. Eustacius, but onto this trunk he grafted a surprising variety of narrative types: Oriental tales of romance and magic, biblical stories, moralizing fables popular since the Middle Ages, including several from Aesop, and instructions in the rules of proper knightly conduct. Humor in the form of puns, jokes, and old proverbs also runs through the novel. In particular, the foolish/wise Knave offers a comic contrast to the heroic Knight, whom he must continually rescue through the application of common sense.Zifar was to have an important influence on later Spanish literature, and perhaps on Cervantes' great tale of a knight and his squire, Don Quixote. All those with an interest in Spanish literature and medieval life will be grateful for Mr. Nelson's excellent translation, which brings to life this extraordinary early novel.

Robert Penn Warren's reputation as a poet, though always considerable, has soared in the last decade, as indicated by his recent selection as America's first poet laureate. The Braided Dream is one of the first book-length studies of the poetry that has led to Warren's recent rise to eminence and the first to consider his final collection, Altitudes and Extensions.In a communicable, jargon-free style that will appeal to the nonacademic reader as well as the serious scholar, Randolph Paul Runyon provides a detailed and illuminating guide to a body of poetry that, despite its greatness, has until now seemed resistant to full understanding. Every poem of Warren's last four sequences -- Now and Then, Being Here, Rumor Verified, and Altitudes and Extensions -- is given a close reading, with a precise laying-out of words, phrases, and recurring images that not only enrich the texture of the poetry but are themselves the texture. Runyon demonstrates the relevance of Freud's concept of the dream work of the unconscious to a reading of this tightly interwoven poetry. He shows how Warren's poems assume additional meanings by the poet's very arrangement of them, deepening his thesis by arguing that "poems eat poems" as each reuses and reconceptualizes the imagery of its predecessor, frequently with ironic or parodic effect.

"Is it not monstrous, that our Seducers should be our Accusers? Will they not employ Fraud, nay often Force to gain us? What various Arts, what Stratagems, what Wiles will they use for our Destruction? But that once accomplished, every opprobrious Term with which our Language so plentifully abounds, shall be bestowed on us, even by the very Villains who have wronged us" -- Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs (1748).In her scandalous Memoirs, Laetitia Pilkington spoke out against the English satires of the Restoration and eighteenth century, which employed "every opprobrious term" to chastise women. In The Brink of All We Hate, Felicity Nussbaum documents and groups those opprobrious terms in order to identify the conventions of the satires, to demonstrate how those conventions create a myth, to provide critical readings of poetic texts in the antifeminist tradition, and to draw some conclusions about the basic nature of satire. Nussbaum finds that the English tradition of antifeminist satire draws on a background that includes Hesiod, Horace, Ovid, and Juvenal, as well as the more modern French tradition of La Bruyere and Boileau and the late seventeenth-century English pamphlets by Gould, Fige, and Ames. The tradition was employed by the major figures of the golden age of satire -- Samuel Butler, Dryden, Swift, Addison, and Pope.Examining the elements of the tradition of antifeminist satire and exploring its uses, from the most routine to the most artful, by the various poets, Nussbaum reveals a clearer context in which many poems of the Restoration and eighteenth century will be read anew.

The poetry of Robert Browning has been the subject of extensive literary criticism since his death in 1889. Two well-known Browning scholars here present the best of Browning criticism, bringing together from many sources representative evaluations of the poet and his poetry. The twenty-one essays here have been arranged chronologically so that the reader can follow the development of Browning studies and the fluctuations of his poetic reputation. They express varied points of view and are typical of the critical methods used by the Browning scholars. Included are essays by George Santayana, John J. Chapman, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Elmer More, William C. DeVane, Hoxie N. Fairchild, and Richard D. Altick.In the introduction Mr. Litzinger and Mr. Knickerbocker review the broad spectrum of Browning criticism. The editors also provide a bibliographic guide to the rapidly growing body of Browning criticism, which supplements and brings up to date previous Browning bibliographies.

Two strands, one indigenous, the other imposed, pro-duce the poetic and cultural tensions that give form to the work of five contemporary Mexican poets -- All Chumacero, Efrain Huerta, Jaime Sabines, Ruben Bonifaz Nuno, and Rosario Castellanos. Although all five are significant figures, only Castellanos has yet been widely studied in the United States, primarily for her novels and her relations with the feminist movement.In spite of a number of rather basic differences in their work, these poets share and write within a complicated culture rooted in both the pre-Hispanic and the European traditions. Their poetry reflects this in its emphasis on death as a constant presence and in the echoes of both Aztec ritual poetry and European poetry.Although apparently very different formally and thematically, the five share a number of concerns. Each of them writes out of a contradictory inner tension; each is preoccupied with the effort to shape language as part of a personal voyage of discovery; each is haunted by death and seeks realization or plenitude through love of some kind. And each of them, ultimately, finds there is no escape.As Frank Dauster concludes, "The poetry of Mexico, like its people and its society, reflects the fusion of two worlds, and these complex poets of the double strand operate freely and imaginatively within it." Although addressed primarily to specialists in Latin American literature, The Double Strand also speaks to those interested in the complex interaction between two widely differing cultural heritages, and in the rich fusion this blending produces in Mexican letters.

