Explores the great themes in modern literature, and the relationship of the artist to society. Revised and enlarged version of a lecture given on various occasions in Germany and in America. (DS)

Using Barthelme as a representative of current avant-garde American writers, the author analyzes his works from a traditional critical approach, outlining themes and structural patterns, and then from an "art as object" approach, in which fictional works are viewed as constructs in themselves, not as descriptions of anything. (SJL)

The present study, in an attempt to suggest factors which were at work in giving a man of such varied interests and predispositions the peculiar shape that they did, focuses upon the pathway that Wilson took during the 1920s, while questing for the mysteries of Axel's castle. (Author)

A study of the reasons why editors of poetry magazines accept or reject submissions. (DD)

Argues that the clarity of Ishmael Reed's later novels is part of a complex and innovative style that is "rhetorical" in the broadest sense. Notes that his narrative strategies are constructed primarily on the way the audience will read and even misread the novel. Explores the rhetorical workings in Reed's novel "Reckless…

The lesbian detective of current fiction may be single, but she is not alone; she has a lover. In varying degrees of realism and fantasy, sexuality is part of her character. While some writers in the field argue that romances involving the protagonists of feminist detective fiction distract from the plot, these critics themselves sometimes break…