George Douglas Atkins's Books

The Faith of John Dryden

Change and Continuity

By: George Douglas Atkins

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The Faith of John Dryden

Change and Continuity

By: George Douglas Atkins

John Dryden's celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism is revealed in this provocative study as the culmination of a lifelong search that began with his youth in an actively Puritan family. Atkin's familiarity with the religious thought of the times allows him to range widely among Dryden's contemporaries and predecessors and to bring a fresh perspective to those key poems in Dryden's religious development: Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. Through a sensitive reappraisal of all Dryden's texts—including those less widely known—Atkins shows that Dryden had a lifelong antipathy for all "priests" of whatever sect, whether pagan or Christian; by concentrating on the theme of Dryden's opposition to the clergy and his efforts toward articulating a faith for the layman, Atkins provides an important new way of tracing and evaluating the changes in Dryden's religious position and, with this perspective, offers a new interpretation of Dryden's conversion.

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Page Count

225

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

081319430X

ISBN 13

9780813194301

The Argumentative Imagination

Wordsworth, Dryden, Religious Dialogues

By: George Myerson

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The Argumentative Imagination

Wordsworth, Dryden, Religious Dialogues

By: George Myerson

This work offers readings of four stories which depend upon the representation of argument. They belong to diverse works of poetic vision (from Wordsworth, Dryden, the Book of Job and the Bhagavad Gita). The arguments and questions in the texts motivate the stories, which in turn carry forward the arguments.

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Page Count

200

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0719036763

ISBN 13

9780719036767

Estranging the Familiar

Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

By: George Douglas Atkins

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Estranging the Familiar

Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

By: George Douglas Atkins

In Estranging the Familiar, G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay, the form critical writing once took and the form that is now enjoying a resurgence of popularity and excellence. Atkins contends that to reach a general audience, criticism must move away from the impersonality of modern criticism and contemporary theory without embracing the old-fashioned essay. "The venerable familiar essay may remain the basis," Atkins writes, "but its conventional openness, receptivity, and capaciousness must extend to theory, philosophy, and the candor that seems to mark the tail-end of the twentieth century." In noting the timeliness, if not the necessity, of a return to the essay, Atkins also considers our culture's parallel "return to the personal." When the essay combines good writing with the concerns of the personal, Atkins says, it becomes a form of criticism that is readable, vital, and potentially attractive to a large readership. Atkins hopes critics will tap into the revitalized interest the essay now enjoys without ignoring the considerable insights and advances of contemporary theory. He argues that despite claims to the contrary there is no inherent incompatibility between the essay and modern theory. As Atkins considers various experiments in critical writing from Plato to the present, notably feminist interest in the personal and autobiographical, he contends that these attempts, although undeniably important, fall short of the desired goal when they emphasize the merely expressive and neglect the artful quality good writing can bring to personal criticism. The final third of the book consists of a series of experiments in critical writing that represent the author's own attempts to bridge the gap between theory and popular criticism, between an academic and a general audience. In essays that illustrate the rhetorical power of the form, Atkins describes the reciprocal relationship between his life experience and a reading of The Odyssey, explains the role that theory has played in his personal development, and chronicles his attempts to find a voice as a writer.

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Page Count

222

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820314536

ISBN 13

9780820314532

Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading

By: George Douglas Atkins

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Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading

