In The Dome and the Rock, James Baird exposes the capacity of Wallace Stevens to design his poetry in a manner similar to an architect, and he "reveals the craftsmanship of [Wallace's] acts as builder."

Each essay in this collection focuses on an individual classical American author--Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Moore, and Stevens--and the author's primary works. Traditional interpretations are reassessed based on close study of source texts and criticism.

Wallace Stevens - American Writers 11 was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The work of Wallace Stevens has been read most widely as poetry concerned with poetry, and not with the world in which it was created; deemed utterly singular, it seems to resist being read as the record of a life and times. In this critical biography Alan Filreis presents a detailed challenge to this exceptionalist view as he traces two major periods of Stevens's career from 1939 to 1955, the war years and the postwar years. Portraying Stevens as someone whose alternation between cultural comprehension and ignorance was itself characteristically American, Filreis examines the poet's impulse to disguise and compress the very fact of his debt to the actual world. By actual world Stevens meant historical conditions, often in order to impugn his own interest in such externalities as the last resort of a man whose famous interiority made him feel desperately irrelevant. In light of events ranging from the U.S. entry into World War II to the Cold War, Filreis shows how Stevens was driven to make a "close approach to reality" in an effort to reconcile his poetic language with a cultural language. "Wallace Stevens and the Actual World is not only an impressive feat of historical recovery and analysis, but also a pleasure to read. It will be useful to anyone interested in the relationship between American politics and literature during World War II and the Cold War."--Milton J. Bates, Marquette University Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Wallace Stevens - American Writers 11 was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

A scholarly review of American world literature from early times to the postmodernist era American World Literature: An Introduction explores how the subject of American Literature has evolved from a national into a global phenomenon. As the author, Paul Giles – a noted expert on the topic – explains, today American Literature is understood as engaging with the wider world rather than merely with local or national circumstances. The book offers an examination of these changing conceptions of representation in both a critical and an historical context. The author examines how the perception of American culture has changed significantly over time and how this has been an object of widespread social and political debate. From examples of early American literature to postmodernism, the book charts ways in which the academic subject areas of American Literature and World Literature have converged – and diverged – over the past generations. Written for students of American literature at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and in all areas of historical specialization, American World Literature offers an authoritative guide to global phenomena of American World literature and how this subject has undergone crucial changes in perception over the past thirty years.

Often considered America's greatest twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poet whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing both synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens's poetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of this poet's work, Bart Eeckhout traces both the limits of Stevens's poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. Stevens's work has been interpreted so variously and contradictorily that critics must first address the question of limits to the poetry's signifying potential before they can attempt to deepen our appreciation of it. In the first half of this book, the limits of appropriating and contextualizing Stevens's "The Snow Man," in particular, are investigated. Eeckhout does not undertake this reading with the negative purpose of disputing earlier interpretations but with the more positive intention of identifying the intrinsic qualities of the poetry that have been responsible for the remarkable amount of critical attention it has received.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the leading poets of the twentieth century, continues to influence a wide range of poets writing today. However, an image persists of Stevens as an aesthete who was politically removed from his times and who also exhibited sexist and racist tendencies. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan offers careful readings from across the Stevens canon to demonstrate that, contrary to such enduring earlier assessments, Stevens's work over the years shows poetic and political changes that merge with his growing ethical concerns. Brogan traces Stevens's evolving poetic practices along three major lines that often intersected. She situates the beginnings of Stevens's development within his early resistance to the pressures of "reality" on the imagination, an artistic stand that pitted him against the "objective" poetry exemplified in the work of William Carlos Williams. Then, in the midst of Stevens's career, World War II moved him forward with new poetic responsibilities both to witness the current world and to guide readers into their future. The emergence of an almost feminist vision defines Stevens's third line of development. Finally, in addition to identifying these developmental stages, Brogan addresses the undercurrent of race throughout Stevens's work. According to Brogan, Stevens not only changed but matured over time. What began as an aesthetic "violence within," or a girding against such "violence without" as social unrest and war, rapidly evolved during Stevens's middle years into a set of perceptions and practices increasingly responsive to his times.