Flannery O'Connor was a writer of extraordinary power and virtuosity. Her strong supple prose blends humor, pathos, satire, and grotesquerie which leads the reader to the evil at the center of the self's labyrinth. There, she confronts that evil with originality and power, pulling the reader into consideration of the terrifying dependencies of love in the recesses of the heart. This study focuses on Flannery O'Connor's sense of the coincidence of the eternal and cosmic with worldly time and place -- "the eternal crossroads" -- and how that sense controls and infuses her fiction. From an examination of various influences upon Miss O'Connor's work -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Mauriac, Nathaniel West, and Hawthorne -- the authors consider her novels and stories, as well as several stories never collected. Their textual analysis shows that her structures, images, motifs, and symbols became vehicles for anagogical meaning as she progressed from early promise to artistic fulfillment.Considering Miss O'Connor's own comments on her writing, the authors illuminate some frequently misunderstood features of her work, such as her "grotesques" and her stress on death and violence. In so doing they make an important contribution to our understanding of how Flannery O'Connor arrived at "the eternal crossroads."

John Dryden's celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism is revealed in this provocative study as the culmination of a lifelong search that began with his youth in an actively Puritan family. Atkin's familiarity with the religious thought of the times allows him to range widely among Dryden's contemporaries and predecessors and to bring a fresh perspective to those key poems in Dryden's religious development: Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. Through a sensitive reappraisal of all Dryden's texts -- including those less widely known -- Atkins shows that Dryden had a lifelong antipathy for all "priests" of whatever sect, whether pagan or Christian; by concentrating on the theme of Dryden's opposition to the clergy and his efforts toward articulating a faith for the layman, Atkins provides an important new way of tracing and evaluating the changes in Dryden's religious position and, with this perspective, offers a new interpretation of Dryden's conversion.

Along with Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal is a major exponent of the Theater of the Absurd. In this study Arrabal's plays are seen as a contemporary expression of a festive form of theater that flourished during the Middle Ages and that had its roots in the drama of Aeschylus and Aristophanes.With this view of Arrabal's work, Luis Arata explores the nature of play in art in the light of Jean Piaget's psychology. He thus offers a new way to approach festive and playful art.

A research guide for specialists in the Gothic novel, the Romantic movement, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, and popular culture, this work contains summaries of more than two hundred novels, reputed to be Gothic, published in English between 1790 and 1830. Also included are indexes of titles and characters and an extensive index of characteristic objects, motifs, and themes that recur in the novels -- such as corpses, bloody and otherwise, dungeons, secret passageways, filicide, fratricide, infanticide, matricide, patricide, and suicide.The novels described, including those by such writers as Charlotte Dacre, Louisa Sidney Stanhope, Regina Maria Roche, Charles Maturin, and Mary Shelley, are for the most part out of print and circulation and are unavailable except in rare book rooms. Thus this book provides the researcher with ready access to information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

The later novels of Machado de Assis -- notably Dom Casmurro and Esau and Jacob -- are well known in this country, but the earlier novels have never been translated. Here, in The Hand and the Glove (the Brazilian master's second novel), rendered in English for the first time by Albert I. Bagby, Jr. , readers will find a younger, gentler Assis, writing a romantic comedy that is yet permeated with the lively wit characteristic of his later works.The story is a simple one-of love lost and love found. Of love lost by Estêvão, amiable but vacillating, who is bemused by his own romantic posturing, and by Jorge, superficial and calculating. Of love found by Luis Alves, whose self-possession and determination seem destined to carry him far. The love of all three men is the proud and beautiful Guiomar, sure of her own heart but unsure, until faced by rival claims, of where to bestow it -- a foreshadowing of Capitú, the intriguing heroine of Dom Casmurro."English-speaking readers," says Helen Caldwell in the Foreword, "who are already acquainted with Machado de Assis will welcome this latest addition to the translated novels. True, it is a period piece; but its quaintness is a charm to carry us back to the Rio de Janeiro of the 1850s -- to vanished courtly elegance arid attitudes.... Now, we too can know what drew [Assis] back to this early tale, for The Hand and the Glove recreates in English the elegant background, the charming heroine, the comedy, and the light-hearted ebullience of the Portuguese original."