ELT & Literary Studies Books

Book SynopsisTwo thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to Game of ThronesA Penguin ClassicThe most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, dragons have provoked fear and fascination for their lethal venom and crushing coils, and as avatars of the Antichrist, servants of Satan, couriers of the damned to Hell, portents of disaster, and harbingers of the last days. Here are accounts spanning millennia and continents of these monsters that mark the boundary between the known and the unknown, including: their origins in the deserts of Africa; their struggles with their mortal enemies, elephants, in the jungles of South Asia; their fear of lightning; the world’s first dragon slayer, in an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns; the colossal sea monster Leviathan; the seven-headed “great red dragon” of the Book of Revelation; the Loch NeTrade ReviewI love the way Scott Bruce has scoured so much ancient lore to bring us this treasury of dragon-related information, and I shall turn to it frequently -- Philip PullmanScholarly and thrilling. By collecting some of the foundational - and also most surprising - historical sources on these guardians of the 'boundary between the known and unknown', Scott Bruce has created the new indispensable resource for anyone who cares about dragons -- Adam Gidwitz, New York Times bestselling author of A Tale Dark and Grimm and The Inquisitor’s Tale

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Book SynopsisIt is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few.This anthology contains twelve key stories from the first two years of Spider-Man''s publication history (from 1962 to 1964). These influential adventures not only transformed the super hero fantasy into an allegory for the pain of adolescence but also brought a new ethical complexity to the genre-by insisting that with great power there must also come great responsibility.A foreword by Jason Reynolds and scholarly introductions and apparatus by Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of The Amazing Spider-Man and classic Marvel comics.The Penguin Classics black spine paperback features full-colour art throughout.Trade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisThe Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories, seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel’s transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy.   A Penguin Classics Marvel Collection Edition   Collects Captain America Comics #1 (1941); the Captain America stories from Tales of Suspense #59, #63-68, #75-81, #92-95, #110-113 (1964-1969); “Captain America…Commie Smasher” from Captain America #78 (1954). It is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few.   Drawing upon multiple comic book series, thisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.”—Publishers Weekly“Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post“Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans—initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too—found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That’s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why—or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby—or his successor on “Captain America,” Jim Steranko—barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper—unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.”—Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker“As before, all three of these volumes re-present Professor Ben Saunders’ learned general series intro which does an excellent job of succinctly explaining the rise of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Method.”—Forces of Geek

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Book SynopsisClassical stories about women who wield power, from the Amazons to Dido to CleopatraIn this fascinating anthology, ancient women threaten male power by stepping into the roles traditionally held by men. They command armies, exercise sexual autonomy, speak in public, issue laws and subject others (even masculine heroes and citizen men) to their control. All of these stories were written by men and none of them can be read as affirmations or celebrations of women in power. Instead, their sexist attitudes continue to justify women's exclusion from power.Yet despite the fear and suspicion the male authors direct toward these women, we can find much to admire in their tales, from the coordinated action of the women of Aristophanes's Assemblywomen, to the righteous anger of Boudicca against sexual violence by men in power, to the successful resistance of Amanirenas against Rome's colonial expansion. Read differently, these tales testify to the long history of women in power and suggest new paths for female empowerment.

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Book SynopsisThe first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin ClassicJoshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradTrade Review“You feel you’re meeting them on a human level. The book is slim and portable, as the best poetry books are (…) Bennett and McCarthy, in their introduction, set out their criteria for inclusion in ‘Minor Notes.’ They list things like ‘minimal appearance’ in anthologies and ‘very little, if anything, in the way of secondary literature focusing on their work.’ But it becomes plain that they chose these poets because they still speak across generations. This is a passion project.(…) This is a reclamation project that goes through you like a spear.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, both scholars of African American literature, aim to widen the canon of Black poetry by spotlighting poets who have been overlooked (…) giving readers an understanding of their unique voice and poetic concerns. (…) David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Henrietta Cordelia Ray, Anne Spencer, and other poets interrogate everything from labor politics to friendship in finely wrought lyrics that delight and surprise, prompting the reader to wonder how these geniuses could have been sidelined for so long.” —Poets & Writers“The first in a series recovering the out-of-print words of Black poets whose work shaped the 19th and 20th centuries, Minor Notes, Volume 1 draws a bright line between the creations of the past and those of today’s bards. Curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, while featuring a foreword from former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, the book centers clear, resonant voices—like that of Angelina Weld Grimké’s, who ruminates joyfully on the beauty of living in a Black body.”—Essence

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Book Synopsisand his superb eye for detail has conjured some of the most memorable characters in English fiction from the cruel Miss Havisham of Great Expectations to the treacherous Uriah Heep of David Copperfield. This timeless collection brings together his most iconic novels.

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Book SynopsisAranyak, a novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, portrays a man's journey as an estate manager in Bihar, falling in love with the forest. It delves into the urban-rural divide and the profound connection between humans and nature, reflecting the author's own experiences.

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Book SynopsisA man's perennial quest for the unattainable, Black Rose also brings alive the heady idealism and the charged years when India was struggling to be free.

