Kirjahaku

The Cliffs of Solitude offers a comprehensive assessment of the career of one of America's most neglected major poets, Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers' reputation, once one of the most substantial in American letters, was founded chiefly on the publication of 'Tamar' (1924) and the other verse narratives of the California coast that followed it in the next two decades. Most previous studies have cast no more than a backward glance at the considerable body of work that preceded 'Tamar', much of which was presumed to be lost. The recent recovery of major portions of Jeffers' verse drama 'The Alpine Christ', however, as well as a significant quantity of other early material, compels reassessment of this phase of his career and casts the mature poetry in a radically altered light. Such an attempt is particularly timely now that the rhetoric of modernist criticism, which tended for so long to obscure the scope and importance of Jeffers' achievement, has itself receded into the historical record.

Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England is a study of the structures of authority in England between the beginning of the English Reformation in 1529 and the outbreak of the Civil War of the 1640s. These structures, both secular and sacred, were profoundly affected by the creation of a national Protestant church governed by the crown; by the emerging sense of national consciousness and providential destiny that followed in its wake; by the development of a legal culture that defined and sometimes contested the parameters of authority; by an urban state that articulated a new civic culture and reflected broad political, social, and religious tensions; and by the growing sophistication and assertiveness of Parliament, the capstone both of elite interest and popular legitimacy, and ultimately the site of resistance to claims of unfettered royal and ecclesiastical power. Together, these elements constituted the discourse of legitimacy through which the daily transactions of power in Tudor and early Stuart England were disputed, mediated, and sometimes resisted. They both expressed and contained the tensions of a rapidly changing society, and were finally the theaters on which its irreconcilable conflicts were enacted as social and political consensus broke down. The Discourse of Legitimacy presents a wide-ranging, synoptic view of England's political culture and its conflicts in the crucial period between its two greatest revolutions.

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

The Atom To Be Split collects new and selected essays by Robert Zaller on the work and career of Robinson Jeffers, whose prophetic verse, more than fifty years after his death, speaks increasingly to students of literature, history, science, and theology, as well as to readers concerned with the environmental and civilizational crises of our moment. The opening essay of the book situates Jeffers in the context of the high Modernist generation, tracing the course of his reception from the deep impression he made on early critics as a poet not only of national stature but as one worthy of comparison with the great figures of world literature, through the controversies of his subsequent career and his growing rediscovery as an essential voice for our time. Subsequent essays include wide-ranging considerations of Jeffers' response to the critical social issues of his day, his engagement with historical and natural process, his place in philosophical tradition, the development of his distinctive aesthetic and moral stance, and his relationship to other significant literary figures including Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, and William Everson. The book concludes with fresh examinations of Jeffers' evolving concept of a divine cosmos and humanity's place in it, and the relevance of his vision for our own world. Altogether, the essays in this volume refine and broaden the work of Zaller's previous studies of Jeffers, extending them in important new directions and offering a comprehensive perspective on Jeffers' unique and indispensable place in American literature.

The Atom To Be Split collects new and selected essays by Robert Zaller on the work and career of Robinson Jeffers, whose prophetic verse, more than fifty years after his death, speaks increasingly to students of literature, history, science, and theology, as well as to readers concerned with the environmental and civilizational crises of our moment. The opening essay of the book situates Jeffers in the context of the high Modernist generation, tracing the course of his reception from the deep impression he made on early critics as a poet not only of national stature but as one worthy of comparison with the great figures of world literature, through the controversies of his subsequent career and his growing rediscovery as an essential voice for our time. Subsequent essays include wide-ranging considerations of Jeffers' response to the critical social issues of his day, his engagement with historical and natural process, his place in philosophical tradition, the development of his distinctive aesthetic and moral stance, and his relationship to other significant literary figures including Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, and William Everson. The book concludes with fresh examinations of Jeffers' evolving concept of a divine cosmos and humanity's place in it, and the relevance of his vision for our own world. Altogether, the essays in this volume refine and broaden the work of Zaller's previous studies of Jeffers, extending them in important new directions and offering a comprehensive perspective on Jeffers' unique and indispensable place in American literature.