For this early 20th century French poet-philosopher, life, in its most dynamic sense, can only be experienced after the facade of self-identity has been systematically negated through a kind of metaphysical suicide. In Le Contre-Ciel, Daumal invites us, his readers, to go through this process of regeneration-through-negation with him in order to revive in ourselves a knowledge and understanding of our primordial sources.

Demonstrates how Rene Daumal, author of Mount Analogue, (a study of Hindu philosophy and poetics) and the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff combined with Daumal's early surrealist tendencies in determining the quality of his writing.

René Daumal's Le Contre-Ciel is a collection of poems about death; not a death that ends life but a death that begins it.

"The poetic is an abiding yet elusive qualification within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature. No longer amenable to formal assignment, its recurrences delimit a shifting, multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual (self-) invention. This study attempts to outline certain durable properties of that practice by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. Drawing, in particular, upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work - work done in support of poetic difference - along the social, physical and textual axes of what is argued to be a sustained and radically inclusive utopian practice within the literary field. The complex utopian quality of poetic work is linked to the cultural persistence of the poetic as a simple attribute within literary practice. In uncovering this link, the study encourages revised understandings of both the poetic and the utopian in the modern French literary context."

An influential social thinker, the late Richard Harvey Brown was professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication, published by Yale University Press.

The emblem book was invented by the humanist lawyer Andrea Alciato in 1531. The preponderance of juridical and normative themes, of images of rule and infraction, of obedience and error in the emblem books is critical to their purpose and interest. This book outlines the history of the emblem tradition as a juridical genre, along with the concept of, and training in, obiter depicta, in things seen along the way to judgment. It argues that these books depict norms and abuses in classically derived forms that become the visual standards of governance. Despite the plethora of vivid figures and virtual symbols that define and transmit law, contemporary lawyers are not trained in the critical apprehension of the visible. This book is the first to reconstruct the history of the emblem tradition, evidencing the extent to which a gallery of images of law already exists and structuring how the public realm is displayed, made present and viewed.

Malcolm Lowry, who would permanently stake his claim to literary immortality with the masterpiece Under the Volcano, wrote Ultramarine, his debut, as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Displaying the linguistic virtuosity and haunting imagery that became signatures of Lowry's mature style, Ultramarine, a novel he continually rewrote and revised from publication until his death, is one of his central works, and this new edition offers the opportunity for a fuller assessment of his place in the modern canon.Ultramarine is the story of Dana Hilliot's first voyage, as mess-boy on the freighter Oedipus Tyrannus bound for Bombay and Singapore: of his struggle to win the approval of his shipmates, trying to match their example in the bars and bordellos of the Chinese ports while at the same time remaining faithful to his first love, Janet, back home in England. Alternating between Dana's own narrative and the ribald humor and colorful language of the seamen's conversation, Ultramarine depicts a boy's initiation into the company of men.