San Antonio College Library

"For more than three decades Adrienne Rich's essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she searches from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators' worlds."--Inside cover.

"This volume brings together essays by specialists in different disciplines on the cultural expression of apocalypse, in particular in anglophone science fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Approaching these works from historical, philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives, the contributors examine the relationship between secular and spiritual apocalypse, connecting the fiction and films to their historical moment. Not surprisingly,...

Felski presents a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and analyzes contemporary fiction by women to show that no theorist can identify a specifically "female" or "feminine" kind of writing without reference to what gender means at a given historical moment. She argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a non-issue needlessly pursued by feminists. She calls for a consideration of the social and cultural...

"Shakespeare is, and always was, political. This is the contention of the most challenging of the new critical approaches currently disrupting literary criticism: cultural materialism. It disallows the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius whose work is great precisely to the extent that it transcends politics and history. Combining historical enquiry, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis it produces not just new readings...

"Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at once hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive...