San Antonio College Library

"During the eighteenth century, the activity of conversation was repeatedly portrayed as a morally improving and socially cohesive activity. By the time Jane Austen was writing in the early nineteenth century, however, speakers and writers could not always work with such confidence. Many worried that manners were being eroded into mannerisms, many more were becoming conscious that their speech was fraught with the potential for deceit and misunderstanding."...

"This book is a study of the attitude of the leading novelists of the eighteen century to the contemporary class system and to current trends in philosophy and education"--Preface

Chaucer was a keen observer of the lives of women with a remarkable ability to see beyond his culture's preconceptions concerning their proper roles. The lives of medieval women were divided into three estates -- virginity, wifehood, and widowhood -- each with complex rules extending to particulars of speech and dress, but all directed toward the single purpose of preserving female chastity, for which a woman was to be prepared to suffer or even die....

How the southern novel works to construct the American concept of race following Huckleberry Finn.

"Taking King Lear as her central text, Judy Kronenfeld questions the critical assumptions of much of today's most fashionable Shakespeare scholarship. Charting a new course beyond both New Historicist and deconstructionist critics, she suggests a theory of language and interpretation that provides essential historical and linguistic contexts for the key terms and concepts of the play. Opening the play up to the implications of these contexts and this...