Product Description: The stubborn silence of text passed down from fathers to their sons is examined in this highly original study of Robert Penn Warren's fiction. In every case, that text-whether a letter, a poem, a handbill or a wink-refuses to disclose what the son who reads it wants to know...read more

Product Description: Robert Penn Warren's reputation as a poet, though always considerable, has soared in the last decade, as indicated by his recent selection as America's first poet laureate. The Braided Dream is one of the first book-length studies of the poetry that has led to Warren's recent rise to eminence and the first to consider his final collection, Altitudes and Extensions...read more

Montaigne’s Essays are treasured for their philosophical and moral insights and the fascinating portrait they give us of the man who wrote them, but another of their undoubted delights is that they tantalize the reader, offering beneath an apparent disorder some hints of a hidden plan. After all, though the essayist kept adding new pages, except when he added the third and final book he never added a new chapter, but worked within the structure already in place. Order in Disorder: Intratextual Symmetry in Montaigne’s “Essais,” by Randolph Paul Runyon, offers a new answer to the question of how ordered the Essays may be. Following up on Montaigne’s likening them to a painter’s “grotesques” surrounding a central image, and seeing in this an allusion to the ancient Roman decorative style, rediscovered in the Renaissance, of symmetrical motifs on either side of a central image, Runyon uncovers an extensive network of symmetrical verbal echoes linking every chapter with another. Often two chapters of greatly different length and apparent importance (one on thumbs, for instance, balanced against one on the limits of human understanding) will in this way be brought together—not without, Runyon finds, an intended irony. The Essays emerge as even more self-reflexive than we thought, an amazingly intratextual work.

Product Description: The fox and the crow, the tortoise and the hare, the hen that laid the golden eggs – all of these familiar characters, and more, are present and accounted for in this complete translation of La Fontaine’s fables. Runyon’s translation is delightfully fresh and faithful to the original French...read more

Book Description: Intratextual Baudelaire: The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Parisby Randolph Paul Runyon provides a new and provocative answer to the question that has intrigued readers for years: did the poet arrange the Fleurs du mal in a meaningful order? Runyon believes so, but not in the way most have conceived the question...read more

Product Description: America's most eminent man of letters in his later years, and certainly one of the greatest Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren has increasingly come to be known for his poetry. Ghostly Parallels is a close examination of the heart of his poetic corpus-the eight collections published between 1935 and 1976: Thirty-Six Poems; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme; Promises; You, Emperors, and Others; Tale of Time; Incarnations; Or Else; and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Ghostly Parallels shows how Warren constructed collections of poems based on common subjects and contexts and also contends that, while the poems are distinctive, taken together they reveal intricate patterns of theme, imagery, and diction within explicit sequences...read more

Product Description: Some thirty years after the initial publication of Montesquieu's Persian Letters in 1721, the author hinted at the presence of 'a secret, and somehow unnoticed, chain' tying together this entertaining, insightful, yet disparate collection of fictional letters to and from two Persian travelers in France...read more

Product Description: Runyon demonstrates the intimate connectedness between each fable and the next as well as the sequential unity of each of La Fontaine's masterpieces. (Poetry) (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: " In this captivating tale, Randolph Paul Runyon follows the trail of the first woman imprisoned for assisting runaway slaves and explores the mystery surrounding her life and work. In September 1844, Delia Webster took a break from her teaching responsibilities at Lexington Female Academy and accompanied Calvin Fairbank, a Methodist preacher from Oberlin College, on a Saturdary drive in the country...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume contains five articles by prominent scholars of French literature and political philosophy that examine the relation between Montaigne's Essays, one of the classic works of the French philosophical and literary traditions, and the writings attributed by Montaigne to his friend, the French humanist Etienne de La Boétie's...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study of the short stories of Raymond Carver also takes excursions into his poetry and essays. Runyon argues that the stories are intricately linked as part of a cohesive body of work.