Both accessible and insightful, this collection of personal critical essays employs a formal study of literature as framework for the consideration of universal issues, including grief management, death, and acceptance of, and benefit from, traumatic change. These topics offer Brackett the opportunity to reflect upon the joys and rigors of scholarship as she considers professional issues, such as academic advancement through publication. They stand as testimony to one professional's belief that academia should not only embrace but encourage a number of approaches to self-expression on the part of its scholars. Her personal commentary draws from the work and life stories of many writers, including Elizabeth Cary, Anne Bradstreet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rabindranath Tagore, Leo Tolstoy, Katherine Anne Porter, and V.S. Naipaul. Critical and philosophical commentary by notables such as Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jane Tompkins, Lois McNay, Diane P. Freeman, Olvia Frey, Frances Murphy Zauhar, Janice Radway and Patricia Waugh interlace and advance Brackett's own speculations. The book makes clear Brackett's belief that no reasonable explanation exists for the necessity some scholars see in withholding results of literary study from a broader audience, unless it be a reluctance to write with the clarity necessary to make digestible and enjoyable the fruits of their profession.

Discover a truly interdisciplinary picture of the diversity of sociocultural forces that affect romantic relationships.

A theoretically and empirically rich exploration of universal questions, this book examines the interplay of three distinct behavioral systems involved in romantic love. This integrative volume will be of interest to both researchers and clinicians.

Concerned with the intermingled thematic and formal preoccupations of Romantic thought and literary practice in works by twentieth-century British, Irish, and American artists, this collection examines the complicated legacy of Romanticism in twentieth-century novels, poetry, and film. Even as key twentieth-century cultural movements have tried to subvert or debunk Romantic narratives of redemptive nature, individualism, perfectibility, and the transcendence of art, the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continue to exert a signal influence on the modern moment - both as a source of tension and as creative stimulus. As the essays here show, the exact meaning of the Romantic bequest may be bitterly contested, but it has been difficult to leave behind. The contributors take up a wide range of authors, including Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, W. H. Auden, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Hart Crane, William Faulkner, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Franzen. What emerges from this lively volume is a fuller picture of the persistence and variety of the Romantic period's influence on the twentieth-century.

Studying major writers and philosophers--Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England, and Chateaubriand in France--Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social, and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries. Izenberg makes two persuasive and related arguments. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses: a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise. Izenberg demonstrates how the Romantics retreated, in part, from a preliminary, radically activist ideal of autonomy they had worked out under the impact of the French Revolution. They had begun by seeing the individual self as the sole source of meaning and authority, but the convergence of crises in their personal lives with the crises of the revolution revealed this ideal as dangerously aggressive and self-aggrandizing. In reaction, the Romantics shifted their absolute claims for the self to the realm of creativity and imagination, and made such claims less dangerous by attributing totality to nature, art, lover, or state, which in return gave that totality back to the self.