By: George Douglas Atkins

Deconstruction—a mode of close reading associated with the contemporary philosopher Jacques Derrida and other members of the "Yale School"—is the current critical rage, and is likely to remain so for some time. Reading Deconstruction / Deconstructive Reading offers a unique, informed, and badly needed introduction to this important movement, written by one of its most sensitive and lucid practitioners. More than an introduction, this book makes a significant addition to the current debate in critical theory. G. Douglas Atkins first analyzes and explains deconstruction theory and practice. Focusing on such major critics and theorists as Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman, he brings to the fore issues previously scanted in accounts of deconstruction, especially its religious implications. Then, through close readings of such texts as Religio Laici, A Tale of a Tub, and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, he proceeds to demonstrate and exemplify a mode of deconstruction indebted to both Derrida and Paul de Man. This skillfully organized book, designed to reflect the "both/ and" nature of deconstruction, thus makes its own contribution to deconstructive practice. The important readings provided of Dryden, Swift, and Pope are among the first to treat major Augustan texts from a deconstructive point of view and make the book a valuable addition to the study of that period. Well versed in deconstruction, the variety of texts he treats, and major issues of current concern in literary study, Atkins offers in this book a balanced and judicious defense of deconstruction that avoids being polemical, dogmatic, or narrowly ideological. Whereas much previous work on and in deconstruction has been notable for its thick prose, jargon, and general obfuscation, this book will be appreciated for its clarity and grace, as well as for its command of an impressively wide range of texts and issues. Without taming it as an instrument of analysis and potential change, Atkins makes deconstruction comprehensible to the general reader. His efforts will interest all those concerned with literary theory and criticism, Augustan literature, and the relation of literature and religion.

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Page Count

183

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

081318309X

ISBN 13

9780813183091

Reading Essays

An Invitation

By: George Douglas Atkins

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Reading Essays

An Invitation

By: George Douglas Atkins

Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.” Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick. Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author’s contention that reading should not be separated from writing. Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of “the glorious essay.”

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Page Count

297

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082032826X

ISBN 13

9780820328263

The Postmodern Bible

By: George Aichele,Fred W. Burnett,Robert M. Fowler,David Job ling,Tina Pippin,Wilhelm Wuellner,Bible and Culture Collective

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The Postmodern Bible

By: George Aichele,Fred W. Burnett,Robert M. Fowler,David Job ling,Tina Pippin,Wilhelm Wuellner,Bible and Culture Collective

The burgeoning use of modern literary theory and cultural criticism in recent biblical studies has led to stimulating--but often bewildering--new readings of the Bible. This book, argued from a perspective shaped by postmodernism, is at once an accessible guide to and an engagement with various methods, theories, and critical practices transforming biblical scholarship today. Written by a collective of cutting-edge scholars--with each page the work of multiple hands--The Postmodern Bible deliberately breaks with the individualist model of authorship that has traditionally dominated scholarship in the humanities and is itself an illustration of the postmodern transformation of biblical studies for which it argues. The book introduces, illustrates, and critiques seven prominent strategies of reading. Several of these interpretive strategies--rhetorical criticism, structuralism and narratology, reader-response criticism, and feminist criticism--have been instrumental in the transformation of biblical studies up to now. Many--feminist and womanist criticism, ideological criticism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalytic criticism--hold promise for the continued transformation of these studies in the future. Focusing on readings from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, this volume illuminates the current multidisciplinary debates emerging from postmodernism by exposing the still highly contested epistemological, political, and ethical positions in the field of biblical studies.

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Page Count

418

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0300068182

ISBN 13

9780300068184

Tracing the Essay

Through Experience to Truth

By: George Douglas Atkins

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Tracing the Essay

Through Experience to Truth

By: George Douglas Atkins

The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820327611

ISBN 13

9780820327617

Educational Learning and Development

Building and Enhancing Capacity

By: Margaret Baguley,Patrick Alan Danaher,Andy Davies,L. De George-Walker,Janice K. Jones,Karl J. Matthews,Warren Midgley,Catherine H. Arden,Linda De George-Walker

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Educational Learning and Development

Building and Enhancing Capacity

By: Margaret Baguley,Patrick Alan Danaher,Andy Davies,L. De George-Walker,Janice K. Jones,Karl J. Matthews,Warren Midgley,Catherine H. Arden,Linda De George-Walker

Through ten research projects, this book explores the topic of educational learning and development in order to examine issues that are impacting, either positively or negatively, on current research in this area. The authors explore the capacity building potential of the projects and what factors impacted on or assisted their development.

