Leslie A. Fiedler

This work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous - now increasingly accepted - judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

The Inadvertent Epic is based on a five part radio broadcast of the 1978 Massey Lectures which were aired in October of that year as part of CBC's IDEAS series. "I want to discuss the treatment of what seems to me now to be a kind of communal or co-operative prose epic, dealing with the war between the States, Reconstruction, and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as certain ethnic and sexual conflicts in America which helped motivate those political events and were in turn exacerbated by them."

xvii, 588 p. ; 23 cm

The treatment of the "stranger" (woman, Jew, Black) depicted in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets reflect, almost without exception, not only Shakespeare's own values, but those of his audience as well.