Olivia's life was perfect. She was a young, beautiful chemist. Her life in Princeton was a fairy tale until the night she was attacked in her garden. Recovery was slow and painful but Olivia never expected the darkness that would overtake her life from that moment forward.

An international journal of general philosophy.

Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.

Paul John Eakin's earlier work Fictions in Autobiography is a key text in autobiography studies. In it he proposed that the self that finds expression in autobiography is in fundamental ways a kind of fictive construct, a fiction articulated in a fiction. In this new book Eakin turns his attention to what he sees as the defining assumption of autobiography: that the story of the self does refer to a world of biographical and historical fact. Here he shows that people write autobiography not in some private realm of the autonomous self but rather in strenuous engagement with the pressures that life in culture entails. In so demonstrating, he offers fresh readings of autobiographies by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, William Maxwell, Henry James, Ronald Fraser, Richard Rodriguez, Henry Adams, Patricia Hampl, John Updike, James McConkey, and Lillian Hellman. In the introduction Eakin makes a case for reopening the file on reference in autobiography, and in the first chapter he establishes the complexity of the referential aesthetic of the genre, the intricate interplay of fact and fiction in such texts. In subsequent chapters he explores some of the major contexts of reference in autobiography: the biographical, the social and cultural, the historical, and finally, underlying all the rest, the somatic and temporal dimensions of the lived experience of identity. In his discussion of contemporary theories of the self, Eakin draws especially on cultural anthropology and developmental psychology.

Introduction / Mark W. Estrin -- The dramaturgy of blackmail in the Ibsenite Hellman / Jacob H. Adler -- Miss Hellman's two sisters / Jacob H. Adler -- The autumn garden : mechanics and dialectics / Marvin Felheim -- The dramatic adaptations of Lillian Hellman / Doris Fleischer and Leonard Fleischer -- The lark, translation vs. adaptation : a case history / Henry W. Knepler -- "Good and evil" in Lillian Hellman's The children's hour / Philip M. Armato -- Bohemia bumps into Calvin : the deception of passivity in Lillian Hellman's drama / Mary Lynn Broe -- Lillian Hellman's American political theater : the thirties and beyond / Timothy J. Wiles -- Establishing the woman and constructing a narrative in Lillian Hellman's memoirs / Pamela S. Bromberg.