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This selection from John Fraser's essays forms a triptych with his Violence in the Arts and America and the Patterns of Chivalry (published by the Press in 1974 and 1982) and, like them, explores conflicting attitudes towards self-affirmation and social order. Important concerns in all three works are ideas of energy, power, and personal plenitude, and the way in which idealism and heroic intensity can sometimes lead to overstrain and collapse. Yet the dominant emphasis is positive. In this volume the author offers some of his finest analyses both of the workings of heroic and pastoral ideals and of the dangers of irony and nihilism in a violent world. The essays range in subject from Shakespeare to Atget's photographs of Paris, by way of American fiction, sadomasochism, literary theory and patterns of rural culture. Their implicit argument is subtle and absorbing.

John Fraser's critical essays explore conflicting attitudes towards self-affirmation and social order.

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Preface; Introduction; Part I: 1. Prospero's book: The Tempest revisited; 2. Dust and dreams and The Great Gatsby; 3. In defence of culture: Huckleberry Finn; 4. Othello and honour; 5. The name of action: Nelly Dean and Wuthering Heights; 6. Crime and forgiveness: The Red Badge of Courage in time of war; 7. Rereading Traven's The Death Ship; Part II: 8. A dangerous book?: The Story of O; 9. Yvor Winters: the perils of mind; 10. Mr Frye and evaluation; 11. Swift and the decay of letters; Part III: 12. Theories and practices: the Hammonds' The Village Labourer; 13. George Sturt's apprenticeship; 14. Atget and the city; 15. Reflections on the organic community; Notes.

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