Work in the English Novel (Routledge Library Editions: 18th Century Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Danon, Ruth

History & Criticism

Routledge

Originally published in 1985, this book traces the development of an ideal of work in English writing which runs parallel to that of the Protestant work ethic. The author has called this the myth of vocation: work is seen as the primary source of self-definition, psychic integration and fulfilment. The root, and the purest form, of the idea is to be found in Robinson Crusoe. This work, so seminal in many ways, presents a prototypical middle-class hero, caught in a conflict between the impulse to adventure and that to create and make profits. 
The conflicts articulated in this work are picked up more or less explicitly by more than one of the great Victorian novelists. This book treats in detail several paradigmatic examples, deriving its terms of reference from modern sociological treatments of work and its effects on persons. The gospel of work need not result in capitalistic or protestant attitudes, but is compatible also with communistic ideas. This study serves to revalue the concept of work as a humanistic activity as well as offering a subtle reading of major works of literature.

Work in the English Novel: The Myth of Vocation (Routledge Library Editions: 18th Century Literature)

Work in the English Novel: The Myth of Vocation

Barnes & Noble Imports

1990, trade paperback edition, North Star Line / Blue Moon, NY. 56 pages. First collection of poetry from a woman who previously was published in scholarly periodicals. "These poems are full of wonder and a quiet thoughtfulness."

Triangulation from a Known Point

Poetry

Blue Moon Books

Foxrock

By investigating the minutiae of life—the stuff that anchors us, a stone and its echo, paradoxes constructed by language—Ruth Danon investigates nothing short of Thanatos and Eros. The journey of the Limitless Tiny Boat is fierce and fearless. Watch out! These poems expand and contract—breathe—as they are read. A substantial achievement. 
 —Martine Bellen 
 Ruth Danon seems to gather all of life into her Limitless Tiny Boat—or to explore every corner, every inch of the limitless, tiny boat that is life. In these flawlessly sculpted, deeply considered and compelling poems, Danon probes the machinery of life—how it sputters, hums along, gets stuck, stops, then restarts, hums along again. She shows how we must reckon with the terrors and consolations of the physical world, make an existential tally, and move on. “Words are / the only boat I have,” she writes. And then, “Really the trick is to estimate / from here, the journey outward.” This book is a beautiful reckoning, an astute tallying, and a profound journey through the dark and bright corridors that make up a life. 
 —Laura Sims 
 I’ve been reading Ruth Danon’s poetry for many years, always with pleasure. She is one of the most honest and affecting poets on the current scene, a writer more than willing to take deep emotional risks, bringing the reader close the flame. She says she is "lucky knowing / that everything tends / to a particular moment” in her latest collection. I suspect that much of her work as a poet has tended toward the moments gathered in Limitless Tiny Boat. It’s important work, and Danon takes us far beyond the fringes of thought and feeling. 
 —Jay Parini 
 Like any passageway between the profane and the sacred, Ruth Danon's poems keep looking for home: "Words are the only boat I have," she writes in her second collection, Limitless Tiny Boat. Danon's voice is intimate, wary, disarming, alive with intelligence and "the extreme urgency of patience." Though she claims that "three lines suggests a narrative," she also admits that "Narrative eludes me...." The material facts of a body in pain, in danger, in love find expression in the book's central sequence, a meditation that swerves from a "small cooking pot" to peristalsis: "The rose opens and closes its little mouth." As in the book's title, contradictions abound: what is called "tiny" is also "limitless" in these profound itineraries that float between story and song, hope and hopelessness, mind and body. 
 — Catherine Barnett 
 Ruth Danon’s poems manage to fuse seemingly irreconcilable qualities: they are both erudite and colloquial; concerned with ideas yet frankly personal; they have the reach of abstraction while also being tactile and concrete. The result is a shimmering originality that makes Limitless Tiny Boat a marvel to read. 
 —Jennifer Egan

