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

by Frederick Glaysher (Author)

From New Preface (April 15, 2024):

"All the essays in The Grove of the Eumenides were written after 1982 when I wrote my first draft of a plot outline for my epic poem The Parliament of Poets. These essays constitute and record my background study, as it were, over a period of more than twenty years, leading up to their publication in 2007... The Grove of the Eumenides is the foundation upon which my epic poem is built."

2024 revised edition. Frederick Glaysher evokes 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.