The Grove of the Eumenides: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Culture

Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture. East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its Age. Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

Table of Contents:
The Function of Criticism.Meditations in an Old Barn.The American Journey into the Land of Ulro.Postmodern American Poets: Debauchees of Dew.MimesisPoetry in the Nuclear Age.Yeats's "Vision of Evil."T. S. Eliot and "The Horror! The Horror!"At the Dark Tower.Sophocles and the Plague of Modernity.Czeslaw Milosz's Mythic Catholicism.Saul Bellow's SoulThe Dialectic of Chinese Literature.Japan's Floating Bridge of Dreams.India's Kali YugaRobert Hayden in the Morning Time.Isaac and Peter: (Isaac Bashevis Singer and Walker Percy).The Victory of World Governance.Epopee.

About the Author :
Frederick Glaysher privately studied writing with the poet Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan, lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan in Maebashi, Japan, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, and on the Mississippi, ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester. Glaysher is the editor of both Hayden's Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright). He has published two books of poetry, Into the Ruins: Poems (ISBN: 0967042127) in 1999, and The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem (ISBN: 0967042178) in 2002. A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, Glaysher studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, he further explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity. An outspoken advocate of the United Nations and accredited participant at the UN Millennium Forum (2000), he takes literary account of global realities.

Review :
"Intriguing because I stop and think about his arguments. What is the role of the universal, of epic poetry, and how has postmodernism dealth with mimesis? Scholarly, well-substantiated arguments, with a wealth of materials that challenge precepts you might have about "value" of a writer/writing/cultural contributions." -Kitty Jospe "Poet Frederick Glaysher in these essays comments on a variety of literary and social issues, ranging from the plays of Sophocles, and the major works of Japanese literature, to the loss of religion and spirituality in modern society and literature." -"New Titles Elected for Essay and General Literature Index," September 2007, H. W. Wilson Co.