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ELEANOR WACHTEL hosts CBC Radio's weekly literary program Writers & Company on Sunday afternoons. Two selections of her interviews, Writers & Company and More Writers & Company, have been published [...]

The examination of English author's George Eliot's 1859 fictional novel 'The Lifted Veil' has triggered queries regarding its role in shaping Eliot's career as a writer because this is the first work in which she carefully takes on a first-person male persona. The association between one's gender and knowledge is important to the interpretation of the story in terms of medical science. Eliot's take portrays the error of pursuing 'Woman' as the representative of an unfathomable 'Other.'

The concept [of] 'attentive love' . . . designates a cognitive capacity - attention - and a virtue - love. . . . Attention lets difference emerge without searching for [...]

The author Margaret Drabble, once a student of literature traditionalist F.R. Leavis, is generally known as a traditional fiction writer with no interest in post modern philosophy. Her 1991 work, a novel entitled 'The Gates of Ivory', investigates postmodern society as seen through the lives of three women friends in the 1980s. Drabble's use of postmodern literary techniques is discussed.

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's novels critique the vain aristocratic values and challenge male hegemony prevalent in 18th century French society. Through the character of Cressy in 'L'Histoire du Marquis de Cressy', Riccoboni demonstrates the male perception of women and how Madame Cressy revolted against the patriarchal trend by committing suicide. Subjugation of women and their manipulation by men is a thematic constant in Riccobani's novels. However, the novels end with visions of revolutionary changes and dismantling of the cultural ideologies and gender stereotypes of the 'ancien regime.'

In an interview with Tom LeClair, novelist Don DeLillo was asked the 'great bar-mitzvah question' -- to name some writers who had influenced him. He eventually listed novels by Joyce, [...]

Early modern French fiction, beginning in the seventeenth century, often employed a frame narrative which provided the opportunity for different voices to speak through the novel. This use of polyphony usually took place within the pairing of primary and secondary narratives. Some of the authors and works that illustrated this device include Marguerite de Navarre's 'Heptameron,' Marie-Madeleine Lafayette's 'La Princesse de Cleves,' and Charles Sorel's 'Historie comique de Francion.', The sharp distinction traditionally drawn between French Renaissance and Classical literature was based in part on the assumption that the defining genre of literary history was poetry--including verse tragedy and [...]

I once imagined that I could attend a conference of the Associated Writing Programs without putting my writerly soul in jeopardy. I learned otherwise one brilliant Easter weekend in San [...]

A few years ago I wrote a series of essays in which I proclaimed that the enterprise of fiction was in a state of serious crisis - a state that [...]

My father was a machinist. Most of the fathers (and none of the mothers) who lived on our block were workers in heavy steel - a thing, as Plato would [...]

We convened, late summer, between the wars. My friends and I traveled by ferry and train, slept sitting chins on chests, to join the others at Como in the lake [...]

The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the [...]

As to fiction's future (for which I have no crystal ball), I can only say that I have no fear for it; it looks very bright indeed, although the brightness [...]

The novel 'Minus Time' presents contemporary issues through the eyes of a family living in Toronto, Canada. The issues tackled in the novel include animal rights, the environment, the growing influence of mass media and the intrusion of television into daily life. The novel is an example of the persistence of writers to present the world in their own viewpoints, despite the threat posed by other forms of communications on the book culture.

We met Robert Creeley at Miriam and Toby Olson's. Michael Heller and Bobby Byrd were there too. Creeley walked Bobby Byrd to our place at three A.M. or so. We [...]

In 1963 in a collection of articles entitled Salinger, Edgar Branch has a piece in which he explores the 'literary continuity' between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and [...]

'Tristram Shandy' provides a glimpse into Sterne's outlook of human nature. The novel forces on a labyrinthine world reader's self-made labyrinths that satiate the desire for coherence in the midst of confusion. Toby find in his labyrinth that the hunger for knowledge increases as one gains it. The concept of the labyrinth that was in vogue was perhaps the garden maze which can be associated with Toby and his fortifications.

George Meredith's 'The Egoist' resounds with Darwin's evolutionary concepts concerning the mating game and the rights of women. This explicit connection is evident in the story's focus on the physical and in the 'struggle between selfish and social instincts.' The story revolves around Clara Middleton's attempts to extricate herself from an engagement with Sir Willoughby Patterne, a baronet whose chief criteria for a bride were 'money, health and beauty.'

A look at the developmental structure of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Artist of the Beautiful,' may help to resolve the debate over whether Emersonian Transcendentalism or Romantic Idealism was the philosophical framework of the author's work. This new perspective reflects both the author's philosophical sophistication and reveals an analogy between the release of Owen Warland's butterfly and the 'reader's imagination from its rational, empirical confinement.'

Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Cousin Phillis' tells more than a woman's unrequited love for her first love. Her heroine, Phillis Holman, represents the predicament of educated women who mistakenly accept 'sexual and intellectual bondage for fulfillment and liberation.' Despite her unusual education, her roles are confined to daughter and lover while the men who teach her 'control her education in ways that serve their interests.'

In the book 'A Critic's Notebook', author Irving Howe concentrates on individual novel writers, the impact of some of their personal narratives on the minds of the readers, the aesthetic imagination and the true human emotions that generated the context and character of the novel. He remarks on their ability to express these inner visions to the readers in such a way as to maintain their interest and convey the thought tactfully. He has added his unique flavor while interpreting the works of other authors.

In an imaginary question-answer session, an author muses over the mundane line of distinction that separates a novel from the poem. A poem may be a state of mind or being or revelation, where as novel is a state of logic, about story, about more earthly feelings. The difference is one of concept and expectations and not of form or content.

Saul Bellow veers toward a schematic allegorization that renders inefficient the social and psychological realism necessary for his art's success. Bellow, who is concerned about being misconstrued as an un-American speculative intellectual after attacks were launched against him, should open his novels to the potential fragmentation of essayism. Readers and critics can better dissect Bellow's novels for the inspirational motivations behind the genius if his writings are devoid of 'mind-numbing labels' and 'coercive certainties' that the characters impose on everybody.

Novelist Saul Bellow is perceived as a captain of intellect whose writings bring to mind major writers such as Kafka, Wilhelm Reich, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Rousseau. Bellow defines intellectual captains as individuals who communicate with their contemporaries while being able and willing to articulate on nearly any subject matter. An intellectual captain, who may even appear to know more than he is actually entitled to, never fails to amuse while telling what he knows.

Saul Bellow's literary influence from Spanish prose fiction is evident in his quixotic novel 'The Adventures of Augie March.' He agrees that the best novelists in the US who are seeking sources of inspiration turn to 19th-century writings such as those from France and Russia. Spanish literature is the product of medieval European traditions; Judaic and Arabic culture; the Inquisition; the Moorish-Arabic-Berber influence; and the Catholic, Moslem and Jewish religions.

Saul Bellow's 'Mr. Sammler's Planet' depicts its central character Artur Sammler as the intellectual's hero who is alienated by everything he sees. The novel, which revolves around a man's spiritual journey that regresses seven centuries, is about 'making peace with intermediacy and representation.' Mr. Sammler, though deeply flawed and contemptuous, admits that imitation is inevitable and imitating good things is necessary in life.

Saul Bellow's novella titled 'Seize the Day' alludes to other great books such as Job and Ecclesiastes in the Bible and those by Milton, Tolstoy and Emerson. The story, which is set in a New York City summer in the 1950s, captures the sadness of failed relationships between fathers and sons. Tommy Wilhelm wallows in self-pity and asks financial assistance from his father Dr. Adler at a time when his life was virtually all messed up. After being humiliated by his father, he finds himself in a funeral chapel where he cries over a dead stranger in comic irony.

A writer perceives Saul Bellow's 'Humboldt's Gift' and its depictions of New York as a gift that provides topics for writing. 'Humboldt's Gift' is best remembered for the conversations between Humboldt and Charlie Citrine. Charlie, who pays tribute to Humboldt and their post-war world in the book's entirety, also tries to purge Humboldt and Humboldt's world from his system to achieve 'metaphysical stability' through anthroposophy. His recollections of Humboldt is an animating combination of love, anger and grief.

In an Esquire article published in February 1935 (six years after A Farewell to Arms), Ernest Hemingway presented a list of books he 'would rather read again for the first [...]

Henry James' novel entitled 'The Bostonians' deals with power and ends with the triumph of materialism. Divergent interpretations of the conclusion of this work would attribute either the revolutionary or the aristocrat represented by certain characters as the ultimate victor. However, a closer analysis of the work as well as the era of the late 19th century to which it belongs shows that it is crass capitalism and consumerism that James alludes to as the trend of the future, for better or for worse.

Works of fiction on early 19th century witchcraft such as the 'Crucible,' published in 1953, dwelt on wide-ranging social and political trials and turmoils in the early American republic. Works including 'The tragedy of Superstition' and 'Rachael Dyer,' which dealt with the Salem witch trials, had a common theme that discarding reason could cause major upheavals in the society.

While post-World War II business fiction writers viewed the modern corporation as a threat to individualism, the author makes the point that modern fiction writers do not share that concern. However, modern fiction does describe the business world as being heavily populated by amoral or immoral valueless people, especially among those businessmen engrossed in financial manipulations. The author also observes that the world of business fiction remains an essentially white male dominated one.

The period in which the Brothers Grimm and Hans Anderson grew up was a time when translations of fictional works was in vogue, especially with the educated people. Fairy tales were meant to be read by children, who were not familiar with foreign languages. Hence the need for translation appeared gradually and soon became a strong formative force in world literature.