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Book SynopsisFrank Moorhouse was legendary in Australian literary and cultural life, the author of a huge and diverse body of work ? essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy ? an unapologetic activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now.Matthew Lamb shared many a luncheon table with Moorhouse and immersed himself in the archived life and cultural ephemera of Frank? s world. This landmark study, from Moorhouse? s own publisher, the first in a projected two volumes, is the fascinating and comprehensive story of how one of Australia? s most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.Fearless, sardonic and utterly dedicated to his creative life, his relationships with friends, other writers and lovers were complex and long-lasting. Lamb shares the strange paths that Frank traversed and gives us a cultural history of the times that shaped Moorhouse and which Moorhouse himself helped to shape.

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Book SynopsisThe perfect gift for anyone who embraces the joy of fandom and geeking out, this collection of essays celebrates the fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Rings, and much more.Pop Culture and sci-fi guru Ryan Britt has never met a monster, alien, wizard, or superhero that didn’t need further analysis. Essayist Ryan Britt got a sex education from dirty pictures of dinosaurs, made out with Jar-Jar Binks at midnight, and figured out how to kick depression with a Doctor Who Netflix-binge. Alternating between personal anecdote, hilarious insight, and smart analysis, Luke Skywalker Can’t Read contends that Barbarella is good for you, that monster movies are just romantic comedies with commitment issues, that Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are total hipsters, and, most shockingly, shows how virtually everyone in the Star Wars universe is functionally illiterate.  

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Book SynopsisThe acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on nineteenth-century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls and The Overcoat; Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorky's On the Rafts; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Crime and Punishment, The

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Book SynopsisThe story of Jewish literature is a kaleidoscopic one, multilingual and transnational in character, spanning the globe as well as the centuries. In this broad, thought-provoking introduction to Jewish literature from 1492 to the present, cultural historian Ilan Stavans focuses on its multilingual and transnational nature. Stavans presents a wide range of traditions within Jewish literature and the variety of writers who made those traditions possible. Represented are writers as dissimilar as Luis de Carvajal the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Isaac Babel, Anzia Yezierska, Elias Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Irving Howe, Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, Amos Oz, Moacyr Scliar, and David Grossman. The story of Jewish literature spans the globe as well as the centuries, from the marrano poets and memorialists of medieval Spain, to the sprawling Yiddish writing in Ashkenaz (the Pale of Settlement'' in Eastern Europe), to the probing narratives of Jewish immigrants to the United States and other parts of the New World. It also examines the accounts of horror during the Holocaust, the work of Israeli authors since the creation of the Jewish State in 1948, and the ingathering of Jewish works in Brazil, Bulgaria, Argentina, and South Africa at the end of the twentieth century. This kaleidoscopic introduction to Jewish literature presents its subject matter as constantly changing and adapting.Trade ReviewReading Jewish literature becomes a stimulating journey; Stavans jumps from one author to another without clinging to either time or space. * Tessa Calders i Artís, Escola de libreria *Table of ContentsChapter One: People of the Book Chapter Two: After the Expulsion Chapter Three: The Age of Anxiety Chapter Four: Into the Abyss Chapter Five: Into the Mainstream Chapter Six: The Ingathering Chapter Seven: The Promised Land Chapter Eight: The Letterless Canon References Further Reading Index

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Book SynopsisMothering India concentrates on early Indian women's fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women's rights in British India.

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Book SynopsisIn 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore met Paul and Edith Geheeb in Germany, they formed a fruitful and long-term association resulting in the exchange of ideas and vision. Tagore''s Brahmacharya Ashram, founded in 1901 in Shantiniketan, and the Geheeb''s Odenwaldschule, established in Germany in 1910 (thereafter the Ecole d''''Humanité in Switzerland, established in 1934 after the couple fled Nazi Germany), emerged from vastly different cultural backgrounds and social exigencies. Yet, they recognized striking similarities between their educational endeavours. The meeting also initiated a close association between India and Germany, with the Geheebs attracting many Indian intellectuals and Indophile Germans to their schools. This book explores the areas where the lives of the Geheebs and Tagore, and their respective circles, overlap. Rather than being a biography, a history, or a comprehensive description, this study is a comparison of Tagore and the Geheebs and their schools. Making use ofTrade ReviewKämpchen's book is full of research insights that only come with years of experience. * Razak Khan, German Historical Institute London Bulletin *

