The Grove of the Eumenides: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Culture (ePub)

Much of The Grove of the Eumenides forms the background study for Glaysher's epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, which he discusses in a new 2015 Preface.

Twenty years in the making, The Grove of the Eumenides invokes 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.

Reviews

"Poet Frederick Glaysher in these essays comments on a variety of literary and social issues, ranging from the plays of Sophocles, and the major works of Japanese literature, to the loss of religion and spirituality in modern society and literature." -"New Titles Elected for Essay and General Literature Index," H. W. Wilson Co., September 2007

"Intriguing because I stop and think about his arguments. What is the role of the universal, of epic poetry, and how has postmodernism dealth with mimesis? Scholarly, well-substantiated arguments, with a wealth of materials that challenge precepts you might have about "value" of a writer/writing/cultural contributions." -Goodreads

From the Back Cover

"A poet now whose work and dedication to a demanding and difficult art I admire; a man who has the gift of inner grace." -Robert Hayden

About the Author

FREDERICK GLAYSHER is an epic poet, rhapsode, poet-critic, and the author or editor of ten books.

Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial, at the University of Michigan, with the poet Robert Hayden and edited Hayden's prose and poetry. He holds two degrees from the University of Michigan, has lived in Japan and traveled widely in China, and was a Fulbright-Hays scholar to China and a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar on India.