Product Code: P262
ISBN: 9780865548947
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $25.00
Whether you’ve been a fan for years or you’ve just recently been hooked by the blockbuster Lord of the Rings movies, "I Am in Fact a Hobbit" is an excellent starting point into the life and work of J. R. R. Tolkien. This indispensable and concise introduction to the career of J. R. R. Tolkien includes:
• a biographical chapter about the man who was a brilliant Oxford professor and Catholic Christian, loving father and devoted husband, and close friend of C. S. Lewis
• overviews and discussions of his best-selling popular works such as the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, his often overlooked academic works and his children’s books such as Roverandom and Mr. Bliss.
• a detailed chronology of the important events and times of his life and career
• an extensive listing of his works, both published and unpublished
• a resource bibliography of the best works about him
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P409
ISBN: 9780881462005
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $35.00
Despite that they didn’t know each other, the writing styles of American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891) and Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) complement each other, especially their humor, irony, penchants for paradox, and passions for imagery and poetics. In addition, their works similarly address issues of the world and time. Esthetic, ethical, social, philosophical, and theological paths on which they walk reveal similar footprints.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H813
ISBN: 9780881462142
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
Flannery O’Connor, Tim Gautreaux, and Walker Percy, are all Catholic writers from the South—and seem to embody very fully both parts of that label. Yet as quickly becomes clear in their writing, their fiction employs markedly different tones and modes of addressing their audience.
Why do texts by three writers who each embrace their Southern locale and their Catholic beliefs seem to have so little in common? Nisly helps readers understand these authors’ fiction by examining the role that place and time had in shaping each author’s idea of an audience—and, by extension, his or her manner of addressing that audience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H816
ISBN: 9780881462173
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
This book offers a fresh approach to Hawthorne and O’Connor as writers of the American romance. Drawing from a contemporary philosophical context, it applies Gadamer’s cultural critique of modernity to the moral and artistic visions conveyed through the authors’ use of the literary form of romance.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H819
ISBN: 9780881462203
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $55.00
The Letters of Austin Warren enables a reader to perceive what epistolary art signifies, and to appreciate the rehabilitative powers and possibilities of communication and connection that it generates. A reader who enters into this unique epistolary community will find there a rich and incessant flow of ideas, seriously and strenuously deliberated, as well as to hear conversations that are vigorous, dignified, and sapient in tone and content. One who pores over these letters will take an intimate part in the works and days of Austin Warren, Man of Letters and Epistolary Artist.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H835
ISBN: 9780881462630
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
Recognizing personal tendencies and developing literary talents enabled Mary Flannery O'Connor to don multiple masks, concealing or revealing segments of herself as she desired. O'Connor's masks serve as metaphorical embodiments of her veiled autobiography, illuminating key components of her sense of self and of her literary power. Sharp's exploration of these masks identifies O'Connor's goals, struggles, and successes.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H842
ISBN: 9780881462807
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $45.00
The First Part of King Henry the Sixth is Shakespeare’s first work for the stage, his first dramatic hit, and, also, his most controversial and suspect history play, a literary genre he perfected. From the vantage of his opening act its close
study affords the original introduction to all the histories and the Shakespearean stage as such, as well as to his idea of time and the world generally, that is, to the Shakespearean education.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H844
ISBN: 9780881462821
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
Near its heart, English Romanticism—across many writers—acknowledges and celebrates a community that is not just secular but that derives meaning from a religious association and, in fact, a particularly defined religion, that is, Anglican Christianity.
William Wordsworth and Jane Austen, premier English Romantic poet and novelist, were baptized, confirmed, and buried (and for Wordsworth, married) in conformity with the Church of England. Of course, Wordsworth’s commitment flagged in his twenties, but with marriage and responsibility came respectability and parishioner status. However, most twentieth-century critics interpret these writers’ works outside the Christian realities with which their lives were much imbued, except for late Wordsworthian poems from his purported decline into conservative politics and religion and evident poetic senility.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P454
ISBN: 9780881463972
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $22.00
This book establishes that Horton Foote’s characters and themes come from Wharton, Texas, a region influenced more by the Deep South than the cowboy tradition of West Texas. But these interviews also establish that such stories are not place-specific. They are universal stories about going away and the eternal search of emotional and spiritual homes. Foote’s stories are revealed as reflecting the dislocation, loneliness, racial tension, and gender and class divisions of the United States. But he explains that these topics are embedded in his plays and films, not part of a rhetorical approach to writing. He writes in the realist tradition. In every interview, Horton Foote demonstrates his kind, engaging, and sensitive view of life and art.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H868
ISBN: 9780881464337
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $45.00
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth is Shakespeare’s most thoughtful history play—it was about this play that Schlegel made his famous comment that “Shakespeare was as profound a historian as a poet.” Yet, this last play, Shakespeare’s lone Tudor history, was popular at its first playing and has proven a crowd pleaser whenever it has been performed. Ever seductive in its trappings of power and emphatic pomp and pageantry, it delineates in a political way the characters of England’s most surpassing statesman and her finest queen, as well as of the king thought most infamous of all by celebrated later English writers like Hazlitt and Dickens.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P463
ISBN: 9780881464375
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
The C.S. Lewis Phenomenon names the way in which Lewis’s presentations of Christianity in both his fiction and non-fiction depend upon the conventions of the public sphere—this study explores three facets of that phenomenon.
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Product Code: H885
ISBN: 9780881464788
Price: $29.00
Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn’t change over the course of his long career.
Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree.
What hasn’t been done before, however, and what SEARCHING FOR EDEN undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck’s literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck’s life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.
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