Norman Norwood Holland

Starting from the premise that each writer and each reader is a "unique" being (a cagey and illusive certainty), the author presents a blend of Freudian psycho-analytic and literary theory.
While he relies upon the import of symbols, for example in Freud's dream interpretation, unlike many "Freudian" disciples, he actually takes Freud's cautions and qualifications to heart -- quoting his express warning against "over-estimating the importance of symbols" [172]. Similarly, the tools of show more childhood demarkation (oral, anal, phallic, oedipal), the structural theory (id, ego, superego), the signal theory of anxiety, and the expanded concept of defense (not just repression but projection, reaction-formation, etc), and the concept of "character", are applied to a study of a poet's work.
The poet, Hilda Doolittle, aka "H.D.", was briefly engaged to Ezra Pound and was promoted as an "Imagist". "I keep the law,/ I hold the mysteries true,/ I am the vine,/ the branches, you/ and you." [8] She left us with an account of her analysis with Freud, which Holland uses to tell us much about both. show less

From the flyleaf: "Ever since the 17th century, critics almost without exception have damned Restoration comedies - damned them for being immoral or belittled them by saying they deal only with "manners." Yet these plays have been favorites of theater-goers and actors and producers over the years (except in mid-Victorian times), and revivals have succeeded beyond reasonable expectation for a drama so consistently maligned.

This book newly evaluates the plays of Etherege, Wycherley, andd show more Congreve, the giants of English drama's silver age. The chapters dealing with the 11 plays of these writers are "readings" - attempts to show by close analysis how the components of each work - plots, characters, language, structure - form a whole and how the whole reveals certain aspects of reality. Chapters interspersed among the "readings" relate the plays and their authors to the intellectual currents of the Restoration period.

Critical misreadings of Restoration comedy perhaps grow out of the tendency to measure it against the standard of Elizabethan drama, which in some superficial way it resembles. The 17th century, however, saw some of the most profound advances in modern intellectual history, an Restoration comedy falls on the "modern" rather than Renaissance side of these changes. It is the reflection of this modern and scientific view of man and the universe that makes the works of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve the first modern comedies.

The author concludes his book with an instructive chapter on the staging of Restoration plays." show less