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Book SynopsisTense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war''s portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book''s introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on critical futurities, Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwarTrade ReviewBy moving our vision from earth to sky, from soldiers in the trenches to civilians under air raids, Paul Saint-Amour makes rich and surprising our understanding of the twentieth-century and its literature. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and we ourselves emerge in the arresting light of this first modern collective anxiety. * Elaine Scarry, author of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom *This book is a tour de force, introducing an entirely new approach to the modernist imagination. Saint-Amour makes us hear the undertones of menace in interwar literature, thereby reconfiguring modernist fiction as meditations on disasters to come. * Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History *Paul Saint-Amour reinterprets culture during the years between World War I and World War II as an era of anxious anticipation. Thoughtful, penetrating, and important, Tense Future expands our understanding of war's destructive power. * Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences *Tense Future moves fluently through the cultural records of the First World War, interwar, Second World War, and Cold War. Creating a wholly new archive, Saint-Amour does nothing less than shift the tense of imaginative action in the literature of major record: from memory, which Paul Fussell established as its primary imaginative circumstance, to anticipation; from reverie to dread. Our way of reading the literature of a century of war will be changed by this comprehensive and compelling account. * Vincent Sherry, author of Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence *Intricately crafted and thoroughly documented, Tense Future not only redefines the modern epic but also lays the groundwork for reconceptualizing the interwar period and perspectives on temporality. * W. T. Martin, CHOICE *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; Introduction: Traumatic Earliness ; I. Bukimi ; II. The Precincts of Time ; III. Collective Psychosis ; Facing Trauma ; Critical Futurities ; Three Interwars ; Weak Modernism ; Part One ; 1. On the Partiality of Total War ; The Case of L. E. O. Charlton ; Intimations of Totality ; Interwar Air Power Theory ; Rival Preemptions of Law and War ; National Totality and Colonial Air Control ; Bombing Display I ; Bombing Display II ; 2. Perpetual Suspense: Virginia Woolf's Wartime Gothic ; Morphologies of Suspense ; Mark Time ; Mrs. Dalloway and the Gaze of Total War ; The Years: Immunities Lost and Found ; <"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid>" ; 3. Fantasias of the Archive: Hamilton's Savage and Jenkinson's Manual ; A Promise of Terror to Come ; Savage Foreclosures ; Declining Fertility ; Jenkinson's Manual ; War Archives: Theory and Performance ; Thoughts on Archives in an Air Raid ; The Death Drive of the Archive ; Part Two ; 4. Encyclopedic Modernism ; Against Epic ; Revisiting the Encyclopedie ; The Eleventh ; Encyclopedic Narrative ; Modern Epic ; Pace Bersani ; 5. The Shield of Ulysses ; Ulysses' Encyclopedism ; Encyclopedia Prophetica ; Urban Violence and Amity Lines ; Theater of Total War ; Scattering ; 6. War Shadowing: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End ; Uncyclopedia Britannica ; Total Worry ; Futures in Furniture ; Conclusion: Perpetual Interwar ; Appendix: Chapter Abstracts ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisThe Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout,Trade ReviewAssembling thought-provoking essays that encompass a vast range of poetry and poetics, The Oxford Handbook succeeds admirably at offering readers some of the best current approaches to reading modern and contemporary American poetry ... It is hard to envision a volume that would better take account of the present state of criticism and scholarship of American poetry. * Stephen Fredman, Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsList of Contributors ; Part I ; 1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present ; Cary Nelson ; Part II ; 2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies ; Rachel Blau DuPlessis ; 3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism ; Robert Dale Parker ; 4. "Jeweled Bindings": Modernist Women's Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality ; Melissa Girard ; 5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem ; John Marsh ; 6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore ; Linda A. Kinnahan ; 7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond ; Peter Nicholls ; 8. Cezanne's Ideal of "Realization": A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry ; Charles Altieri ; 9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry's Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues ; Edward Brunner ; 10. Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture ; Tim Newcomb ; 11. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920-1960 ; Susan Rosenbaum ; 12. Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America ; Mike Chasar ; 13. "With Ambush and Stratagem": American Poetry in the Age of Pure War ; Philip Metres ; 14. The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry ; Karen Jackson Ford ; 15. Asian American Poetry ; Josephine Park ; 16. "The Pardon of Speech": The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry ; Walter Kalaidjian ; 17. American Poetry, Prayer, and the News ; Jahan Ramazani ; 18. The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry ; Michael Thurston ; 19. The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960 ; Al Filreis ; 20. Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse ; Lytle Shaw ; 21. "Do our chains offend you?": The Poetry of American Political Prisoners ; Mark W. Van Wienen ; 22. Disability Poetics ; Michael Davidson ; 23. Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism ; Lynn Keller ; 24. Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry ; Timothy Yu ; 25. "Internationally Known": The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop ; James Smethurst ; 26. Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface ; Adalaide Morris ; Index

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewPowell's translation roves with the lows and highs of Vergil's Latin, matching the poem's emotive and stylistic variations turn for turn. With rich visual illustrations and explanatory notes on nearly every page, Powell's Aeneid offers a full immersion into the mythological and political workings of the poem: in short, a book both good to think with, and good to teach with. * Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University *Powell's translation does more than just allow the Latin-less reader to appreciate the artistry of Vergil; it gives a glimpse into why we are still reading Vergil and why this 'handbook of empire' * with all of the attendant ambiguities and complexities of that phraseis still relevant today.Leah Kronenberg, Rutgers University *Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Book 1: The Shores of Africa ; Book 2: The Fall of Troy ; Book 3: Journey from Troy ; Book 4: The Death of Dido ; Book 5: Funeral Games ; Book 6: Descent into the Underworld ; Book 7: The Seeds of War ; Book 8: The Shield of Aeneas ; Book 9: Turnus Besieges the Trojan Camp ; Book 10: The Deaths of Pallas, Lausus, and Mezentius ; Book 11: The Mourning for Pallas and the Glory of Camilla ; Book 12: The Death of Turnus

