Product Description: If I were to have tea with God He might say to me that there is no such thing as coincidence when you have faith.

Product Description: "Warrenpoint" is a memoir, and more than a memoir: with moments of novelistic narrative and lyricism wedded to musings on the aesthetic and theological themes of the author's coming of age--filial piety, original sin, a child's perceptions, and then the nature of terrorism, and of reading itself--it demonstrates the same insight and lucidity that have contributed to Denis Donoghue's fame as one of our most important critics...read more

Product Description: Denis Donoghue has been a key figure in Irish studies and an important public intellectual in Ireland, the UK and US throughout his career. These essays represent the best of his writing and operate in conversation with one another...read more

Product Description: A Stanley Burnshaw Reader brings together selections from the major works of poetry and prose that have distinguished Burnshaw as one of the most important voices in twentieth-century letters. Included are essays from Burnshaw’s two pioneering critical works: The Seamless Web, praised by the New York Times Book Review as “a defense of poetry that removes it from the realm of man’s spiritual luxuries and places it preeminently among his instruments of survival”, and The Poem Itself, a book that deals with forty-five poets of the last century in an entirely novel way which, as Lionel Trilling observed, “allows the Englishspeaking reader an unprecedented intimacy with poems in the original tongues...read more

On Eloquence questions the common assumption that eloquence is merely a subset of rhetoric, a means toward a rhetorical end. Denis Donoghue, an eminent and prolific critic of the English language, holds that this assumption is erroneous. While rhetoric is the use of language to persuade people to do one thing rather than another, Donoghue maintains that eloquence is “gratuitous, ideally autonomous, in speech and writing an upsurge of creative vitality for its own sake.” He offers many instances of eloquence in words, and suggests the forms our appreciation of them should take. Donoghue argues persuasively that eloquence matters, that we should indeed care about it. “Because we should care about any instances of freedom, independence, creative force, sprezzatura,” he says, “especially when we live—perhaps this is increasingly the case—in a culture of the same, featuring official attitudes, stereotypes of the officially enforced values, sedated language, a politics of pacification.” A noteworthy addition to Donoghue’s long-term project to reclaim a disinterested appreciation of literature as literature, this volume is a wise and pleasurable meditation on eloquence, its unique ability to move or give pleasure, and its intrinsic value.

Product Description: When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Taking its title from a poem of William Butler Yeats, this collection of essays focuses on Adam's Curse - the burdens and harsh conditions that, as Denis Donoghue underscores throughout, make any human achievement difficult. As he says, those conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that range from Shakespeare's plays to a novel by Cormac McCarthy. Donoghue begins with a personal chapter about his own early experiences reading literature while he was living and teaching in Ireland. He then deals with issues of theory, focusing on the validity of different literary theories, on words and their performances, on the impingement of oral and written conditions of reading, and on such current forces as technology and computers that impinge on the very idea of reading. Finally he examines certain works of literature: Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a passage from Wordsworth's The Prelude, a chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" and "Coole and Ballylee, 1931," and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian demonstrating what these texts have in common and how they must be differentiated through a sympathetic, imaginative, and informed reading. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Hailed by Frank O'Connor as one of "the greatest living storytellers," J. F. Powers, who died in 1999, stands with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver among the authors who have given the short story an unmistakably American cast...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Gathers stories and essays prominent in the career of the nineteenth-century American writer. (view table of contents)

A gathering of seventeen of the classic short stories of Henry James, covering the middle period of his career, contains some of his greatest writing, including the novella 'The Aspern Papers' and the unforgettable supernatural story 'Sir Edmund Orne.' (view table of contents)

A handsome, authoritative edition of twenty-one classic stories from James's latest and greatest period includes 'The Turn of the Screw,' 'The Figure in the Carpet,' and 'The Altar of the Dead.'

An expertly edited, fine edition of James's stories from the end of his career collects thirty-one tales, including the fantasies 'The Great Good Place' and 'The Jolly Corner,' along with 'The Beast in the Jungle.'

A critical biography profiles a nineteenth-century aesthetician whose modernistic work on The Renaissance resulted in controversy and ridicule.

A literary scholar and author of The Pure Good of Theory takes an analytical look at the tenets of Modernism that explores how such attitudes and ideas have affected writers' reactions, ideas, and work.

Book by Donoghue, Denis