Cynthia Ozick

The words and grammatical structure of a given language are the most basic building blocks of thought and communication; they reflect the ways speakers communicate with others and conceptualize themselves and their world. Since language reflects a culture's biases and inequities, a socially constructed, gendered power differential between men and women may lead each to have very different relationships to language.

Interpreting five contemporary novels that document suppressed histories of violence and abuse, including Toni Morrison's Beloved and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, the author then examines the disturbing connections between violence and art.

Though many outstanding novels have been written in the last century, most of these novelists have also been short story writers. This reference is a guide to contemporary English-language short story writers and their works. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on roughly 50 writers from around the world, most of whom have been active since 1960. More than half the American writers belong to historically marginalized groups, such as Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, and Asian-Americans, and the volume includes entries for slightly more women than men. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides biographical material, a review of criticism, an extended analysis of specific works, and a selected bibliography.

In this groundbreaking study, the author examines the gradual opening of literary academe to Jewish faculty and analyzes the critical work Jewish scholars undertook to achieve their integration into an exclusive WASP domain.

Beginning her story at Harvard University, Klingenstein describes the unique intellectual paths taken by scholars such as Harry Levin, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, Leo Marx, and Sacvan Bercovitch. At Columbia University, Klingenstein argues that the singular Jewish presence of Lionel Trilling shaped the minds and inspired the careers of Jewish intellectuals as different as Cynthia Ozick, Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, and Carolyn Heilbrun.

Once Jewish scholars had attained a strong foothold in literary academe, pioneering spirits such as Robert Alter and Ruth R. Wisse turned their attention from English and American to Jewish literature in Hebrew and Yiddish.

Written as an interconnected series of twelve lucid and compelling portraits of major figures in the history ofAmerican literary criticism, this book illuminates the element of serendipity in culture-formation and exposes the social and intellectual forces at work in cultural change.

Adam Zachary Newton couples works of prose fiction by African American and Jewish American authors from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in American literature and rethinking their sometimes vexing relationship. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas' ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.

The Encyclopedia of the Essay is the first reference work entirely devoted to the essay as a genre.

Coverage begins with Montaigne, the first essayist, and stretches forward to Addison and Steele, The Spectator and The Tatler, Marivaux, William Hazlitt, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Robert Musil, Theodor Adorno, Nouvelle Revue francaise, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and across the ocean to Emerson and Thoreau, E.B. White, The New Yorker and Harper's, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion -- while also looking back to classical and medieval precursors.

More than 400 writers from around the world are included, along with geographic surveys that provide an historical framework, entries on types of essays, and entries on important single essays. Entries on closely-related genres such as letters, journals, treatises, sermons and reviews expand and explore the fluid boundaries of the essay as genre.