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Page Count

252

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1137392843

ISBN 13

9781137392848

Quests of Difference

Reading Pope's Poems

By: George Douglas Atkins

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Quests of Difference

Reading Pope's Poems

By: George Douglas Atkins

In this eminently readable book, G. Douglas Atkins continues the efforts undertaken in Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading to open eighteenth-century texts to the insights of recent critical theory. Through close readings of most of Pope's major poems, Atkins demonstrates how the powerful theoretical movement known as deconstruction enriches, challenges, and significantly modifies our understanding of the work of the greatest poet of the eighteenth century. The first full-scale deconstructive study of Augustan poetry, Quests of Difference at once offers a fresh and compelling reading of Pope and makes an important contribution to constructive criticism. Though it will be of particular interest and importance to specialists in both eighteenth-century studies and criticism and theory, Quests of Difference is written with the general reader in mind. All readers will appreciate the intelligence and balance of Atkin's approach as well as the clarity, informality, and grace that distinguish his writing.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813187869

ISBN 13

9780813187860

Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts

By: Patrick Alan Danaher,Andy Davies,L. De George-Walker,Janice K. Jones,Karl J. Matthews,Warren Midgley,Catherine H. Arden,Linda De George-Walker,Margaret Baguley

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Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts

By: Patrick Alan Danaher,Andy Davies,L. De George-Walker,Janice K. Jones,Karl J. Matthews,Warren Midgley,Catherine H. Arden,Linda De George-Walker,Margaret Baguley

Education is generally supposed to help learners to develop new capacities and to be able to apply them in work and life - yet we still know very little about how to build useful capacities. This book investigates nine research projects, exploring why particular capacities are successful in some situations but not in others.

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Page Count

255

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

1137374578

ISBN 13

9781137374578

The Lonely Other

A Woman Watching America

By: Diana Hume George

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The Lonely Other

A Woman Watching America

By: Diana Hume George

The Lonely Other chronicles the life of a woman constantly facing new amazements. In Wound Chevy at Wounded Knee (Best of the Best American Essays (1994)) Diana Hume Georgia recounts how she lived a trapped and futile life as a white teenage bride on an Indian reservation. As an adult she confronts drunken hunters outside her isolated cabin; she faces her fear of heights by climbing in the White Mountains; she unflinchingly delves into her long-standing engagement with Anne Sexton's poetry, and into her own father's suicide. Always she wonders: Can women learn to travel alone, on roads and in their daily lives, without fear.

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Page Count

280

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0252065344

ISBN 13

9780252065347

When the Saints Came Marching In

What the New Orleans NFL Franchise Did Wrong (and Sometimes Right) in Its Expansion Years

By: George Becnel

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When the Saints Came Marching In

What the New Orleans NFL Franchise Did Wrong (and Sometimes Right) in Its Expansion Years

By: George Becnel

Famed defensive end Bubba Smith menacing opposing quarterbacks while wearing a New Orleans Saints uniform. Bruising running back Larry Csonka breaking tackles on his way to the end zone for the game-winning touchdown. Future Hall-of-Fame defensive back Ken Houston returning an interception for a touchdown as the New Orleans defense sparks a victory for the Saints. All could have been possible had the New Orleans Saints front office had the scouting competence and foresight to draft the likes of Smith, Csonka and Houston. Instead, trades and draft selections for the likes of soon-forgotten players such as Gary Cuozzo, Les Kelley and Kevin Hardy helped to set a tone for futility that haunted the NFL franchise for many years. Unlike previous books about the New Orleans Saints that have either been an ode to the team or anecdotes about some of the team's more colorful characters, When the Saints Came Marching In: What the New Orleans NFL franchise did wrong (and sometimes right) in its expansion years is a comprehensive look at the crucial first five seasons of the New Orleans NFL franchise and how early decisions impacted the team. The book also takes a look at what the Saints might have done differently from 1967-1971 that could have taken the team in an alternate direction.

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Page Count

190

Publisher

AuthorHouse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438991878

ISBN 13

9781438991870

Book's by George Douglas Atkins

The Faith of John Dryden

The Faith of John Dryden

The Argumentative Imagination

The Argumentative Imagination

Estranging the Familiar

Estranging the Familiar

Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading

Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading

Reading Essays

Reading Essays

The Postmodern Bible

The Postmodern Bible

Tracing the Essay

Tracing the Essay

Educational Learning and Development

Educational Learning and Development

Quests of Difference

Quests of Difference

Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts

Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts

The Lonely Other

The Lonely Other

When the Saints Came Marching In

When the Saints Came Marching In

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