Ulysses Polytropos

This collection of approaches focuses on the dynamics of James Joyce’s Ulysses and some of its nuances with the aim of enhancing its enjoyment.

The books that comprise the 'Casebooks in Criticism' series offer edited in-depth readings and critical notes and studies on the most important classic novels. This volume explores Joyce's 'Ulysses'.

Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante’s late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of ‘virtue and knowledge’ as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses’ many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.

’No one of Shakespeare’s plays is harder to characterize’, said Coleridge of Troilus and Cressida. Over the centuries, generations of critics have faced the challenge of determining exactly what sort of play Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is. Described by Victorian commentators as ’dark’, ’decadent’ and ’bitter’, the work has, until now, retained its designation as a ’problem play’. In this ground-breaking study, leading Shakespeare scholar, W R Elton attempts to dismantle this presumption. His research places the play in the historical context of the Inns of Court law-revels tradition. By close analysis of the text, Elton demonstrates his belief that Troilus and Cressida was written specifically for an audience of law students and lawyers and that the play manifests many elements of a law-revel, including misrule, inversion, mock rhetoric and logic, and mock trials. In so doing, he provides explanations for many of the puzzling and mysterious elements that have previously baffled critics.

This collection of essays reaffirms the central importance of adopting an intertextual approach to the study of Flavian epic poetry and shows, despite all that has been achieved, just how much still remains to be done on the topic. Most of the contributions are written by scholars who have already made major contributions to the field, and taken together they offer a set of state of the art contributions on individual topics, a general survey of trends in recent scholarship, and a vision of at least some of the paths work is likely to follow in the years ahead. In addition, there is a particular focus on recent developments in digital search techniques and the influence they are likely to have on all future work in the study of the fundamentally intertextual nature of Latin poetry and on the writing of literary history more generally.

In 1933, Northrop Frye was a recent university graduate, beginning to learn his craft as a literary essayist. By 1963, with the publication of The Educated Imagination, he had become an international academic celebrity. In the intervening three decades, Frye wrote widely and prodigiously, but it is in the papers and lectures collected in this installment of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, that the genesis of a distinguished literary critic can be seen. Here is Frye tracing the first outlines of a literary cosmology that would culminate in The Anatomy of Criticism (1958) and shapeThe Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990). At the same time that Frye garnered such international acclaim, he was also a working university teacher, lecturing in the University of Toronto's English Language and Literature program. In her lively introduction, Germaine Warkentin links Frye's evolution as a critic with his love of music, his passionate concern for his students, and his growing professional ambition. The writings included in this volume show how Frye integrated ideas into the work that would consolidate the fame that Fearful Symmetry (1947) had first established.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.

Acorns delineates the future of humanity as a reunification of intellect with the Deep Self. Having chosen to focus upon ego (established securely by the time of Christ), much more beta brain wave development will destroy our species and others, which process has already begun. We create our own realities through beliefs, intents and desires and we were in and out of probabilities constantly. Feelings follow beliefs, not the other way around.