Bücher von William F. Zak

In Robert Frost's Visionary Gift: Mining and Minding the Wonder of Unexpected Supply, William F. Zak provides groundbreaking analysis of well over one hundred of Frost's lyrics, considering each poem as an interrelated portion of the poet's overarching ';constellation of intention.' Beyond biography, this book offers extended, close readings of Frost's oeuvre, building its case incrementally from deftly examined particulars. Zak discusses how the pastoral mode Frost adopts is no depleted, homespun idiom retreating from modernism's complexities, but a self-conscious determination to assume the prophetic mantle from his predecessors (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau). Frost's version of pastoral represents no escape from life's stresses, but the most constructive and life-sustaining means to address life's struggles ';head on'in both sense of that last phrase''.This book makes a case for Frost as America's preeminent philosophical poet. The unfortunate effect of Frost's early detractors' claim that he was merely an ironic and equivocal anecdotalist has for too long relegated his work to the second tier of the modernist poetic pantheon. This study, by contrast, supports Robert Graves' claim for Frost as the ';first American poet who could be honestly reckoned a master poet by world standards.'

Hamlets Problematic Revenge: Forging a Royal Mandate provides a new argument within Shakespearean studies that argues the oft-noted arrest of the play's dramaturgical momentum, especially evident in Hamlet's much delayed enactment of his revenge, represents in fact a succinct emblem of the ';arrested development' in the moral maturity of the entire cast, most notably, Hamlet himselfas the unifying disclosure and tragic problem in the play. Settling for unreflective and short-sighted personal gratifications and cold comforts, they truantly elbow aside a more considerable moral obligation. Again and again, all yield this duty's commanding priority to a childishly self-regarding fear of offending those in nominal positions of power and questionable positions of authorityfigures, like Ophelia and Hamlet's fathers, for instance, demanding an unworthy deference. While Hamlet fails to consider with loving regard the improved well-being of the larger community to which he owes his existence and, fails to interrogate the moral adequacy of the Ghost's command of violent reprisal (two things he never does nor even contemplates doing), ';all occasions' in the play ';do inform against' him and merely ';spur a dull revenge'not, as he interprets his own words, arguing the need for greater urgency in his vendetta, but, instead, to ';inform against' the criminality of that very course itself. His revenge therefore can be argued as ';dull,' not because he cannot summon the wherewithal to enact it more bloodily, but because in obsessing about it ceaselessly he remains unreceptive to its ';dull' or ';unenlightened' opposition to the evil he hopes to eradicate. Hamlet does not avenge his father; this book argues that he becomes him. Amidst a wealth of previously unremarked figurative mirrorings, as well as much of the seemingly digressive material in Hamlet within Shakespearean studies, Hamlet's Problematic Revenge brings to light a new interpretation of the tragic problem in the play.

A Mirror for Lovers: Shake-speare's Sonnets as Curious Perspective, by William F. Zak, seeks to identify in Shake-speare'e sonnet sequence the structural and thematic features of the satirical tradition born in Plato's Symposium. Through this study, Zak traces the power of an idea to endure, re-animate, and enrich itself through time: Plato's discrimination of the true nature of love in The Symposium. Born anew in its medieval reincarnations (The Romance of the Rose, The Vita Nuova, and The Canzoniere of Petrarch), the tradition begun in Plato's Symposium was then resuscitated in the Elizabethan sonnet sequence revival, most notably in Shake-speare's Sonnets. With extended examination of all the texts in the Q manuscript, A Mirror for Lovers makes a case for the mutually illuminating relationship among the sonnets to the fair young man and the dark lady, ';A Lover's Complaint,' and the mysterious dedication that until now have never received attention as an integral symbolic matrix of meaning.