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Book SynopsisBarry Powell, acclaimed translator of the Iliad (OUP, 2013) and the Odyssey (OUP, 2014) now delivers a graceful, lucid, free-verse translation of the most important books and passages of the Aeneid in a pleasant modern idiom. On-page notes explain obscure literary and historical references, while the rich visual program lightens the text and educates students in the history of Western art by presenting a single topic as represented over 2,000 years.The Aeneid''s first sentence charts the poem''s historical plot, taking us in one sweep of seven lines from Homer''s Troy to Augustus'' Rome. These two layers of time are felt all the way through the poem, from the distant past of Aeneas'' heroic and quasi-mythological time, over 1100 years before Vergil, down to the now of Augustus'' Rome, when Vergil was writing the poem between 30 and 19 BC, a period of ongoing political experimentation. The story of Aeneas--moving from one continent to another, undergoing and enforcing great transformatTrade ReviewPowell's translation roves with the lows and highs of Vergil's Latin, matching the poem's emotive and stylistic variations turn for turn. With rich visual illustrations and explanatory notes on nearly every page, Powell's Aeneid offers a full immersion into the mythological and political workings of the poem: in short, a book both good to think with, and good to teach with. * Kirk Freudenburg, Yale University *Powell's translation does more than just allow the Latin-less reader to appreciate the artistry of Vergil; it gives a glimpse into why we are still reading Vergil and why this 'handbook of empire' * with all of the attendant ambiguities and complexities of that phraseis still relevant today.Leah Kronenberg, Rutgers University *Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Book 1: The Shores of Africa ; Book 2: The Fall of Troy ; Book 4: The Death of Dido ; Book 6: Descent into the Underworld ; Book 7: The Seeds of War (lines 1-121; 230-389; 659-end) ; Book 8: The Shield of Aeneas (lines 1-176; 352-end) ; Book 9: Turnus Besieges the Trojan Camp (lines 151-391) ; Book 10: The Deaths of Pallas, Lausus, and Mezentius (lines 1-116; 408-552; 626-end) ; Book 11: The Mourning for Pallas and the Glory of Camilla (lines 416-?) ; Book 12: The Death of Turnus (lines 384-end)

