Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books
Aurora Metro Publications The Women Writers' Handbook: 2020
Book SynopsisTo celebrate Aurora Metro's 30th anniversary as an independent publisher, 20% of profits will to go to the Virginia Woolf statue campaign in the UK. This is a revised edition of the publisher's inaugural publication in 1990, which won the Pandora Award from Women-in-Publishing. Inspirational in its original format, this new edition features poems, stories, essays and interviews with over 30 women writers, both emerging authors and luminaries of contemporary literature such as: A.S. BYATT, KIT DE WAAL, CAROL ANN DUFFY, PHILIPPA GREGORY, JACKIE KAY, MADELINE THIEN, CLARE TOMALIN, SARAH WATERS, and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf herself, EMMA WOOLF. Together with the original writing workshops plus black and white illustrations from women illustrators. Guest editor Ann Sandham has compiled the new collection.Trade Review...a gem of a book: everything a woman writer might need in one slim volume. "...plenty of practical advice and information including detailed suggestions for a series of sessions." - Everywoman Magazine; “…I found The Women Writers’ Handbook intriguing, and it should encourage other women to develop confidence in creativity.” - The Listener; …plenty of practical advice and information including detailed suggestions for a series of sessions.” - Writers’ News.
£12.34
Indiana University Press The Aesops Fable Paradigm
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The Aesop's Fable Paradigm is interdisciplinarity at its best: a genuine dialogue between the sciences and the humanities that not only undermines the notion of an unbridgeable divide between "the two cultures" but also offers fascinating insights into the sociology of science. In addition to its important scholarly insights, we are given an insider's view on how scientific work actually gets done, which makes it an excellent teaching resource. As an added bonus, the book is a pleasure to read: it's both playful and witty, but also deadly serious, and it never pulls its punches."—Louise Barrett, University of Lethbridge"An impressively collaborative, interdisciplinary (and quite often funny!) set of essays that illustrate concretely not only how scientists anthropomorphize animals and draw on folkloric constructs in their research design and conclusions, but also how scientists need folklorists to help them sort it out. A must-read for anyone interested in the overlaps and little-understood connections between folklore and science."—Lisa Gabbert, author of Winter Carnival in a Western Town: Identity, Change, and the Good of the Community"Like the coyotes and badgers of native Western folklore that collaborate to ferret prey from their safe burrows, a scientist and a folklorist unite to ferret comparative psychology from its reliance on non-diagnostic experiments into a more enlightened era of self-reflection.The Aesop's Fable Paradigm provides an opportunity for engaging scholars with the challenges of designing a study of animal cognition that probes species-unique cognitive processes rather than continuing to debate how human-like nonhumans can be"—Jennifer Vonk, Oakland UniversityTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: The Perplexities of Water, by K. Brandon Barker and Daniel J. Povinelli1. The Animal Question as Folklore in Science, by K. Brandon Barker2. The Early Tradition of the Crow and the Pitcher, by William Hansen3. Going Meta: Retelling the Scientific Retelling of Aesop's the Crow and the Pitcher, by Laura Hennefield, Hyesung G. Hwang, and Daniel J. Povinelli4. Anthropomorphomania and the Rise of the Animal Mind: A Conversation, by K. Brandon Barker and Daniel J. Povinelli5. Fabling Gestures in Expository Science, by Gregory SchremppConclusion: Old Ideas and the Science of Animal Folklore, by K. Brandon Barker and Daniel J. PovinelliAppendix: Doctor Fomomindo's Preliminary Notes for a Future Index of Anthropomorphized Animal Behaviors, by Daniel J. Povinelli, K. Brandon Barker, Marisa Wieneke, and Kristina DownsIndex
£28.80
MP-WIS Uni of Wisconsin The Unlikely Futurist Pushkin and the Invention
