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The Ghost on the Ramparts presents fourteen of R. B. Heilman's essays on the teaching of English and the profession of the humanities. These essays deal with such diverse topics as administrative ways and means, pedagogical shibboleths and heresies, uses and abuses of literacy, clichés of style, moot issues of history and criticism, and above all the nature of the humanities and their continuing significance. The persuasive discussions of all these subjects reflect the author's wide professional experience, his wit and wisdom, and his superb sense of style. The chairman of a distinguished English department for over twenty years, Heilman well knew the ins and outs of administration. He considers not only the practical problems of maintaining a large department but also the more complex matters involving a chairman's attitude toward deans, toward colleagues of many kinds, and toward oneself as a committed teacher and administrator. Also a literary critic of established reputation, Heilman's explicative side appears in most of these essays as he provides illustrative examples from many different sources while discussing the nature of history and criticism in the humanities. The unity of these essays is no less impressive than the mind of their maker, who instances a remarkable capacity for seeing life in the humanities steadily and whole.
A reference guide to the work of 115 modern British and American critics.
An engaging collection of essays by an astute observer of the South. In 1935, Robert Bechtold Heilman, a native Pennsylvanian and recent Harvard Ph.D., accepted a position in the Louisiana State University English department. He came to the Bayou State bringing with him a sense of curiosity in people and places a delight in the drama of life. that was compatible with the temperament of the South's still largely rural and storytelling society. He came, moreover, to one of the most dramatic contemporary settings in the South, the Louisiana of Huey P. Long. (He was present at the Louisiana State Capitol on the day Long was assassinated.) In Baton Rouge, he found a provincial university in the capital city that was acquiring for the first time in its history a faculty of some distinction. Heilman's enduring association with the South, both personally and professionally, is the focus of The Southern Connection, a collection of seventeen delightful and thought-provoking essays. The first section of the book consists of essays in which Heilman recalls Louisiana and LSU as he found them in the autumn of 1935. He describes the atmosphere at the University and in the surrounding town; offers vivid portraits of some of his colleagues, including Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Eric Vogelin; and meditates on the reasons an obscure university in an impoverished southern state was able to attract and nurture a faculty of outstanding talent and achievement. Having been at LSU during the scandals of the late 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, Heilman makes a significant contribution, through his recollections, to the history of these crucial times. In the book's second section Heilman presents critical essays on a number of important southern writers and their works. There are discussions of the Agrarian movement and its connection with European culture; on Cleanth Brooks and The Well Wrought Urn; on Eudora Welty's work, especially Losing Battles; and on Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. Heilman also includes two essays on Robert Penn Warren's work. The first discusses All the King's Men as tragedy, and the second examines the moral complexities of World Enough and Time. Another essay in the group compares Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Eudora Welty's "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." Finally, Heilman offers two extended reflections on the South as a region and a culture. In "The South Falls In," he discusses the paradoxes in the southern character and in national perceptions of the South. In "The Southern Temper," he considers the southern "sense of the concrete" as it is reflected in the work of various southern writers and in the southern character in general. As a whole, The Southern Connection offers an enjoyable and illuminating assessment of the South by one of the most perceptive and sensitive critics of our time.
In this exploration of four plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Machiavelli and Shakespeare, Mera Flaumenhaft argues that, by revising well-known myths or histories, each playwright reshapes the community for which he writes. Emphasizing the context in which the plays have been read and performed, she examines the moral and political effects of each drama and its production, from the role of classical tragedy in MAINtaining the classical city, to the role of the modern history play in forming and maintaining the nation-state. Flaumenhaft demonstrates how the playwright's presentation of political themes within each drama relates to his view of the broadly political function of theater in his society.
The Workings of Fiction is a collection of essays, chiefly on British and American novels and novelists, that shows a masterful critic at work. Each of the essays examines a different aspect of the novelists' art as one uniquely astute critical mind observes them. The central issue Robert Heilman confronts--often by studying the novels in pairs--is how the novelist does what he does. Dealing with subjects as diverse as Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Evelyn Waugh, Heilman studies the workings of fiction from varied stances. He investigates the uses of the verbal medium and the several means by which a given theme is developed. As Heilman identifies and traces particular themes, he studies how parts are assembled into a whole. In addition, he explores particular generic types--like the picaresque, the gothic, the tragic--as they are used by a variety of novelists. Written by a gifted man of letters, The Workings of Fiction takes us inside the process of criticism. The book offers us an original and perceptive view of Under the Volcano as it offers of Pride and Prejudice or The Turn of the Screw. Each essay presents a fresh way of looking at and understanding these novels. This collection will be of interest to anyone who desires insight into the workings of fiction.