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Book SynopsisPerhaps no other single Roman speech exemplifies the connection between oratory, politics and imperialism better than Cicero''s De Provinciis Consularibus, pronounced to the senate in 56 BC. Cicero puts his talents at the service of the powerful triumviri (Caesar, Crassus and Pompey), whose aims he advances by appealing to the senators'' imperialistic and chauvinistic ideology. This oration, then, yields precious insights into several areas of late republican life: international relations between Rome and the provinces (Gaul, Macedonia and Judaea); the senators'' view on governors, publicani (tax-farmers) and foreigners; the dirty mechanics of high politics in the 50s, driven by lust for domination and money; and Cicero''s own role in that political choreography. This speech also exemplifies the exceptional range of Cicero''s oratory: the invective against Piso and Gabinius calls for biting irony, the praise of Caesar displays high rhetoric, the rejection of other senators'' recommendaTrade Review"This is a splendid work. Politics, history, the range of amicitia, constitutional complexity, philology, linguistics, rhetoric, and nuanced language are examined thoroughly and persuasively." --James S. Ruebel, Ball State UniversityTable of ContentsPreface ; Timeline ; Introduction ; Latin text (Peterson, OCT 1911) ; Commentary ; Glossary of rhetorical terms ; Maps ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisWritten by one of the best-known interpreters of classical literature today, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy presents a revolutionary take on the work of this great classical playwright and on how our understanding of tragedy has been shaped by our literary past. Simon Goldhill sheds new light on Sophocles'' distinctive brilliance as a dramatist, illuminating such aspects of his work as his manipulation of irony, his construction of dialogue, and his deployment of the actors and the chorus. Goldhill also investigates how nineteenth-century critics like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wagner developed a specific understanding of tragedy, one that has shaped our current approach to the genre. Finally, Goldhill addresses one of the foundational questions of literary criticism: how historically self-conscious should a reading of Greek tragedy be? The result is an invigorating and exciting new interpretation of the most canonical of Western authors.Trade ReviewMr. Goldhill joins the crowded field, but his work should stand out. * San Francisco Book Review *Goldhill's critical discussion of the historical and philosophical origin of several key concepts of Sophoclean tragedy is of great interest * rogueclassicism.com *A brilliant balancing act: Simon Goldhill combines close readings of Sophocles' plays with penetrating chapters on the language of tragic criticism since the nineteenth century. There is something for everyone in this exhilarating and adventurous book. * Pat Easterling, University of Cambridge *Following up on his landmark studies of Aeschylus and his influential Reading Greek Tragedy, Goldhill offers now a full-length look at Sophocles. With his customary versatility as critic and cultural historian, he offers a Janus-faced volume that looks in two directions. In the first instance, there are exemplary close readings with insistence on the rhetoric, politics, and history of 5th century Athens as essential background for articulating how the poet develops his own particular engagement with the language of tragedy. In the second, Goldhill spreads a wider net to expose the often unrecognized historicity of our own understanding of the tragic, established especially by 19th century German thinkers, for whom Sophocles represented the perfect paradigm. Like all his work, Goldhill challenges us to rethink inherited ideas and deepens our understanding at every turn of the fabled author of Oedipus the King and those who have cherished him. * Froma Zeitlin, Princeton University *With this latest book, Simon Goldhill brings his customary acumen and verve to reading the 'language' of Sophoclean tragedy from two very different perspectives. ... By placing between the same covers 'profoundly conservative' and 'rashly revolutionary' critical perspectives (3), Goldhill instills in the reader a new awareness of the interpretive practices that have sustained tragedy scholarship for centuries at the same time that he defamiliarizes them. His eye for telling detail, moreover, combined with his panoramic sweep of intellectual history, is...enthralling. * New England Classical Journal *Mr. Goldhill joins the crowded field, but his work should stand out. * San Francisco Book Review *Goldhill's critical discussion of the historical and philosophical origin of several key concepts of Sophoclean tragedy is of great interest. * rogueclassicism.com *A brilliant balancing act: Simon Goldhill combines close readings of Sophocles' plays with penetrating chapters on the language of tragic criticism since the nineteenth century. There is something for everyone in this exhilarating and adventurous book. * Pat Easterling, University of Cambridge *Following up on his landmark studies of Aeschylus and his influential Reading Greek Tragedy, Goldhill offers now a full-length look at Sophocles. With his customary versatility as critic and cultural historian, he offers a Janus-faced volume that looks in two directions. In the first instance, there are exemplary close readings with insistence on the rhetoric, politics, and history of 5th century Athens as essential background for articulating how the poet develops his own particular engagement with the language of tragedy. In the second, Goldhill spreads a wider net to expose the often unrecognized historicity of our own understanding of the tragic, established especially by 19th century German thinkers, for whom Sophocles represented the perfect paradigm. Like all his work, Goldhill challenges us to rethink inherited ideas and deepens our understanding at every turn of the fabled author of Oedipus the King and those who have cherished him. * Froma Zeitlin, Princeton University *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Entrances and Exits ; Section 1: Tragic Language ; 1: Undoing: Lusis and the Analysis of Irony ; 2: The Audience on Stage: Rhetoric, Emotion and Judgment ; 3: Line for Line ; 4: Choreography: The Lyric Voice of Tragedy ; 5: The Chorus in Action ; Section 2: The Language of Tragedy ; 6: Generalizing about Tragedy ; 7: Generalizing about the Chorus ; 8: The Language of Tragedy and Modernity: How Electra Lost her Piety ; 9: Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood: The Tragic Language of Sharing ; Coda: Reading With or Without Hegel: From Text to Script ; Glossary ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisRoutes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed attachment to land in formal texts from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts reveal that territories were imagined specifically as homes, cities, and regions and acted as powerful categories of belonging in the early Islamic world.Trade ReviewAntrim's study...will effectively stimulate discussion on the very nature (and study) of early Islamic geography. * Paul L. Heck, Journal of Historical Geography *Zayde Antrim's monograph provides a guided tour through the menagerie of literatures that poets, litterateurs, religious schoalrs, travel writers , and geographers of this vast empire devised between the ninth and twelfth centuries. * American Historical Review *Most of the texts Antrim uses will be very familiar to scholars of early Islamic history, but she has a talent for reading these in new, engaging and informative ways. Antrim has produced an innovative analysis of real importance which should be considered carefully by all who work on early Islamic history and the Arabic and Persian literary texts of the period. * Harry Munt, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *The first comprehensive study of land and belonging in the premodern Islamic world Routes and Realms is a welcome addition to the study of medieval Muslim history. It challenges us to think about identity and belonging in new and compelling ways. It employs an innovative methodology for the analysis of texts that traverse conventional disciplinary boundaries and that highlights their extra-textual significance. It successfully makes the case for regionalism as a powerful category of belonging during the medieval period. * Steve Tamari, H-Net Reviews *Antrim's findings have ramifications for historians of the modern period. As ethnosymbolists have argued, pre-existing notions of a homeland, of the kind that Antrim traces in classical Arabic literature, are a necessary condition for the emergence of nationalism. But the complexity of the notions of home vs. nonhome, inside vs. outside, and local vs. stranger that she highlights contributes to an understanding of the alternative and competing types of nationalism that have emerged in the Middle East in the twentieth century, that is, pan-Arabism and pan-Islamic nationalism as well as nationalism at the level of individual countries. * Ahmed El Shamsy, American Historical Review *By exhaustively delineating early Muslim attitudes toward homeland, city, and regional identity, Zayde Antrim shows how early Muslims did, in fact, create their own ways of relating to the land beneath and around them, and hence a discourse of place with which any modern notions of nationhood would have needed to contend. It is a rare thing when the study of premodern history can enliven modern debates, but Antrim's work is one of those rarities. * Paul M. Cobb, University of Pennsylvania *Zayde Antrim's most significant contribution is that she challenges the dominant view that explains the rise of nationalism in the Middle East as a byproduct of the nineteenth century encounter with Europe. By critiquing this widely disseminated position, Antrim allows scholars of medieval and modern Middle East to realize that the concept of homeland represents at the same time continuity and change with the classical period, and therefore nationalism has invoked in the mind of medieval and modern Middle Easterners a complex web of legacies. She reminds us that good scholarship should be meticulous research and not speculation. * Suleiman A. Mourad, Smith College *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Dates ; Glossary ; Introduction: The Discourse of Place ; Part I: Home ; 1. Home as Homeland ; Part II: City ; 2. Cities and Sacred History ; 3. The Image of the City ; Part III: Region ; 4. Dividing the World ; 5. Routes and Realms ; Conclusion: Looking Forward ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisNo one had ever tried a caper like this before. The goods were kept in a secure room under constant scrutiny, deep inside a crowded building with guards at the exits. The team picked for the job included two old hands known only as Paul and Swede, but all depended on a fresh face, a kid from Pinetown, North Carolina. In the Depression, some fellows were willing to try anything--even a heist in the rare book room of the New York Public Library.In Thieves of Book Row, Travis McDade tells the gripping tale of the worst book-theft ring in American history, and the intrepid detective who brought it down. Author of The Book Thief and a curator of rare books, McDade transforms painstaking research into a rich portrait of Manhattan''s Book Row in the 1920s and ''30s, where organized crime met America''s cultural treasures in dark and crowded shops along gritty Fourth Avenue. Dealers such as Harry Gold, a tough native of the Lower East Side, became experts in recognizing the value of books and Trade ReviewThieves is an engaging cat-and-mouse account of porous libraries, scouts armed with 'gall, confidence, and oversized coats,' complicit salesmen and of G. William Bergquist, the dogged New York Public Library investigator who cracked the gang's most audacious caper: the theft in 1931 of first editions of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and a rare Edgar Allan Poe collection. * New York Times *McDade does a superb job of drawing a complete picture of the environment in which the Romm Gang operated. McDade makes a smart choice to spin his tale around the mostly forgotten individuals who participated in a widespread scheme to steal library books. * Los Angeles Times *McDade's account is a better-informed account of [thief Harry] Gold than those in other sometimes misty-eyed and less hard-nosed portraits of Book Row. By concentrating on just a few men, McDade not only avoids many pitfalls in writing about the trade more generally, but also manages to bring this tale chronologically to a conclusion. It is not a very satisfactory conclusion, for this book raises larger questions: pointing a moral as well as adorning a tale. * Times Literary Supplement *Definitive history... a fantastically colorful cast of characters and rich period detail will hook book lovers and historians of N.Y.C * Publishers Weekly *A compelling history. Rich in characterization and vividly set, this tale of Manhattan's Fourth Avenue, known then as 'Book Row,' and its bookleggers makes for grand reading. * Library Journal *With wit, erudition, and a nice sense of timing, McDade recreates the seamy side of the antiquarian book business in Depression-era New York and Boston. This immensely engaging story will appeal to cultural historians, literary scholars, bibliophiles, and true-crime lovers alike. * Joan Shelley Rubin, Professor of History, University of Rochester and author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America *Thieves of Book Row chronicles a fascinating chapter in the history of the book trade, libraries, and organized crime. In a highly engaging narrative, McDade provides a wonderful portrait of books stolen and recovered and of many colorful characters ranging from rare book legends to petty thieves. * Thomas Hyry, Director of Special Collections, UCLA Library *Thieves of Book Row is an astonishing account of a highly organized and intrepid book-theft ring in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. * Renae Satterly, Library & Information History *McDade's narrative flows so well you forget you're reading actual events. He is somehow able to emphasise the close-calls and suspense of the story without sensationalising or exaggerating what occurred ... The book is very descriptive and involved, and I highly recommend it. * Diana La Femina, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Newsletter *Table of ContentsPrologue ; Chapter 1: The Antics of the Leading Industrials ; Chapter 2: The Accumulated Wisdom ; Chapter 3: A Purloined Poe ; Chapter 4: Scholarship and Investigation ; Chapter 5: The Boston Scene ; Chapter 6: Someone Qualified as a Bookman ; Chapter 7: The People of the State of New York and their Dignity ; Chapter 8: That's the End of the Rare Book ; Epilogue ; Index

