http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/3738

The study addresses a number of issues, among them the importance that manuscripts and text editing have in our comprehension of fiction; how Agnon composed some of his short works, lending them an indeterminacy and force to serve as comments on the human condition. In addition, the final chapters demonstrate several approaches to the interpretation of A Guest for the Night from thematic, linguistic, and intratextual perspectives.

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) was a nineteenth-century American who combined in his writings and career a catalog of accomplishments and creations that made him one of the most celebrated literary men of his time. The range and significance of Taylor’s oeuvre explains his growing importance today to scholars working in the fields of American studies, gender and queer theory, and the aesthetics of racial and class identities. In less than 35 years, he wrote seventeen volumes of poetry, four novels, eight critical works and translations of German classics, nineteen travel narratives, innumerable magazine essays, stories, and reviews, and thousands of letters to friends, admirers, hostile reviewers, business acquaintances, and intimate male companions. His extraordinary success on the public lecture circuit made him one of the best-known men of his day. Taylor's diplomatic career enhanced his reputation and influence as a travel writer and included service as a writer for the Perry Expedition to Japan, as a charge d’affaires to Russia during the Civil War, and ambassador to Germany in 1878. This analysis of Taylor’s life and works helps to explain three important shifts in American culture: the contradictory development of American ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century; the impact of homophobia and homophilia upon American literary production, criticism, and culture; and the inspirational role played by poetry within a religious and economically-driven society. The introduction describes Taylor's changing fortunes within literary history and presents a methodological approach to the Genteel tradition that recovers its distinctive aesthetic and social values and explains how Taylor is its most winning and significant representative. Taylor was a key figure in the genealogy of American interactions with the Islamic world, and his travel writing demonstrates how individual advancement in an egalitarian society can be linked with aggressive imperialism abroad. Taylor’s novels display a subtle pattern of transgressive sexuality and demonstrate how Taylor's manipulation of reputation and genteel aesthetics created a space for individual expression and freedom. Taylor’s 1870 novel, Joseph and His Friend, is frequently cited as America's first gay novel. This book's analysis of Taylor’s poetry draws the strands of egalitarian racialization and male-male intimacy together with his abiding concern with regional American identities and the mixed influences of religious subcultures.

The scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of the Romantic period transformed the status of humans and redefined the concept of species. This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism. The book’s novel approach focuses on the role of aesthetic taste in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced—and were influenced by—their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. The study reveals how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how, in political writings, the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book brings an original perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and the Presence of God in Modern Literature employs a new theoretical approach to critical analysis: Victor Frankl’s logotherapy (from the Greek “logos” for word or reason and often related to divine wisdom), a unique form of existentialism. On the basis of his observations of the power of human endurance and transcendence – the discovery of meaning even in the midst of harrowing circumstances – Frankl diagnoses the malaise of the current age as an “existential vacuum,” a sense of meaninglessness. He suggests that a panacea for this malaise may be found in creativity, love, and moral choice – even when faced with suffering or death. He affirms that human beings may transcend this vacuum, discover meaning – or even ultimate meaning to be found in Ultimate Being, or God – and live with a sense of “tragic optimism.” This book observes both the current age’s “existential vacuum” – a malaise of emptiness and meaninglessness – and its longing for meaning and God as reflected in three genres: poetry, novel, and fantasy. Part I, “Reflections of God in the Poetic Vision,” addresses “tragic optimism” – hope when there seems to be no reason for hope – in poems by William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Part II, “American Angst: Emptiness and Possibility in John Steinbeck’s Major Novels,” presents a study of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Winter of Our Discontent – novels that together form a uniquely American epic trilogy. Together these novels tell the story of a nation’s avarice, corruption, and betrayal offset by magnanimity, heroism, and hospitality. Set against the backdrop of Frankl’s ways of finding meaning and fulfillment – all obliquely implying the felt presence of God – the characters are representative Every Americans, in whose lives are reflected a nation’s worst vices and best hopes. Part III, “A Tragic Optimism: The Triumph of Good in the Fantasy Worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling,” defines fantasy and science fiction as mirrors with which to view reality. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are considered in the light of Frankl’s logotherapy – providing paths to meaning and the ultimate meaning to be found in God. In a postmodern, fragmented age, these works affirm a continuing vision of God (often through His felt absence) and, also, a most human yearning for meaning even when there seems to be none – providing, as Frankl maintains, “a tragic optimism.”