This pioneering work is the first book to systematically explore the literature of gay and lesbian writers of color in the United States. Critical Essays challenges the marginalization and tokenization of gay men and lesbians of color in the dominant academic discourses by focusing exclusively on the imaginative work of representative Native-American, Asian-American, Latino(a), and African-American gay and lesbian writers. As the first book offering a scholarly assessment of ethnic gay and lesbian writing in the U.S., Critical Essays simultaneously defies ethnic and mainstream homophobia as well as straight and gay/lesbian racism. This deliberate counter to the dominant white discourse of gay and lesbian literature offers a lively contribution to the debate on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender/sexuality and class in American literature. A wide range of critical approaches, including historical readings, cultural analysis, and deconstructive criticism, is employed to the works of such major literary figures as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, John Rechy, Paula Gunn Allen, and Gloria Anzaldúa. These thought-provoking chapters disrupt the complacent notion of a unified gay/lesbian community by questioning the presumed similarities of persons who share sexual identity. Some of the specific topics explored in Critical Essays include: post-coloniality and gay/lesbian identities emerging Asian-American gay and lesbian writers redefining the Harlem Renaissance from gay perspectives contemporary African-American gay male performance art relocating the gay Filipino This groundbreaking volume will be of immense interest to undergraduate, graduate, and advanced scholars in Gay and Lesbian studies, Women’s studies, African-American studies, Asian-American studies, Latino(a) studies and Native-American studies. It will also serve students and scholars as a valuable introduction to the diversity of authors that comprise twentieth-century American literature.

This invaluable book offers the student of literature detailed advice on the entire process of critical essay writing, from first facing the question right through to producing a fair copy for final submission to the teacher.

Despite the outpour of interpretations, from critics of all schools, on Shakespeare's dramatic works and other poetic works, A Lover's Complaint has been almost totally ignored by criticism. This collection of essays is designed to bring to the poem the attention it deserves for its beauty, its aesthetic, psychological and conceptual complexity, and its representation of its cultural moment. A series of readings of A Lover's Complaint, particularly engaging with issues of psychoanalysis and gender, the volume cumulatively builds a detailed picture of the poem, its reception, and its critical neglect. The essays in the volume, by leading Shakespeareans, open up this important text before scholars, and together generate the long-overdue critical conversation about the many intriguing facets of the poem.

Until recently, Anne Clifford has been known primarily for her Knole Diary, edited by Vita Sackville-West, which recounted her steadfast resistance to the most authoritative figures of her culture, including James I, as she insisted on her right to inherit her father's title and lands. Lucy Hutchinson was known primarily as the biographer of her husband, a Puritan leader during the English Civil Wars. The essays collected here examine not only these texts but, in Clifford's case, her architectural restorations and both the Great Book which she had compiled and the Great Picture which she commissioned, in order to explore the identity she fashioned for herself as a property owner, matriarchal head of her family, patron and historian. In Hutchinson's case, recent scholars have turned their attention to her poetry, her translation of Lucretius and her biblical epic, Order and Disorder, to analyze her contributions to early modern scientific and political writing and to place her work in relation to Milton's Paradise Lost.

This volume brings together nineteen essays that marked the bicentenary of Jane Austen's birth and reflect twentieth-century critical attitudes.

Unique in all of literature, the Confessions combines frank and profound psychological insight into Augustine's formative years along with sophisticated and beguiling reflections on some of the most important issues in philosophy and theology. The Confessions discloses Augustine's views about the nature of infancy and the acquisition of language, his own sinful adolescence, his early struggle with the problem of evil, his conversion to Christianity, his puzzlement about the capacities of human memory and the nature of time, and his views about creation and biblical interpretation. The essays contained in this volume, by some of the most distinguished recent and contemporary thinkers in the field, insightfully explore these Augustinian themes not only with an eye to historical accuracy but also to gauge the philosophical acumen of Augustine's reflections.