This volume represents a study in the formation of a personal literary opus, and in some of the theoretical reflections involved in understanding how parts of that opus are constructed. The opus in question is the author’s own, and he is the analyst of it, attempting in this role to work as an everyman stand-in, a representative of the I in each of us which can choose to live the situation of replacing itself by writing. The opus is addressed by pieces of individual text – a chapter each from a couple of novels and a long poem – and by a close pursuit of the kinds of ways in which the author is transformed into those pieces of text. This textbook in democratic self-transformation is at the same time a fussy tractatus on the intricacies imposed on itself by art, in its quest to become a zone of moral enhancement.

A Fred Will Reader samples the writings of Frederic Will, compiling excerpts of his poetry, travel work, agricultural sociology, short stories and novels, speculative philosophy, and cultural history. Naming the world, Will says, is at least half of world, the half that gives in to us. The other half, the world that reading invents, is supplied by the reader. By reading each other globally, Will argues that we should learn to share ways of reconstructing the often broken totality of the human condition.

This volume presents an autobiography of one writer’s existence in poetry, the tracks left by a clumsy bear taming himself in public; it is also a forum in which to act out and discover oneself. It will serve to light fires, the can-do drive others can surpass, finding in themselves language as daring as their lives, and more daring than the author’s. It endeavours to allow every reader of this text to leave it feeling better, more able to do things by him- or herself, and more convinced that poetry is essential to a good life. The text itself is the eighth title in the 10-volume series Inside Selfhood and History.

Gerhild Scholz Williams's Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time, reviews key discourses in eight of Praetorius's works. She introduces the modern reader to the kinds of subjects, the intellectual and spiritual approaches to them, and the genres that this educated and productive German scholar and polymath presented to his audience in the seventeenth century. By relating these individual works to a number of contemporaneous writings, Williams shows how Praetorius constructed a panorama in print in which wonders, the occult, the emerging scientific way of thinking, family and social mores are recurrent themes. Included in Praetorius's portrait of the mid-seventeenth-century are discussions of Paracelsus's scientific theories and practice; early modern German theories on witchcraft and demonology and their applications in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we read about the early modern beginnings of ethnography, anthropology, and physical geography; gender theory, early modern and contemporary notions of intellectual property, and competing and sometimes conflicting early modern scientific and theological explanations of natural anomalies. Moreover, throughout his work and certainly in those texts chosen for this study, Praetorius appears before us as an assiduous reporter of contemporary European and pan-European events and scientific discoveries, a critic of common superstitions, as much a believer in occult causes and signs and in God's communication with His people. In his writings, in his way of telling, he offers strategies by which to comprehend the political, social, and intellectual uncertainties of his century and, in so doing, identifies ways to confront the diverse interpretive authorities and the varieties of structures of knowledge that interacted and conflicted with each other in the public arena of knowing.