Book SynopsisThrough systematic and detailed readings of Futurist texts, James Rann offers the first book-length study of the tensions between the outspoken literary group and Aleksandr Pushkin. Rann's analysis contributes to the understanding of both the Futurists and Pushkin's complex legacy.Trade ReviewElegantly written and convincingly argued. The Unlikely Futurist provides for the first time a comprehensive account of the complex relationship between Russian Futurism, on the one hand, and Pushkin and his myth, on the other." - Daria Khitrova, Harvard University"An extremely intelligent, well-polished study of Russian Futurism's treatment of Pushkin as both a historical burden to be thrown from the 'steamship of modernity' and a source of inspiration for the Futurist, avant-garde project of reinvigorating Russian and Soviet poetry. The Unlikely Futurist dazzles." - Tim Harte, Bryn Mawr College
£60.00
University of Wisconsin Press The Making of an Antifascist Nordahl Grieg
Book SynopsisIn this comprehensive and accessible book, Dean Krouk examines a significant public figure in Scandinavian literature and a critical period in modern European history through original readings of the political, ethical, and gender issues in Nordahl Grieg’s works.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Seas of Empire and Despair: 1902–1924 2 Anti-Imperialist Awakening: 1925–1927 3 Death in the Machine Age: 1928–1932 4 Polemical Confrontations: 1933–1935 5 Hope and Defeat: 1936–1937 6 Satire and Purge: 1937–1938 7 Becoming a Resistance Poet: 1939–1941 8 A Modern Wergeland: 1941–1943 Notes Bibliography Index
£62.96
WW Norton & Co A Readers Book of Days
Book SynopsisAn addictively readable day-by-day literary companion and guide from a former bookseller and eight-time Jeopardy! Champion.Trade Review" It's a lovely book to curl up with, and suggests appropriate books for each month... " -- The Herald
£12.34
LUP - University of Michigan Press An Emotional State The Politics of Emotion in
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewAs a literary-historical study of postwar Germany, this book makes a substantial contribution to German Studies, offering a much-needed critique of ‘melancholic scholarship’ in favour of work that wrestles with the often complex emotionality of the postwar era."" - German History""An Emotional State thus innovatively presents highly productive building blocks toward a complexified historical study of emotion"" - The Germanic Review""Offers a truly original, even pathbreaking, contribution to the study of postwar West German culture, while making a very important intervention in the theoretical debate on the study of emotions. Its potential audience includes not only historians and literary critics but the rapidly growing, strongly interdisciplinary community of ‘emotion scholars"" - Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego.
£23.70
The University of Michigan Press Affect Animals and Autists
Book SynopsisMaps connections across performances that question the borders of the human whose neurodiverse experiences have been shaped by the diagnostic label of autism, and animal-human performance relationships that dispute and blur anthropocentric edges. The book treats a diverse selection of live performance and archival video and analyzes the ways in which they affect their audiences.Trade ReviewProvocative, timely, and well-written, Affect, Animals, and Autists raises challenging questions that will be of interest to affect theorists as well as a broad complement of interdisciplinary scholars working in disability, performance, theatre, and/or animal studies."" -Kirsty Johnston, University of British Columbia""A timely, exciting and important book that is evidently the manifestation of years of in-depth research and reflection. The evaluation of performances is admirably measured, whilst not underestimating the risks of perpetuating conventional paradigms of animals or autism by influential ‘hits’ like War Horse or Curious Incident."" - Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, University of Surrey
£23.70
LUP - University of Michigan Press Autistic Disturbances
Book SynopsisAutism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics.
