In nine extraordinary explications — from Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida to Ionesco's Dance of Death — Miss Oates investigates tragedy as literary form. She takes account of the criticism of Steiner, Abel and others who suggest tragedy can only exist within a fixed historical context; but she believes that the true content of a great work of tragedy is not history but "dreams, ahistorical dreams." The God of the past, bearing on human limitations, is redefined as "the furthest reaches of man's hallucinations." Within domestic order there is the wilderness; within the possible, the unthinkable. Miss Oates then turns to her models: the melancholy commentary on the pretensions of tragedy itself in Troilus and Cressida; the conquest of reality by "nature's own imaginings" in Anthony and Cleopatra; Chekov's wavering symbolism; Yeats' meld of human and inhuman in death and consummation; Mann's "hero," a role self-created; the shifting multiplicity of the absurdists; and the "terror of the white whale" dissolving good and evil and life itself. Miss Oates pays tribute to Dostoevski as one "who can leave nothing left unsaid," an echo perhaps of her own compulsion to (as Kazin has mentioned) exorcize her characters and ideas rather than invent. Here, however, she moves with brilliance and agility along the edge of impossibilities where "sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish," and endure Hamlet's bad dreams bounded in a nutshell.
Pub Date: March 1, 1972
ISBN: 0814906753
Page Count: -
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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