The author demonstrates that the apparent contradictions in the poetic, dramatic, and conceptual framework of Paradise Lost are purposive, indeed central, to Milton's kinesthetic poetics.

Byers (expressive arts therapies, Lesley University) and Forinash (music therapy, Lesley University) assemble contributors in arts therapy, education, counseling, and psychiatry to recount the transformative experiences they have had in their relationships with those they mentor and guide. By exploring contemporary concepts in reciprocal learning, they challenge and inspire readers to examine their own engagement in the process of lifelong transformative learning. The book will of interest to students in arts therapy. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

In Caught in the Act, Joseph Litvak reveals not only the surprising wealth of theatrical themes in the canonical nineteenth-century English novel, but also the complex and over-determined politics of this theatricality. Nineteenth-century fiction is typically understood as enshrining the bourgeois values of privacy, domesticity, subjectivity, and sincerity. But Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Henry James is in fact a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. These novels also display extravagant theatrical forms like travesty, transvestism, charade, and carnival. The theatricality enforces social norms at the same time that it provides ways for novelists to resist them. Litvak thus challenges recent interpretations of the nineteenth-century novel as a disciplinary apparatus. His approach encourages a rethinking of the genre and its varied cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence. In addition to a new interpretation, this rethinking offers a new, more frankly theatrical approach to interpretation itself. Litvak argues that the theatricality of the nineteenth-century novel anticipates the late twentieth-century strategies of feminist and gay critical performance.

The Book of Unknowing meditates on John's confrontation with the incandescent Jesus, a figure of our desire for immortality. Guiding us through the Gospel's coming to grips with Jesus, the poet David Sten Herrstrom prefers sparking the imagination to arguing a thesis, as he explores John's own obsessions, such as image (light), symbol (water), sign (water to wine), shapeliness (symmetry), loves (Peter, Mary's), and above all, words (the Word, the body of Jesus). The result is a heady, literary engagement not afraid of wit and paradox. For anyone who loves literature or whose business is interpretation--ministers and teachers--this book blossoms with fresh revelations about the many voices of Jesus living in the House of the Interpreter and interacting with another interpreter (Nicodemus), as well as about John the interpreter who continually pauses to explain Jesus' motives, metaphors, and the meaning of his death. This meditation on John's Gospel takes the goat's leaping approach to the craggy language of John and Jesus rather than the methodical rock climber's. And along the way, to help him find footholds on the how and why of John's strategies, the author calls on other poets, from William Blake to Emily Dickinson and Miguel de Unamuno. The result: a poet's rather than a preacher's, theologian's, or scholar's reading of John's book, one which crosses the borders of disciplines. Throughout The Book of Unknowing, David Herrstrom is unsettled and exhilarated by the peculiar orneriness and fragrance of John's book, by its strange particulars that grab him by the throat and call lives into question. As William Blake has said, "Exuberance is Beauty," and this is an exuberant book.

"Everything you might want to know about the history and practice of feminist criticism in North America". -Feminist Bookstore News