The groundbreaking poetic work by our “Mondrian in verse” (Susan Barba, Boston Review), now back in print in a newly revised edition with a new preface by the author. Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, “I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition.” In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire.

"Comparative literature," Earl Miner writes, "clearly involves something more than comparing two great German poets, and something different from a Chinese studying French literature or a Russian studying Italian literature." But what would a true intercultural poetics be? This work proposes various ways to "study something other than what are, all things considered, the short and simple annals of one cultural parish at one historic moment." The first developed account of theories of literature from an intercultural standpoint, the book shows that an "originative" or "foundational" poetics develops in cultures with explicit poetics when critics define the nature and conditions of literature in terms of the then most esteemed genredrama, lyric, or narrative. Earl Miner demonstrates that these definitions and inferences from them constitute useful bases for comparative poetics.

Today genre studies are flourishing, and nowhere more vigorously perhaps than in the field of Renaissance literature, given the importance to Renaissance writers of questions of genre. These studies have been nourished, as Barbara Lewalski points out, by the varied insights of contemporary literary theory. More sophisticated conceptions of genre have led to a fuller appreciation of the complex and flexible Renaissance uses of literary forms. The eighteen essays in this volume are striking in their diversity of stance and approach. Three are addressed to genre theory explicitly, and all reveal a concern with theoretical issues. The contributors are Earl Miner, Ann E. Imbrie, Claudio Guillen, Alastair Fowler, Harry Levin, Morton W. Bloomfield, Mary T. Crane, Barbara J. Bono, Janel M. Mueller, Annabel Patterson, Steven N. Zwicker, Marjorie Garber, Robert N. Watson, John N. King, Heather Dubrow, John Klause, James S. Baumlin, and Francis C. Blessington.