Henry James

Harry Levin

Sent to Paris by a wealthy matron to retrieve her son, Strether becomes sidetracked by intriguing complications

The Ambassadors

James Joyce, a Critical Introduction

An Essay

Toward Stendhal

James Joyce

A Essential James Joyce - Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Exiles; Chamber Music; Pomes Penyeach

Frank Kermode

William Shakespeare

Anne Barton

Heather Dubrow

Gwynne Blakemore Evans

Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature Harry Levin

Herschel Baker

William T. Liston

Marie Edel

Hallet Smith

Charles H. Shattuck

The Second Edition of this complete collection of Shakespeare's plays and poems features two essays on recent criticism and productions, fully updated textual notes, a photographic insert of recent productions, and two works recently attributed to Shakespeare. The authors of the essays on recent criticism and productions are Heather DuBrow, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and William Liston, Ball State University, respectively.

The Riverside Shakespeare

Looks at the history of comedy from Aristophanes to Bertolt Brecht, focusing on two types of humor, and discusses theories of humor in comic repertory

An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy

Playboys and Killjoys

"Mr. Levin defines the myth of the golden age as a nostalgic statement of man's orientation in time, an attempt at transcending the limits of history. Usually concentrating on a pre-historic epoch, an imaginary foreworld once perfected and now lost, he myth holds up an anarchic vision of justice among men, peace among peoples, and love between the sexes, and is a product of a reaction against the decadence of the present epoch, whenever that may be. When the focus shifts from the past to the future, the standpoint shifts to the idea of progress. In both cases especially the latter, where specific plans can be envisaged-it posits an ideal relation between man and man. In this beautifully written book Mr. Levin argues that, because the myth emphasizes free will, an ethic of hedonism, and a cult of beauty, it was an especially pertinent myth in the Renaissance. He finds that while painters attempted to portray the myth, it remained essentially a literary subject, and there are few men of letters in whose works there is not some sort of an allusion to it. The humanistic revival of learning together with the unprecedented efflorescence of the arts acted out the fancy that the golden age had returned. The topics Mr.Levin treats- prehistory, ethics, geography, fiction, pageantry, and historiography allow unusual scope for the interplay of critical and historical interpretation."-Publisher

The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance

A stimulating essay which focuses on the Stendhal who wrote for his post-Napoleonic era, so much like our time.

Brännmärkt i statens tjänst

A Study of Five French Realists

The Gates of Horn

Eleanor Jack Gibson

Robert C. Calfee

Richard Arnold (psychologue.)

Priscilla Drum

A Review ... of The Psychology of Reading by Eleanor J. Gibson and Harry Levin

Harry Levin--one of America's major literary critics--offers a brilliant and original study of the whole world of comedy, concentrating on playwrights through the centuries, from Aristophanes and Plautus in classical times to Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht and their recent successors. Viewing the comic repertory as a richly varied yet broadly unified whole, Levin provides a synthesis of theories and practice. Isolating two fundamental aspects of comedy--the ludicrous and irreverent "playboy," whom we laugh with, and the ridiculous and forbidding "killjoy," whom we laugh at--he traces the dialectical interplay of these components throughout history and across various cultures and media. While mainly focusing on the plays and the stage, with discussions of such major dramatists as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Moli?re, and William Congreve, Levin also includes essays on such related topics as humor, satire, and games.

15 lectures on novelists and literature, ranging from broad problems of critical theory and esthetic formulation to specific analyses of forms and texts.

Contexts of Criticism

G. Blakemore Evans

The Wadsworth Shakespeare

"The author explores this tradition in depth and defines it with a breadth of vision, a dynamic vigor and freedom rarely paralleled today....His method, flexible, generous, humane in the best sense of the word, eschews pedantry, dogma, useless theorizing and scholastic argumentation."--The New York Times Book Review. "I wish to make it clear that The Gates of Horn represents an outstanding critical accomplishment."--Saturday Review. In the Odyssey, Homer describes two gates of the imagination: one of ivory through which fictitious dreams pass, and the other of horn, through which nothing but the truth may pass. Realism is the type of literature that passes through the horn, and in this significant study of the genre Levin examines a major form of Realism--the French novel--and focuses on five of its masters--Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Now available in paperback, Levin's study is a veritable reconstruction of the artistic and intellectual life of a nation.

Essays discuss modern writers, including Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Mann, Hesse, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Nabokov

Harry Levin

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