UNITED STATES AUTHOR · DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL · FICTION
Julia C. R. Dorr
Also known as: Julia C.R. Dorr
WHO stands on that cliff, like a figure of stone,
— from Poems
Most acclaimed
Daybreak
1968
Few writers can move and captivate readers as Belva Plain can. In Daybreak, perhaps her best and boldest work yet, she creates a living, breathing portrait of two families joined by a devastating childhood illness, yet divided by the politics of hatred and by the sons they love. In a doctor's office, a man and a woman sit stunned as the doctor speaks: Blood tests show without a shadow of a doubt that the son they love so dearly, and who is now dying, is not their child. Incredible as it seems, there must have been a mix-up in the hospital where he was born. Enduring the pain of Peter's death is a blow they must bear, but Margaret and Arthur Crawfield must also confront the realization that somewhere their biological child still lives. And although they know their search will tear apart another family, they feel compelled to look for the child who has grown up in another home. At the same time that the Crawfield family's world is turning upside down, Laura Rice - Mrs. Homer "Bud" Rice - looking around her elegant home at her beloved piano and ancestral portraits, realizes that after nineteen years of marriage she and her husband are fundamentally strangers. Bud Rice is respectable and respected in their small southern town, a good father to their two sons - bright, healthy Tom and eleven-year-old Timmy, who despite his chronic illness is a gift of joy. But Bud is the reason, Laura believes, for Tom's involvement with a campus group of terrifying bigots. Now the Crawfield and the Rice families will come together, putting emotions in upheaval and leaving lives forever changed. Somewhere in the days ahead a mother must tell her son that he was born to another woman and has another family. And no one foresees the events gathering force to explode with violence in the quiet town as a political candidate plays on prejudice and fear. Newly discovered truths rock a family already under siege in Daybreak's jolting, soul-shattering conclusion. Timely, provocative, and as real as today's headlines, Daybreak pulses with truth, takes our breath away with its extraordinary grace and eloquence, and brings vividly to life men and women so real they will long remain in our minds and hearts.
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.