Douglas C Atkin

Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth

The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a greased pig,” for example, or a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved o...

The Culting of Brands: When Customers Become True Believers

A fresh and original look at the phenomenon of "cult branding" -- how companies cultivate fanatical customer loyalty. At first glance, companies like Apple and Nike have little in common with organizations like the Hell’s Angels and the Unification Church. But in reality, they all fulfill the main ...

Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading

Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing

In Estranging the Familiar, G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay,...

Contemporary Literary Theory

This series of essays has been designed to analyze the relationship between contemporary literary theory and critical and pedagogical practice. The authors have selected 12 of the most prominent, influential and far-reaching theoretical positions currently available, such as hermeneutics, archetypal...

The Watchers

Hundreds of years ago, deep within an ancient Jewish religious work, the details of a prophesied judgment day are revealed. Written in 300 BC, the book of Enoch holds the truth for the future. The world needs to know the reality, but one question remains-who will spread the word? Long after the turn...

Swift, Joyce, and the Flight from Home: Quests of Transcendence and the Sin of Separation

Consisting of six essayistic chapters, this book centers on two seminal yet not often associated Irish texts: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916). Practicing a comparative way of reading indebted to T.S. Eliot, Atkins traces t...

Reading T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets and the Journey toward Understanding

This book offers an exciting new approach to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets through both a close reading and a comparison to Eliot's other works, notably the poems "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men", and "Ash-Wednesday". G. Douglas Atkins reveals that in Four Quartets, incarnation is the universal, tim...