Read complete books and articles on: Literary Imagination

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Literary Imagination

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

The Use of Imagination: Educational Thought and the Literary Mind » Read Now
by William Walsh. 258 pgs.

Collections: Education, Literature, Entire Library

...IMAGINATION THE USE OF IMAGINATION Educational Thought and the Literary Mind William Walsh...the civic use of the imagination--a faculty for the possible...52 4 The...
2.

The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination » Read Now
by Christopher Collins. 196 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library
3.

The Depictive Image: Metaphor and Literary Experience » Read Now
by Phillip Stambovsky. 156 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library
4.

Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination » Read Now
by Albert William Levi. 348 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Literature, Entire Library

...characteristic forms of literary imagination, concretely expressed...doctrine of the imagination adequate to the needs of literary criticism and aesthetic...The...
5.

Skepticism and Poetry; An Essay on the Poetic Imagination » Read Now
by D. G. James. 252 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination » Read Now
by William F. Lynch. 267 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library
7.

Essay on the Creative Imagination (1906) » Read Now
by Theodule Ribot, Albert H. N. Baron. 370 pgs.

Collections: Psychology, Entire Library

...ESSAY ON THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION BY TH. RIBOT TRANSLATED FROM...spook science" per se , and the imagination, now analyzed by M. Ribot in...been accustomed to speak of the...
8.

Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination » Read Now
by Tom Quirk. 234 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, Nothing Abstract is a collection of essays gathered over the past twenty years -- all of which, in some fashion, have to do with a genetic approach to literary study. In previous books, the author has traced and discussed the com-positional...
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Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, Nothing Abstract is a collection of essays gathered over the past twenty years -- all of which, in some fashion, have to do with a genetic approach to literary study. In previous books, the author has traced and discussed the com-positional histories of certain literary works. In this book, Tom Quirk takes a stand against the direction taken by modern critical theory and sets forth his approach to literature through source and influence study, the evolution of a certain writer's career, the establishment of biographical or other contexts, and the transition from one literary era to another.
All of the essays that Quirk has chosen for this collection illustrate a scholarly method. The first two essays, somewhat general in their concerns, constitute a defense for the genetic method, and subsequent essays serve as evidence for the usefulness of genetic inquiry. The entire volume resists poststructuralist and later theory not through active confrontation, but merely by being what it is and doing what it does. More important though is that all of the chosen essays are intrinsically interesting. They tell fascinating stories -- stories about literary genesis, biographical circumstances, and artistic ambitions and achievement.
Authors discussed at length are Edgar Allan Poe, Tony Hillerman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Wallace Stevens, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Joyce Carol Oates. Quirk also touches on Flannery O'Connor, Richard Wright, Robert Frost, Jack London, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and others. Nothing Abstract makes a great contribution to the study of important Americanwriters and will be welcomed by all students and scholars of American studies and American literature.
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9.

Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds » Read Now
by Peter J. Schakel. 214 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Imagination has long been regarded as central to C. S. Lewis's life and to his creative and critical works, but this is the first study to provide a thorough analysis of his theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. Peter Schakel...
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Imagination has long been regarded as central to C. S. Lewis's life and to his creative and critical works, but this is the first study to provide a thorough analysis of his theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. Peter Schakel begins by concentrating on the way reading or engaging with the other arts is an imaginative activity. He focuses on three books in which imagination is the central theme: Surprised by Joy, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image.
He then examines imagination and reading in Lewis's fiction, concentrating specifically on the Chronicles of Narnia, the most imaginative of his works. He looks at how the imaginative experience of reading the Chronicles is affected by the physical texture of the books, the illustrations, revisions of the texts, the order in which the books are read, and their narrative "voice, " the "storyteller" who becomes almost a character in the stories.
Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis also explores Lewis's ideas about imagination in the nonliterary arts. Although Lewis regarded engagement with the arts as essential to a well-rounded and satisfying life, critics of his works and even his biographers have given little attention to this aspect of his life. Schakel reviews the place of music, dance, art, and architecture in Lewis's life, the ways in which he uses them as content in his poems and stories, and how he develops some of the deepest, most significant themes of his stories through them.
Schakel concludes by analyzing the uses and abuses of imagination. He looks first at "moral imagination." Although Lewis did not use this term, Schakel shows howLewis developed the concept in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man long before it became popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. While readers often concentrate on the Christian dimension of Lewis's works, equally or
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10.

Shakespeare's Imagination; A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration » Read Now
by Edward A. Armstrong. 198 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library
11.

Dickens and Imagination » Read Now
by Robert Higbie. 204 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Robert Higbie investigates the concept and use of imagination in Romantic and Victorian literature, concentrating on the novels of Charles Dickens and showing how they illuminate and are influenced by various tendencies in post-Romantic thought. Higbie offers a new definition of imagination as a...
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Robert Higbie investigates the concept and use of imagination in Romantic and Victorian literature, concentrating on the novels of Charles Dickens and showing how they illuminate and are influenced by various tendencies in post-Romantic thought. Higbie offers a new definition of imagination as a function of desire, an unstable compound existing "at the intersection of reason and desire" and he discusses the way 19th-century writers attempted to use imagination to revive or replace religious belief.
Against this background he discusses Dickens's works from Pickwick to Our Mutual Friend, showing that both an idealist emphasis on imagination and a realist distrust of it evolved in complex ways throughout Dickens's career. He argues that Dickens's novels involve a search for some sort of spiritual ideal and that he based that search on imagination. At the same time, Dickens recognized the limitations of imagination and attempted to transform it through the process enacted in his novels.
During a period when,criticism has been dominated by ideological orthodoxy, Higbie does not impose modern, quasi-political attitudes on his subject but rather accepts the past sympathetically on its own terms. His work is refreshingly free of jargon and offers an alternate way of thinking about literature and the creative process.
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12.

Imagination Transformed: The Evolution of the Female Character in Keats's Poetry » Read Now
by Karla Alwes. 214 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...transcendent powers lie in the temporal beauty of the earth. The imagination that had consistently attempted to leave the earth gives...consistently delineated his...
13.

Willa Cather and the Art of Conflict: Re-visioning Her Creative Imagination » Read Now
by Patrick W. Shaw. 194 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

"Although some scholars may object to the hyper-close relationship of this analysis to Cather's personal life, the end result is a challenging and intriguing addition to Cather scholarship."—Choice
14.

A "Strange Sapience": The Creative Imagination of D.H. Lawrence » Read Now
by Daniel Dervin. 242 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
15.

The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism » Read Now
by Ernest Lee Tuveson. 220 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Entire Library

...of the mind as that conception affected the theory of the imagination. I must also record my indebtedness to M. H. Abrams...i , Modern Language Quarterly chapter iii ...
16.

The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination » Read Now
by John Livingston Lowes. 644 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...the chief services which literary scholarship can render is...Coleridges theory of the imagination. It is an attempt to get at...me since his death by his literary...