Major European Authors Series – serie

This is a concise survey and criticism of Goethe's work, for the general reader and the student. It is intended as a useful first book from which the reader can proceed to more specialised studies. Here Goethe's work is seen as a whole, and from the point of view of literary criticism. The first chapter summarises Goethe's life. The other chapter discuss the works, singly and in groups. Much attention is given to the poems; and there are two long chapters on Faust. Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Elective Affinities, and the Divan are given a chapter each; so are the dramatic works, the autobiographical writings, and the scientific work. A refreshing aspect of the book is that while Dr Gray takes account of earlier criticism he also seeks to see Goethe's work entirely afresh, and to reappraise it; by questioning the value of some works, he enhances the valuation of others. Quotation is in German, but English translations are given in footnotes. There is a useful comparative table of biographical dates, which shows what was happening, politically and culturally, in Europe while Goethe lived. There are references at the end of the book, a select bibliography and an index. The book can be used in conjunction with Dr Gray's selection of the poems. The two books together are the best possible introduction to one the greatest European men of letters.

This is a digital reprint of Mme de Mourgues' critical introduction to the work of Racine for the student and the general reader. It concentrates entirely on the plays themselves, and attempts to say what they are and how they work on the mind of the spectator or reader. Mme de Mourgues' main point is admirably expressed in her title. Everything in Racine's plays is directed to a single end: the heightening of the feeling of tragic conflict. The separable literary or dramatic conventions have no importance in themselves - their only claim on the attention is their function in the drama, their relevance to the overriding purpose. Discussions include the use of time and space, the stylization of passion, the paradox of the héros moyen and the interplay of action and character. The author also looks at the tragedy of the individual character with the abiding moral order within which the action is set and considers the specific emotion which Racine evokes.

This is a critical introduction to the novels and short stories of Tolstoy, treating them in their own right as works of literature, not as biographical evidence or contributions to a philosophical system. The heart of the book, inevitably, is in the two long chapters which examine War and Peace and Anna Karenina in detail, but most of Tolstoy's other fiction is also discussed and there is a chapter on his drama and his aesthetic theories. Professor Christian is concerned to show what is characteristic about Tolstoy's fiction: what kind of effects he is trying to convey and how his art secures those effects. No Russian is needed, but in his frequent quotations in English Professor Christian touches on the problems of translations so that the reader of English is given some hint of the texture and uniqueness of the original Russian, often smoother out in translation. Professor Christian shows the link between the subtlety of the technique and the greatness of the mind and heart behind it. The general reader will welcome this human concern; the student will be equally grateful for a straightforward, systematic, concise overall study.

This 1973 text provides a critical introduction to the writings of Franz Kafka. Within it Ronald Gray surveys the novels and short stories, and glances also at the religious or confessional writings. He presents a persuasive and coherent account of Kafka's personal and artistic development and its meaning and value for us. Dr Gray argues that the early short stories are most finished and controlled; here Kafka recognised and managed to find a form exactly fitting his own condition, and the writing is less compulsive and obsessional than it became later. Dr Gray quotes extensively, translating specifically for the purpose. He writes for all whose who read Kafka, especially the many who read him in translation and would like a helpful and shrewd guide to understanding. Kafka's work hauntingly expresses one whole area of the modern mind - its anguish, dissociation and guilt - and this sane and sympathetic book puts him into a humane perspective.

This is one of the first studies to treat Valéry's theory and practice of poetry together and is the first full-length study of his poetry in English. Discussion of his ideas on poetic composition leads to a detailed analysis of the principal poetry: the long term poem La Jeune Parque and all the poems in the main collection. While serving as a step-by-step introduction to Valéry's poetic achievement, the argument is not merely neutral; it elicits and comments on his little-known concept of 'Voice', now seen increasingly to be central. This is not simply the acoustic or musical effect of one poet's verse: it relates to the inner monologue we all hear within ourselves. By concentrating on Valéry's unusually thorough understanding of this area of exchange between willed and spontaneous modes of perception and creativity, the book is able to approach without jargon the much debated question of the subject - 'Who speaks in a poem?' It proposes some unexpected conclusions concerning Valéry's relationship to both Mallarméan Symbolism and contemporary Structuralist thought. This searching study will interest linguists, philosophers and psychologists, as well as students of literature and literary history.

Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81) was, with Lope de Vega, the greatest exponent of Spanish Golden Age drama. Professor Parker's essays are the fruits of a highly distinguished career spanning forty-five years. They provide a wide-ranging survey of Calderón's secular, three-act plays (comedias) through detailed analyses of individual works. The themes found in the plays are studied in relation to the background of ideas in seventeenth-century Spain and to the development of Calderón's own view of the intellectual life and the social, ethical and moral problems of this age. From the tensions of Calderón's early family life and his intellectual struggle with the associated problems, the book passes to the wider tensions in the social and political life of his time, and concludes with a demonstration of how Calderón raises all these human problems onto a wide 'philosophical' level through his use of myths and symbols.

This book is a comprehensive study of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. As well as examining the drama and the fiction, the book analyses the evolution of his philosophy, explores his concern with ethics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, biography and autobiography and includes a lengthy section on the still much-neglected study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille. One important aim of the book is to rebut the charges made by many theorists and philosophers by revealing that Sartre is in fact a major source for concepts such as the decentred subject and detotalised truth and for the revolt against individualistic humanism. Dr Howells also takes into account much posthumously published material, in particular the Chaiers pour une morale, but also the Lettres au Castor and the Cranets de la drole de guerre. The work is a substantial contribution to Sartre studies, but has been written with the non-specialist in mind; to that end all quotations are translated into English and gathered in an appendix.

When it was published this was the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), a great comic writer whose works are regarded as modern classics. This account of Bulgakov's career as playwright and prose-writer examines all his works in the context of the changing demands put upon artists in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, who were faced with the choice of integrity at the price of silence, or publication and production at the price of conformty with the totalitarian state. Lesley Milne traces through Bulgakov's career an ethical concept of the writer's role, his response to his time, and his search for an audience in and beyond that time.

Boileau has traditionally been regarded as the spokesman of French neo-classicism, but some elements of scholarship have discounted the importance of neo-classical doctrine in general and of Boileau's particular contribution to it. Many critical approaches have stressed instead the liveliness and wit of Boileau's poems, his love of language and his passionate temperament. Mr Pocock uses these critical approaches to demonstrate in detail how Boileau's verve, love of contrasts, and essentially dramatic imagination animate the major poems. But he also argues that such approaches do not in themselves suffice to explain Boileau's special qualities. Neo-classicism was an important element in the intellectual life of Europe in the most critical period of the decline of Christianity and the rise of rationalism and science. Mr Pocock proposes a reformulation of those views which take account not only of modern criticism but also of Boileau's commitment to neo-classicism and his embodiment of it in his work.

This 1982 book was the first major critical study of Jaroslav Hašek and his most important literary creation, The Good Soldier Švejk. For many people Hašek's book is simply extremely funny. Cecil Parrott begins from the point of view that a closer examination of the conditions under which the book was written reveal it to be a much deeper work than it appears on the surface: a tragic as well as a comic masterpiece. A leading authority on Hašek, Parrott wrote the definitive biography, The Bad Bohemian, and translated the unexpurgated version of Švejk and many of Hašek's short stories. This book is lucidly written and aimed at the non-specialist reader who requires guidance in coming to terms with this strange book. All quotations are translated, and the book also includes a number of illustrations including the only sketch of Švejk that Hašek approved.

Among seventeenth-century classical French writers La Rochefoucauld owes his renown to his maxims and La Bruyère to his stylised portraits, or caractères. This book starts from the basic assumption that both writers were 'moralists', and as such were concerned with a universal picture of man and society within the limitations of nature and reason. The two moralists are studied separately. Professor de Mourgues stresses their individual characteristics, and the complexity of their views. She draws attention to the problems of literary diction they had to face, and comments on the artistic achievement to be found in the Maximes and the Caractères. This study shows that the position of La Rochefoucauld and la Bruyère as 'moralists' is more ambiguous than the usual neat definitions of the term would allow. This study raises delicate questions of interpretation, and adds equally to the fascination of the two writers' work.

