Dover Books on Literature & Drama

A leading art patron, lecturer, and author of the Victorian era, John Ruskin was also one of the period's foremost art and social critics. This anthology features excerpts from some of his best-known books, including Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, on the subjects he held most dear: nature, art, and society.

His mother is a virgin and he's reputed to be the son of a god; he loses favor and is driven from his kingdom to a sorrowful death - sound familiar? In The Hero, Lord Raglan contends that the heroic figures from myth and legend are invested with a common pattern that satisfies the human desire for idealization. Raglan outlines 22 characteristic themes or motifs from the heroic tales and illustrates his theory with events from the lives of characters from Oedipus (21 out a possible 22 points) to Robin Hood (a modest 13). A fascinating study that relates details from world literature with a lively wit and style, it was acclaimed by literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman as "a bold, speculative, and brilliantly convincing demonstration that myths are never historical but are fictional narratives derived from ritual dramas." This new edition of The Hero (which originally appeared some 13 years before Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces) is assured of a lasting popularity. This book will appeal to scholars of folklore and mythology, history, literature, and general readers as well.

Reporter, author, artist, and screenwriter Wallace Smith (1888-1937) served as the Washington correspondent for the Chicago American for over a decade, and originated the paper's Joe Blow comic panel feature. Reputed to have been one of the most colorful characters to have worked for the Hearst newspapers, he switched back and forth between cartooning and reporting, covering subjects as diverse as the criminal trials of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Pancho Villa's Mexican campaigns. Smith's experiences as an eyewitness to the armed struggles of the Mexican Revolution during the 1910s and '20s inspired these remarkable stories. They begin with the title tale of a soldadera, one of the many women who abandoned their conventional roles to fight in the revolution. Populated by soldiers, bandits, and peasants, these tales of love, treachery, courage, and adventure are illustrated by the author's atmospheric drawings from his field sketchbook.

How could the son of a glove-maker, born and bred in an Elizabethan backwater, have developed into the immortal William Shakespeare? How is it possible that someone with no formal education beyond grammar school wrote the world's most read and performed plays? This captivating exploration of the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare's life and work offers a persuasive case for the authenticity of his authorship. Scholarly but readable, the study rests upon the surviving evidence of the playwright's family life and career, from his humble beginnings to the triumphant presentations of his dramas before commoners and royalty alike. Author Irvin Leigh Matus discusses the publication and dating of the plays, their performance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the arguments favoring the Earl of Oxford as the true author. Reproductions of Elizabethan engravings, manuscript pages, and other illustrations complement this fascinating and accessible survey.

An eccentric poet acts as spiritual detective in eight thought-provoking tales. Gabriel Gale employs his extraordinary gifts of empathy to solve and prevent crimes perpetrated by madmen. His philosophical police-work forms the basis for captivating explorations of poetry, insanity, and sin - all expressed in the author's characteristic paradoxes and soaring flights of rhetoric. Best known as the creator of priest-detective Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) ranks among the twentieth century's most influential writers and thinkers. His prodigious talents embraced a wide range of subjects and genres, from philosophy and religion to history, literary criticism, and fantasy.

Written by two major American poets, this guide to versification is immensely useful for anyone interested in poetry or in general poetic structure. Its systematic study of meter, tempo, rhyme, and other components of verse incorporates countless vivid illustrative examples. Concise and informal, The Prosody Handbook progresses from the smaller elements to the larger: from syllables to feet to lines to stanzas, and from smaller stanzas to larger ones. Its modified notation for marking times and stresses is easily understandable. The extensive and expanded material in the chapter titled "Scansions and Comments" introduces the manifold problems of scansion, confronting readers with the necessity of considering a poem's prosody simultaneously with all its other elements and aspects. A glossary provides ready definitions and illustrations of the most common prosodic terms. A brief chapter covers classical prosody, and the text concludes with an updated bibliography. Both readers and writers of poetry will find this comprehensive volume an essential companion.

This comprehensive collection showcases Oscar Wilde's brilliant storytelling skills and his amazing stylistic versatility, ranging from fairy tales and ghost stories to detective yarns and comedies of manners. It includes the complete texts of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales," "A House of Pomegranates," "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories," "Poems in Prose," and the critical essay "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." Originally published in the late 1880s and early 1890s, these tales predate Wilde's fame as a dramatist. When he wrote them, he was best known among fashionable London society as a drawing-room raconteur. Many of the character types now familiar from his comedies first emerged in these stories, along with his gifted uses of parody, melodrama, paradox, and irony. Even more significantly, they reflect the author's preoccupation with opposites-idealistic love and desire, art and life, sincerity and artifice, innocence and sin, altruism and greed, and honesty and deceit-offering captivating expressions of the themes that dominated Wilde's life and thought.

Hilaire Belloc's best work - according to the author, as well as most critics - The Path to Rome is less concerned with Rome itself than with a pilgrim's journey to the Eternal City. A spirited Catholic apologist, Belloc traveled on foot from Toul (near Nancy), France, and crossed the Alps and the Apennines in order to, in his words, "see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved." Afterward, he turned his pen from his usual polemics to literature, and related in finely crafted prose his myriad experiences with the people he met along the way, as well as his reflections on tradition, politics, landscape, and much else. Throughout, the work abounds in Belloc's inimitable wit and good humor, and displays his profound love for the land, his faith, and his fellow man.

One of the richest, most inexhaustible books in the English language, The Anatomy of Melancholy is an elaborately systematized medical treatise dealing with various morbid mental states - their causes, symptoms, and cures - as well as a compendium of memorable utterances on the human condition in general, compiled from classical, scholastic, and contemporary sources.