Limitless Tiny Boat

BlazeVOX Books

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Aging. "WORD HAS IT, by American poet Ruth Danon takes on the unease that has accompanied the troubling politics that have created so much disturbance in the last few years. The book launches the reader into a journey marked by foreboding and innuendo. In the first section the speaker proceeds on an uneasy path while a character named 'Word,' referring to herself in the third person, offers acerbic commentary along the way. In the second section, the speaker retreats first into the domestic, then to a deeper interiority in which a journey through the rooms of a house embodies a study of various states of consciousness that lead her to the recognition of her role as a poet. By the end of the second section, the speaker is ready to leave the interior space and venture into the third section, where she takes on the daunting poetic task of augury. The foreboding of the first section culminates in the violence that has been hinted at all along. Danon evokes language as backdrop, as foundation, as scaffolding--a quiet though inexorable landscape in which we witness our most cherished and frightening transformations."--Kristina Marie Darling "Ruth Danon gives us one of her most darkly oracular works...The poems are acid, ingenious, and unsentimental."--Andrew Levy "Deep and skeptical, natural and magical, melancholic and beautiful, Danon's oracle makes a truly compelling statement--one to be heeded, one to be savored."--Stephen Massimilla "Ruth Danon's extraordinary poems take us directly into states of feeling and perception that are subtle and profound...These are necessary poems."--Chase Twichell

Word has it: Poems (Nirala)

Nirala Publications

Danon's peregrinations occur within the context of our own times--of a planet grown increasingly hot, a pandemic as cruel as an inquisition, of hotheaded and often coldhearted politics of America, as she contends with personal loneliness, isolation, guilt, and longing. How, she asks us, can we make and find the fire that warms, sustains, and illumines us? American poet Ruth Danon hates and fears the cold in all its forms - literal, metaphorical, external, internal. In TURN UP THE HEAT she ventures into the chill and explores as well as its problematic opposite. In poems that range widely in form and style and that travel through place and time, Danon introduces us to St. Anthony, who stole fire from the devil and heated the icy desert, and heretic and genius Giordano Bruno, whose prescient astronomical vision led him led him to be burned at the stake. As she moves from Renaissance Italy to modern Sardinia and frosty upstate New York, from the desert to the domestic, Danon's peregrinations occur within the context of our own times--of a planet grown increasingly hot, a pandemic as cruel as an inquisition, of hotheaded and often coldhearted politics of America, as she contends with personal loneliness, isolation, guilt, and longing. How, she asks us, can we make and find the fire that warms, sustains, and illumines us? Danon's peregrinations occur within the context of our own times--of a planet grown increasingly hot, a pandemic as cruel as an inquisition, of hotheaded and often coldhearted politics of America, as she contends with personal loneliness, isolation, guilt, and longing. How, she asks us, can we make and find the fire that warms, sustains, and illumines us? "TURN UP THE HEAT is a beautiful book, at turns tender, wry, and heartbreaking. Whether she's writing about growing older, or the challenges of domesticity, or the fickleness of the English language, Ruth Danton has created a hymn to our complex present and our anxious, unknowable future. . ."--Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of American Estrangement "Ruth Danon's TURN UP THE HEAT is elegiac, edgy, and disquieting. . . In articulating a new language to think about losses--in the form of feeling coldness and the cold--Danon takes on aging, the notion of freedom, the idea of bodily autonomy, and the physicality of the self made real. This is a serious and effective book."--Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi ". . .Ruth Danon has found the courage to compose a poetry in which Judgment and Silence counterpoise upon the ground of one purpose: Truth. Like one of the tutelary spirits of this beautiful collection, Giordano Bruno, Danon is willing to risk everything upon a clear word, a keen observation, an honest statement. The result is the very opposite of austere; it is warm and welcoming."--Donald Revell, author of Drought-Adapted Vine ". . . These poems embody tricks of vision, quick-witted plays on words, 'the false and the true, the angel and devil, [standing] equal.' This book burns with hope, as 'white branches of birch trees trace bright lines against the oncoming dark.'"--Moira Egan, author of Synaethesium ". . . Her poems in this marvelous collection are dramas of integrity that offer no easy comfort and suggest how even mistakes can be profitable for the spirit."--Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies.

Turn Up the Heat: New Poems

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Books by Danon, Ruth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Danon, Ruth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Work in the English Novel (Routledge Library Editions: 18th Century Literature)

Work in the English Novel: The Myth of Vocation (Routledge Library Editions: 18th Century Literature)

Work in the English Novel: The Myth of Vocation

Triangulation from a Known Point

Triangulation from a Known Point

Limitless Tiny Boat

Word has it: Poems (Nirala)

Turn Up the Heat: New Poems