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Book SynopsisThe Oxford Handbook of Aristotle reflects the lively international character of Aristotelian studies, drawing contributors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, and Japan; it also, appropriately, includes a preponderance of authors from the University of Oxford, which has been a center of Aristotelian studies for many centuries. The volume equally reflects the broad range of activity Aristotelian studies comprise today: such activity ranges from the primarily textual and philological to the application of broadly Aristotelian themes to contemporary problems irrespective of their narrow textual fidelity. In between these extremes one finds the core of Aristotelian scholarship as it is practiced today, and as it is primarily represented in this Handbook: textual exegesis and criticism. Even within this more limited core activity, one witnesses a rich range of pursuits, with some scholars seeking primarily to understand Aristotle in his oTrade ReviewA must-buy for libraries, this book brings together 25 of the world's top Aristotle scholars. Shields's editorial work is superb, and his own contributions are lucid. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsPreface ; Notes on the Contributors ; List of Aristotle's Works ; I. Aristotle's Philosophical Milieu ; 1. Aristotle's Philosophical Life and Writings, Christopher Shields ; 2. Aristotle on Earlier Natural Science, Edward Hussey ; 3. Science and Scientific Inquiry in Aristotle: a Platonic Provenance, Robert Bolton ; II. The Framework of Philosophy: Tools and Methods ; 4. Aristotle's Categorial Scheme, Paul Studtmann ; 5. De Interpretatione, Hermann Weidemann ; 6. Aristotle's Logic, Paolo Crivelli ; 7. Aristotle's Philosophical Method, C. D. C. Reeve ; 8. Aristotle on Heuristic Enquiry and Demonstration of What It Is, Kei Chiba ; III. Explanation and Nature ; 9. Alteration and Persistence: Form and Matter in the Physics and De Generatione et Corruptione, S. Marc Cohen ; 10. Teleology, David Charles ; 11. Aristotle on the Infinite, Ursula Coope ; 12. The Complexity of Aristotle's Study of Animals, James Lennox ; 13. Aristotle on the Separability of Mind, Fred D. Miller, Jr. ; IV. Being and Beings ; 14. Being qua Being, Christopher Shields ; 15. Substances, Coincidentals, and Aristotle's Constituent Ontology, Michael Loux ; 16. Actuality and Potentiality, Stephen Makin ; 17. Aristotle's Theology, Stephen Menn ; 18. Aristotle's Philosophy of Mathematics, David Bostock ; V. Ethics and Politics ; 19. Conceptions of Happiness, Terence Irwin ; 20. Aristotle on Becoming Good: Habituation, Reflection, and Perception, Richard Kraut ; 21. Aristotle's Politics, Pierre Pellegrin ; VI. Rhetoric and the Arts ; 22. Aristotle on the Moral Psychology of Persuasion, Christof Rapp ; 23. Aristotle on Poetry, Annamaria Schiaparelli and Paolo Crivelli ; VII. After Aristotle ; 24. Meaning: Ancient Comments on Five Lines of Aristotle, Richard Sorabji ; 25. Aristotle in the Arabic Commentary Tradition, Peter Adamson ; 26. The Latin Aristotle, Robert Pasnau ; Bibliography ; Index Locorum ; Index Nominum ; Subject Index

