This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of different theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives on 'the sublime'.

A fourth collection of poems by the author recalls over a century of African American traditions, knitting together a blend of history, biography, personal experience, pop culture, and dreamscape.

Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

A fresh look at the Argentine novelist Marechal emphasises his subversive approach in his novels to the Peronist politics of his time. Leopoldo Marechal has become a chosen precursor of many contemporary Argentine writers, cineastes, and intellectuals, and so his novels - universally recognized but rarely studied - demand treatment from a contemporary critical sensibility. This study departs from the line of criticism that reads Marechal as a Christian apologist, arguing instead that Marechal's `metaphysical' novels are really metafictional, ludic exercises informed by ironic scepticism.Adán Buenosayres (1948) inverts the Christian-Platonist narrative of redemption through the Logos; in El Banquete de Severo Arcángelo (1965) Marechal, tongue firmly in cheek, leads his readers on a metaphysical wild-goose chase; and in Megafón, o la guerra (1970) he finally lays apocalypticism to rest. The close readings of his novels presented in this book help to lay the theoretical groundwork underpinning Marechal's reinscription incontemporary Argentine culture.

Joe has a plan to walk around the world without ever leaving his backyard, and waiting for his violent past to catch up to him

Detailed new account of the historical emergence and conceptual reach of the sublime both before and after Longinus.

Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"? In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period. Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.