Product Description: A first-person meditation on the literary and visual arts of the American West, Westernness: A Meditation explores how this region has developed its own distinct culture, in literature and painting, from the point of view of someone who has been, at different times in his life, both a westerner and an easterner...read more

Alan Williamson artfully joins social and literary history with personal experience in The Pattern More Complicated, a collection of his very best poems over the last twenty years. A powerful section of new poems draws the whole work together in a kind of autobiographical novel, as—in Eliot's phrase, from which the title is taken—"the pattern of dead and living" grows "more complicated" with the years.  Williamson's verse is a refreshing examples of how delicately the personal can intersect with the public in a love for the considered life.The Pattern More Complicated assembles Williamson's most important, representative poems, marking the trajectory of poetic development and the recurrence of themes across the span of four previous collections to present a survey of a major American poet in a single volume.

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Gender criticism, Alan Williamson argues, has for too long been shaped and limited by the same dualisms that have defined male versus female literary voices in Western culture. Certain emotions expressed in literature are considered "feminine," certain emotions are typed as "masculine," and there is little room in critical studies for the male writer who shares in feminine experiences or who finds himself on the wrong ideological side of those firmly gendered dichotomies.Confined by such strict codes, male writers--homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual--possessing the sensibilities typecast as feminine often face a crisis of gender identity. They struggle to overcome early childhood experience and adult cultural expectations as men with feminine creative emotions that are often repressed in more conventionally masculine lives.Almost a Girl challenges both feminist orthodoxy and men's movement thinking to show how several important male writers have drawn creative strength from their identification with, even envy of, a positive image of the feminine. Williamson opposes the feminist argument that men cannot really empathize with female experience, as well as the men's movement's insistence that female identification is common but psychically dangerous. As he explores the psychic confusion, even torment, and ambivalence toward women that accompanied their mixed gender identification, Williamson honors the works and imaginative courage of such diverse writers as Rainer Maria Rilke, Randall Jarrell, D.H. Lawrence, and Cesare Pavese. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: Breakthrough information for Web database developers! The first book to cover servlets - Java's answer to CGI, set to revolutionize Web database design. Ties together JDBC, servlets, front-end design, security, multi-threading and client/server...read more

Product Description: The Java Server API provides a way to write Web applications in Java without having to use CGI. This book focuses on Java Server API because that is the key to creating cross-platform Java servlets that run on any Web server. The CD-ROM contains Java tools and utilities, including Visual J++ Publisher's Edition, Sun Java 1...read more

In Love and the Soul's title poem, a male speaker asks "not to believe/that what lights up the world from within is always the wrong thing" and is answered by a female speaker midway through the book who says "I don't think men and women/are meant to have relationships any more." Between these poles, Williamson's powerful collection explores the enormous burden of expectation that our culture has placed on love and its gifts to the soul.

Product Description: Assesses past and future generations of poets and examines the standards by which they should be measured

Poems deal with being lost, city life, the past, homosexuals, travel, college days, good and evil, airports, and photography

Product Description: Williamson examines Robert Lowell's poetic expression of his discontent with American civilization.

Product Description: In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment―from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage―like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W...read more