Edmund Wilson's last collection of criticism, The Devils & Canon Barham, contains ten essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters Previously published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, Wilson's writing featured in this volume sees the critic returning to his roots and youth, with essays on his childhood love for The Ingoldsby Legends, the works of Hemingway, Eliot's The Waste Land, and ends with a piece on The Monsters of Bomarzo and by taking the Modern Language Association (MLA) to task.

The literary 'middle ground', once dismissed by academia as insignificant, is the site of powerful anxieties about cultural authority that continue to this day. In short, the middlebrow matters . These essays examine the prejudices and aspirations at work in the 'battle of the brows', and show that cultural value is always relative and situational.

In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan develops a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, arguing that the monster was a key figure in Renaissance culture and that the incorporation of the monstrous into gardens was not incidental but an essential feature.

The biographer - so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - here comes to the stage. James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas's professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know the author's first subject, the "self-doomed" poet Delmore Schwartz; a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the "tall trees," as Mary McCarthy described them, cut down now, Atlas writes, by the "merciless pruning of mortality"); and, of course, the elusive Bellow, "a metaphysician of the ordinary." Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers: the Renaissance writers of what were then called "lives," Samuel Johnson and the "meshugenah" Boswell, among them. In what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the luminaries of contemporary literature and the labor of those who hope to catch a glimpse of one of them - "as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd."

The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging. "Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews

The death of Edmund Wilson precipitates an odyssey through the distorted literary landscape of America in search of Wilson's essence as the pre-eminent man of letters and the author's own creative wellsprings

This volume makes available an international collection of plays, from Britain, the US, Germany, France and Russia, providing an essential and fascinating resource for anyone interested in the theatre culture of this period. Lovesick brings together six plays, each with individual introductions, including an author biography and a production history. The editor provides a contextual introduction to the volume offering valuable information about the ancestry of gay theatre and queer performance. The anthology reveals how 'sexual deviance' made its way into the drama of this time, and also how homosexual playwrights used comic or lyrical devices in order to celebrate a 'superior sensibility'.

"Readers drawn to the "Roaring Twenties," gossip about the Great White Way, discussion of high, middle, and low-brow culture will seek out this book."--BOOK JACKET.

Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 contains a selection of the literary critic and author Edmund Wilson's personal correspondence. As editor Leon Edel states in his introduction to these papers: "More than a sampling, the present volume provides sufficient material to show the energy and vitality of Wilson's professional relations with friends and acquaintances; it shows even more the continuity of his imaginative life from his youth to the end."

Scrutinizes the contentious ideological feuds in American academia during the 1980s and 1990s