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Book SynopsisStephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod''s Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton''s own creation myth, which sought to soar above th'' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony] ... and justify the ways of God to men. Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enûma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern scientific myths, Freud''s Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod''s poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and - with but one exception - a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony''s reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem''s reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton''s imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod''s artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.Trade ReviewScully has long been interested in the polis, as his excellent 1990 study, Homer and the Sacred City, demonstrated, and this new volume about Hesiod's Theogony is, in a sense, an extension of that interest. An equally exciting aspect of this comprehensive study is its clear and full discussion of Hesiod's until-now overlooked literary methods, in which personification reflects psychological reality, or flows from action, and in which common nouns, in their shifting meanings, follow the narrative arc of the poem. * Helaine L. Smith, Semicerchio: Rivista di poesia comparata *The heart of Stephen Scully's book is a masterful inquiry into the place of the Theogony in literary history, in the course of which he makes important observations about the evolution of ancient Greek ideas of the cosmos, divinity, sexuality and gender, justice, and the polis. He prefaces his historical investigations with a careful reading of the poem on its own terms, before looking backward toward its sources and then forward toward the influence it exerted on later texts. Literary analysis and literary history are carefully interwoven, as Scully's initial reading of the poem provides a road map for the historical sections of the book. * Deborah Lyons, American Journal of Philology *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ; Introduction ; Chapter I: Points of Comparison: Hesiod and Homer; the Theogony and Genesis ; Chapter II: The Theogony ; Chapter III: The Theogony and Eastern Parallels: City-State Succession Myths? ; Chapter IV: The Theogony in the Archaic and Classical periods ; Chapter V: Echoes of the Theogony in the Hellenistic and Roman periods ; Chapter VI: Theogonic shadows: Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance, Milton's Paradise Lost ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisModernism''s Other Work challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning-in particular the political meaning-of modernism''s commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, it argues that modernism''s core aesthetic problem-the artwork''s status as an object, and a subject''s relation to it-poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. With fresh accounts of works by canonical figures such as William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, and transformative readings of less-studied writers such as William Gaddis and Amiri Baraka, Siraganian reinterprets the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and politics. Through attentive readings, the study reveals how political questions have always been modernism''s critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis boldly assert the art object''s immunity from the world''s interpretations. Reorienting our undeTrade ReviewIn moving nimbly between modernism and postmodernism, accounting for a politics of aesthetics, and negotiating multiple media, this is modernist criticism at its athletic best. Siraganian's stringent argument for meaning's autonomy not only makes for provocative groupings but can change the way we understand autonomy and what it bequeaths. Moreover, Siraganian writes like the best prosecuting attorney you could hope for-or fear. * Jessica Burstein, University of Washington *Modernism's Other Work represents a real advance in how we read some major writers, and in how we understand their own views of their art. Lisa Siraganian argues that important modernists pursued a vision of art at odds with our assumptions about what they believed. She is a fine guide to artists like Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and others. Anyone interested in what modernists did, in what modernists thought, in what their successors can do, about writing and bodies and visual art, will surely learn much from Siraganian's good book." * Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry *Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Theorizing Art and Punctuation: Gertrude Stein's Breathless Poetry ; Satirizing Frameless Art: Wyndham Lewis's Defense of Representation ; Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos Williams and Company ; Challenging Kitsch Equality: William Gaddis's and Elizabeth Bishop's "Neo" Rear-Garde Art ; Administering Poetic Breath for the People: Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka ; Coda: Universal Breath

