Fictions Of Presence

An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.

An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of "presence" in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century. In the years following the 1737 Licensing Act, the English stage found itself for the first time facing serious competition from the novel - newly respectable and increasingly fashionable. But the story is not one of theatre's decline and the novel's rise. As Ros Ballaster shows in this lively and innovative study, the relationship between the two media was one of an intensely creative and productive rivalry. Novelists sent their heroes to the theatre, dramatists appropriated the plots of popular novels, the celebrity status of actors was advanced through guest appearances in printed prose fictions. Some figures, like Richardson's virtuous serving maid Pamela, or Sterne's eccentrichumourist Tristram Shandy, acquired such independent lives in the minds of the public that they migrated into the mainstream of popular culture. Fictions of Presence describes how major authors of the period - Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Oliver Goldsmith - spanned both genres. It charts the movement of popular fictional characters between stage and page. And it looks at the representation of contemporary audiences and readers in the new types of the (female) mimic and the (male) critic. Crucially, Ballaster delineates the ground over which the two media competed: the ability to create 'presence' - a sense of being present with the moment of action, of finding 'being' in fictional worlds - in the mind's eye of readers and theatregoers. In so doing, she not only illuminates the shared history of the theatre and the novel, but describes the power of aesthetic experience itself.

An unforgettable collection of a master storyteller?s final works Throughout his life, Arthur Miller, one of the foremost dramatists of the twentieth century, wrote highly regarded fiction?from his early novel Focus to two collections, I Don?t Need You Anymore and Homely Girl. In Presence, a posthumous gathering of his last published stories, he reveals the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that characterized his great dramatic works. The six stories included here have all appeared in major publications and each displays all the assuredness of an artist in his autumnal prime. Presence is a gift that all fans of Miller?s work, as well as readers of contemporary fiction, will applaud.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Flannery O'Connor wrote more than a hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia. This full collection of these reviews nearly doubles the number that have appeared in print elsewhere and represents a significant body of primary materials from the O'Connor canon. We find in the reviews the same personality so vividly apparent in her fiction and her lectures--the unique voice of the artist that is one clear sign of genius. Her spare precision, her humor, her extraordinary ability to permit readers to see deeply into complex and obscure truths-all are present in these reviews and letters.

Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt and Doris Lessing's fictional character Anna Wulf. She argues that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings, but that their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. She argues that the audience is the author's male lover or husband and describes how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. She argues that this audience enforces a certain 'male censorship' which changes the shape of the revelations and of the writer herself.

The immediate purpose of this book is to construct a vocabulary for the literary study of graphic texteual phenomena. -- introd.

Presence, the Play offers a penetrating perspective on the vital role personal presence plays in the essence of life. This timely, captivating novel speaks to a growing hunger for a way of life that's real and tangible, the opposite of an artificial existence lived in a realm of mediated connectivity. The protagonist of Presence, the Play is a playwright and monk named Script who lives on the Isle of Estillyen. On the opening night of Presence, Script's long-awaited play, he suffers a devastating fall in the theatre balcony and lapses into a prolonged coma. The novel plays out in Script's comatose state. Presence, the Play offers a meticulously crafted storyline evoking the imaginative prose of J. R. R. Tolkien, the spirited perception of C. S. Lewis, and the dramatic flair of Dante's Divine Comedy. Readers will join Script on an epic mission to save the Isle of Estillyen from the forces of darkness, experiencing many daunting adventures along the way.

After the deaths of her father and sister, a disheartened young horsewoman takes a position on a Pennsylvania farm and meets a special horse who renews her spirit, along with her attractive but mysterious owner.