The Grove of the Eumenides: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Culture

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In Frederick Glaysher's collection of literary essays, The Grove of the Eumenides, East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind-ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Tamura Ryuichi, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its age. A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, Glaysher studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, he further explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity. An outspoken advocate of the United Nations and accredited participant at the UN Millennium Forum (May 22-26, 2000), he takes literary account of global realities. Frederick Glaysher privately studied writing at the University of Michigan with the poet Robert Hayden, lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan in Maebashi, Japan, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, and on the Mississippi, ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester Hills. Glaysher is the editor of both Hayden's Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright). He has also published two books of poetry with Earthrise Press, Into the Ruins: Poems (ISBN: 0-9670421-2-7) in 1999, and The Bower of Nil: A Narrative Poem (ISBN: 0-9670421-7-8) in 2002. In The Grove of the Eumenides, Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision of humankind beyond the prevailing conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary culture. - Earthrise Press