Table of Contents

Inaugural Address.- "Poetics at the Creative Crucibles" Offering New Guidelines for Literary Interpretation.- I Plurivocal Poiesis of the Airy Elements.- Empedocles: The Phenomenology of the Four Elements in Literature.- Fire in Goethe's Work: Neptunism and Volcanism.- The Tempestuous Conflict of the Elements in Baroque Poetry and Painting.- Fire Transfigured in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.- Fire and Snow: The Dichotomies and Dichomachies of Polish Baroque Poetry.- II The Metamorphic Poiesis of Air.- Temporality Puts on Airs: Process, Purpose, and Poetry in Shakespeare's Histories.- Filles de l'air.- Concretizations of the Aeolian Metaphor.- III The Aesthetic Forces of the Airy Elements.- Le theme de l'air dans la poesie de Paul-Marie Lapointe.- "L'Etre contre le vent": Aspects du vent dans la poesie de Paul Valery.- "Le Ciel est mort": Mallarme and a Metaphysics of (Im)Possibility.- IV The Elemental Fire and the Poetic Transfiguration of Reality.- Man against Fire: Alfred Doblin's Utopian Novel Mountains, Oceans and Giants.- "This Hard Gemlike Flame": Walter Pater and the Aesthetic Accommodation of Fire.- Thoreau's Waiden: The Pro-vocation of Fire.- Flannery O'Connor: The Flames of Heaven and Hell.- V Fire, the Poetry of Elemental Passion.- From Fire to Fireworks in Baroque Poetry.- "Falling Fire": The Negativity of Knowledge in the Poetry of William Blake.- The Poetics of Fire in Jean Giono's Le Chant du Monde.- VI The Elemental Expanse.- Ruskin's Queen of the Air.- Breathless Messages: Phenomenology in Deep Space.- A Poetics of Space: William Bronk's Unhousing of the Universe.- Jean Giono's Le Chant du monde: The Harmony of the Elements.- VII The Significance of Literature and Related Topics.- The Significance of Literature According to Contemporary Writers.- The "Literature in Life" Philosophy vs. Reality: The Role of the River in Beppe Fenoglio's Il partigiano Johnny.- "The Origin of the Work of Art": Truth in Existence and the Scholastic Tradition.- The Ontology of Language in a Post-Structuralist Feminist Perspective: Explosive Discourse in Monique Wittig.- Etre-dans-un-monde-litteraire.- Index of Names.