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Book SynopsisAncient Greek culture is pervaded by a profound ambivalence regarding female beauty. It is an awe-inspiring, supremely desirable gift from the gods, essential to the perpetuation of a man''s name through reproduction; yet it also grants women terrifying power over men, posing a threat inseparable from its allure. The myth of Helen is the central site in which the ancient Greeks expressed and reworked their culture''s anxieties about erotic desire. Despite the passage of three millennia, contemporary culture remains almost obsessively preoccupied with all the power and danger of female beauty and sexuality that Helen still represents. Yet Helen, the embodiment of these concerns for our purported cultural ancestors, has been little studied from this perspective. Such issues are also central to contemporary feminist thought. Helen of Troy engages with the ancient origins of the persistent anxiety about female beauty, focusing on this key figure from ancient Greek culture in a way that botTrade Reviewthe book is a good survey of Helen in Greek literature and a decent introduction to Helen for undergraduate Classics students, but is a bit thin for those seeking more advanced, in-depth analysis. * Stephanie L. Budin, Collingswood, New Jersey, Journal of the American Oriental Society *Table of ContentsIllustrations ; Preface ; 1. The Problem of Female Beauty ; 2. Helen, Daughter of Zeus ; 3. Self-Blame and Self-Assertion: the Iliad ; 4. Happily Ever After? The Odyssey ; 5. Refractions of Homer's Helen: Archaic Lyric ; 6. Behind the Scenes: Aeschylus' Oresteia ; 7. Spartan Woman and Spartan Goddess: Herodotus ; 8. Playing Defense: Gorgias' Encomium of Helen ; 9. Enter Helen: Euripides' Trojan Women ; 10. Two-Faced Helen: the Helen of Euripides ; 11. Helen MacGuffin: Isocrates ; Epilogue ; Bibliographical Notes ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisCommonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism''s leading figures of the 1930s--such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender--come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong''o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney''s original and extensive archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antTrade ReviewIt is the mapping of the literary networks, rivalries, allegiances and collaborations that marks Kalliney's book out as an important contribution in this turn of postcolonial studies to interaction with modernist periodicity and aesthetics ... Kalliney offers a truly expansive study of the importance of migration in the developmental history of modernism. * Robert McLaughlan and Neelam Srivastava, Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Commonwealth of Letters is an original and revisionist account of the historical encounter between the writers and institutions of English modernism and late colonial intellectuals, informed by solid archival research and refreshing new readings of the postcolonial canon, and keenly attuned to the complex history of cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. * Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste *For too long, modernist autonomy and postcolonial politics were thought to be antithetical. This book's splendid research deals this dichotomy a convincing blow. With illuminating insights into crossracial networks in radio, publishing, and other cultural institutions, Kalliney brilliantly shows how modernism enriched African and Caribbean literatures and was itself sustained by them. * Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics *A fascinating study which explores how modernist ideas influenced a generation of black and white writers-often working sideby-side-and created international networks of affiliation which rise up above race or geography. An illuminating and convincing examination of Anglophone literary history in the second half of the twentieth century. * Caryl Phillips, author of Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 *This densely argued study covers a lot of ground, from literary modernism to postcolonial Anglophone literature from the West Indies and Afria. The book's bibloiography testifies to Kalliney's prodigious research." -M.S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton, CHOICEKalliney's argument is extensive, meticulously researched, and compellingly revisionist... Kalliney provides a startling and thorough reimagining of the complex lines of aesthetic, philosophic, and institutional affiliation between metropolitan and colonial authors in the period 1930-70. * Novel *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments and Permissions ; 1. Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectual ; 2. Race and Modernist Anthologies: Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound ; 3. For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o ; 4. Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors ; 5. Developing Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber ; 6. Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: The African Writers Series ; 7. Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual ; Conclusion ; Bibliography

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