James M. McGlathery Livres

Wagner audiences are especially challenged to fathom the meaning of his operas, for there is much mystery as to just what they depict. This study attempts to meet that challenge for the ten operas - from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal - that Wagner considered to embody his particular poetic genius and which indeed continue to be regularly performed. The texts of the ten works are examined with special attention to the role of erotic passion, a subject usually relegated to secondary importance in Wagner criticism.

Series Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas at Austin; Robert Lecker, McGill University; David OConnell, Georgia State University; David William Foster, Arizona State University; Janet Pérez, Texas Tech University.TWAYNES UNITED STATES AUTHORS, ENGLISH AUTHORS, and WORLD AUTHORS Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works. Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an authors work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writers work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives.

Professor McGlathery's study is the first to survey scholarly criticism of Grimms' Fairy Tales from its publication to the present. It reveals the changing perception of fairy tales, from the initial assumption that they were descended from ancient sources, and the consequent interest in the genre's origin and evidence for ancient ritualistic practice, to the study of the fairy tale as a literary genre, distinct from other types of popular narrative; ideological critics are seen to pursue the meaning of the tales, and folklorists to examine cultural sources and story-telling as performance art.

This study aims to show that Hoffmann drew on his own psychic experiences relevant to sexuality, and that he also was writing in a broad literary tradition of roguish sexual humor and ironic portrayal of the psychology of desire that had survived to his time in «opera buffa» and comic theater generally, as well as in certain vestiges of the eighteenth-century «conte licencieux».

This study aims to show that Hoffmann drew on his own psychic experiences relevant to sexuality, and that he also was writing in a broad literary tradition of roguish sexual humor and ironic portrayal of the psychology of desire that had survived to his time in opera buffa and comic theater generally, as well as in certain vestiges of the eighteenth-century conte licencieux. In this second volume the perspectives developed in Part One: Hoffmann and His Sources are used to provide new readings of each of Hoffmann's four-dozen tales and of his two novels.

This study aims to show that Hoffmann drew on his own psychic experiences relevant to sexuality, and that he also was writing in a broad literary tradition of roguish sexual humor and ironic portrayal of the psychology of desire that had survived to his time in «opera buffa» and comic theater generally, as well as in certain vestiges of the eighteenth-century «conte licencieux».