An attempt to interpret and appraise the work of Boris Pasternak as lyrical and narrative poet, writer of prose fiction, and verse translator (notably from Shakespeare). Pasternak belonged to an unusually gifted generation of Russian poets who began writing in the years that preceded the First World War and the Russian revolution of 1917. Henry Gifford discusses Pasternak's choice of vocation, and then examines the poetry and stories of the 1920s and 1930s, his work as translator, his two autobiographies, the novel that brought him world fame and much personal anguish, Doctor Zhivago, his late poems and his unfinished play, The Blind Beauty. Pasternak is seen in relation to his most eminent contemporaries among the Russian poets, and to the common crisis they had to face. All the poetry quoted in Russian has a plain prose translation. This critical study is not intended only for the specialist student of Russian literature: it should have an appeal for all readers who are concerned about the survival of poetry in the present age.

Up until the last century there was a tendency, among directors in the theatre and academic critics alike, to stress the philosophical and satirical content of Molière's comedy and to overlook the fact that he was a professional man of the theatre. More recently, certain influential critics have tended to go to the other extreme and to emphasise the theatrical and aesthetic qualities of his plays at the expense of what they may have to offer as plays of ideas. This study seeks to reconcile the two approaches: while exploring the evolution of Molière's comedy as a vehicle for his own talents as an actor and for the resources of his company, the author also seeks to define the composition of the original audiences, both in the public theatre and at Court, and to assess the taste and attitudes of the spectators for whom the plays were written.

In this 1976 introduction to Brecht's theatre and theory, Ronald Gray explores the dramatist's interacting roles as a committed Marxist seeking to influence audiences and as one of the most innovative craftsmen ever to work in the theatre. Dr Gray traces the development of Brecht's dramatic work in the context of his life and time and discussed its significance, devoting chapters to reappraisals of the major plays. Particular attention is paid to Brecht's dramatic theories and their relationship to Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, to the tradition of political theatre in Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the influence Brecht had on English and American post-war drama. There are also detailed accounts of how many of the plays appeared in Brecht's own productions, and frequent references to actual performances in widely differing theatrical styles.

This digitally reprinted edition of Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary has the same content as the original 1971 edition. Professor Bayley, in this first critical assessment in English of the whole range of Pushkin's writing, examines his achievement in relation to Russian literature and the European tradition, analysing Pushkin's language in detail to illustrate how he obtains his literary effects.

A study of Rabelais (?1494-1553) as a literary artist giving special attention to the form and language of his fiction. Coleman uses a genuinely literary approach, using some of the techniques of stylistic analysis. She avoids the two extremes of approaching Rabelais either as a solemn sixteenth-century humanist who expressed profound truths in simple allegories or as a mere joker, drunk with words. Instead she sees him as finding a particular form - Menippean satire - in which he could achieve a balance between seriousness and irony, involvement and detachment, direct address to the reader and distance, and in which he was able to develop his own unique language. This study will interest students and teachers of French and European literature and Renaissance studies.

This critical study of the group of remarkably talented poets who flourished in Spain between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War includes copious quotations accompanied by English prose translations. Mr Morris treats his poets as a group, showing how they shared certain themes and attitudes. He begins with a general study of the generation as a whole and then examines the use of tradition; the zest and levity of the Jazz Age; the exaltation of life as a shared attitude; then its converse; the escape from life; and finally the expression in complex imagery of personal tensions and disturbances. These are often 'difficult' poets, but become less so when they are sympathetically examined in this way and in relation to earlier literary traditions. Mr Morris enables the reader to take bearings and establish relationships which are enhanced by reproductions of photographs of the poets.

This 1977 study of Chekhov examines his development and achievement as prose-writer and dramatist. Beverly Hahn draws attention to the range and depth of Chekhov's imagination, disputing any limited conception of him as a 'poet of twilight Russia'. By looking in detail at a number of the longer stories as well as at Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, she makes a strong case for viewing Chekhov as a humanist - one actively interested in modern European theories and ideas, but finally committed to respecting and celebrating the unpredictability and variety of human lives. She also explores Chekhov's relationship with his Russian contemporaries and his importance to the modern European tradition. All quotations are in English, but Miss Hahn pays close attention to Chekhov's imagery as it relates to wider structural perspectives of his works. The book as a whole is intended both for professional students of literature and as a critical introduction to Chekhov's work.