Walker Percy differs from other American novelists in that he started writing fiction relatively late in life, after being trained as a physician and after considerable reading and writing in philosophy. Although critics have appreciated Percy's skills as a writer, they have seen Percy above all as a novelist of ideas, and, accordingly, the majority of critical articles and books about Percy has dealt with his themes, especially his philosophical themes, as well as with his philosophical sources. This study explores, therefore, the critical response to philosophical ideas in Percy's five novels to date, as evidenced first by reviews, then by the later articles and books. The critical response developed gradually as critics became aware of Percy's aims and pointed out his use of Christian existentialism and his attacks upon Cartesianism, Stoicism, and modern secular gnosticism. These critical evaluations of Percy's philosophical concerns have sometimes overshadowed interest in his more purely artistic concerns. However, the more a reader understands the underlying philosophical concepts that inform Percy's novels, the more he may understand what Percy is trying to say and the more he may appreciate Percy's accomplishment in expressing his philosophical ideas so skillfully in fictional form. Critics and readers may …

Among the most important characters in contemporary writer Anne Tyler's nine novels of modern American life are her skillfully-drawn managing women who choose the family circle as the arena in which to use their skills and exert their influence. Strong, competent, independent, capable of caring for themselves, their husbands, their children, and others, too, as well as holding outside jobs, these women are the linchpins of their families. Among their most outstanding qualities are their abilities to endure hardships with heads high and skills unhampered. Within this broad category of managing women, Tyler clearly delineates two types of managers: the regenerative managing woman and the rigid managing woman. A major character in every novel, the regenerative managing woman not only endures, she also adapts. The key to her development and her strength is her capacity for trying again, renewing herself, and her family relationships. The evolution of a vital regenerative woman from a lonely childhood through the beginning of her vibrant womanhood is a key element in every Tyler novel. This development always includes an escape from her original family? an attempt to establish her own family; at least one major hardship that often sends her reeling home; and finally, …

This study focuses on the praeceptor amoris, or teacher of love, as that persona appears in English poetry between 1500 and 1660. Some attention is given to the background, especially Ovid and his Art of Love. A study of the medieval praeceptor indicates that ideas of love took three main courses: a bawdy strain most evident in Goliardic verse and later in the libertine poetry of Donne and the Cavaliers; a short-lived strain of mutual affection important in England principally with Spenser; and the love known as courtly love, which is traced to England through Dante and Petrarch and which is the subject of most English love poetry. In England, the praeceptor is examined according to three functions he performs: defining love, propounding a philosophy about it, and giving advice. Through examining the praeceptor, poets are seen to define love according to the division between body and soul, with the tendency to return to older definitions in force since the troubadours. The poets as a group never agree what love is. Philosophies given by the praeceptor follow the same division and are physically or spiritually oriented. The rise and fall of Platonism in English poetry is examined through the praeceptor …

A collection of poetry.