San Antonio College Library

Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, has been a source of enduring fascination for centuries. In this authoritative text, the author traces the myth of Merlin back to its roots in the early Welsh figure of Myrddin. He then follows Merlin as he is imagined and reimaged through the centuries of literature and art. He covers French and German as well as Anglophone elements of the myth and brings the story up to the present with discussions of a globalized...

Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations...

"Through careful research that draws on recent scholarship about female adolescent development, Declarations of Independence situates this shift to a stronger female protagonist within a larger cultural context. The empowered girls in this book are defined through stories of historical and multicultural fiction, social realism, romance and adventure, fantasy, and memoir - with emphasis on books published after 1990. The result is a collection of modern...

"This study analyzes the work of social poets who hail from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States. These figures, who emerged as poets in the last two decades, utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address issues of in/visibility, the erasure and reconstruction of history, and issues of inclusivity and exclusivity in formations of community. Issues of community raised involve race/ethnicity,...

Nine essays explore issues of hegemony as manifested in modern Spanish American fiction, moving beyond the now conventional Marxist, feminist, and gay readings. Among the authors discussed are Jose Donoso, Sara Castro-Klaren, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Rulfo, and Luisa Valenzuela. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Through a revised study of Shakespeare's dramatic heritage in its social context, the author questions the idealizing view that Shakespearean drama enacts an 'Elizabethan world picture' as well as the materialist view that the plays laid the foundation for modern radical ideology. Instead the author locates Shakespeare's skepticism about power in his heritage from medieval religious drama. Always responsive to the taste of the ruling class, Shakespeare,...

"The legacy of Emily Dickinson's life and work have shaped a romantic conception of women's poetry as private, personal, and expressive that has governed the reception of subsequent American women poets." "Of Women, Poetry, and Power demonstrates how the canonization of Dickinson has consolidated limiting assumptions about women's poetry in twentieth-century America and models an alternative reading practice that allows for deeper engagement with...