£23.70
LUP - University of Michigan Press A Company of Poets
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£26.55
LUP - University of Michigan Press From Klein to Kristeva
Book SynopsisExplores the cultural history of what underlies popular conceptions of "proper" mothering
£16.95
LUP - University of Michigan Press The Glass House The Life of Theodore Roethke
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£20.85
LUP - University of Michigan Press Learning Legacies Archive to Action through
Book SynopsisExplores the history of cross-cultural teaching approaches, to highlight how women writer-educators used stories about their collaborations to promote community-building. Robbins demonstrates how educators used stories that resisted dominant conventions and expectations about learners to navigate cultural differences.Trade ReviewRobbins pushes the envelope on the normative uses and perspectives about the Archive, using literal archives of educational practice recorded in counter-narratives from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Educators will find value in using this book to help train emerging teachers to be reflective about their practice and for models of how to use texts, archives, and stories as powerful teaching tools . . . "" - Timothy K. Eatman, Associate Professor of Higher Education, Syracuse University, Faculty Co-director Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life""[Learning Legacies] combines knowledge about teacher training and the history of education in the United States gained from extensive research into many formal archives, numerous site visits, and interviews with educators, archivists and others. Robbins’s own autoethnographic reflections also form a crucial and welcome element of her research."" - Sandra A. Zagarell, Donald R. Longman Professor of English at Oberlin College and scholar of American Literature and Culture
£71.06
University of Michigan Press HandiLand
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£69.30
The University of Michigan Press The French Joyce
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£22.75
The University of Michigan Press The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect
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£52.95
The University of Michigan Press Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right
Book SynopsisExplores the complex relationship between avant-garde art and politics to reveal links with right-wing or fascist causes
£60.95
The University of Michigan Press Strange Science
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£40.95
LUP - University of Michigan Press Ruins
Book SynopsisTheorizing the effects of memory, absence, and disappearance in classical theatre - the aesthetics of ruins.Trade ReviewIt has been a long time since I read a work of great and serious scholarship with such enjoyment. Impressive in expression, content, and imbued by an encompassing imaginative 'presence' unusual in academic writing . . . As a scholar who has spent his life researching within the realms (sometimes arcane) of ancient theatre, I repeatedly encountered both facts previously unknown to me, or interpretations of familiar subjects cast in a manner that displayed and illuminated them in such an entirely new light, that they seemed freshly fashioned and novel. I admire this book greatly."" - Richard C. Beacham, King's College, London""A gripping study of classical theatre's preservation of its own goneness. This is a learned, innovative, and wonderfully readable book that overthrows the methodological constraints of archeo-historicism to elaborate (from rich evidence) the self-forgetting that conditions the theatre at its roots . . . a powerful, marvelous book."" - Ellen MacKay, University of Chicago
£65.50
LUP - University of Michigan Press Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird
Book SynopsisThese essays and interviews from 1970-76 are lively, pointed, often polemical. They derive from a unified point of view about creativity and about the function of poetry. For the interested reader they can provide a key to the universe of the contemporary poet.
£19.95
MP-KAN Uni Press of Kansas Two Cities The Political Thought of American Transcendentalism
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£40.80
MY - University of Toronto Press Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and AngloSaxon
Book SynopsisBiblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England provides an accessible introduction to biblical epic poetry.Trade Review"This ground-breaking study draws long-overdue attention to a magnificent body of Latin epics from late antiquity, including Sedulius's Carmen Paschale and Arator's Historia Apostolica. McBrine traces the promulgation of these poems in Anglo-Saxon England, where scholars like Aldhelm and Bede treasured the depth of learning and pleasure in them, and their influence extends even to vernacular epics like the Old English Genesis and Exodus. Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England does more than fill a gap; it fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of literary production in Anglo-Saxon England." -- Daniel Donoghue, John P. Marquand Professor of English, Harvard University "Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England is a very accessible introduction to the Latin biblical poets and the major poetic features of their biblical epics. This book is a major contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies and provides new context for the development and reception of Anglo-Latin poetry." -- Miranda Wilcox, Department of English, Brigham Young University "This elegantly written and meticulously researched book may well prove a milestone in Anglo-Saxon studies, combining as it does a magisterial overview of some of the most important Latin texts taught in Anglo-Saxon schools with an intricate and intriguing assessment of their impact on Old English texts that evidently echoed in the vernacular their range and purpose. Brilliant close readings sit alongside sweeping vistas, in a book that should both surprise and stimulate all serious scholars and students of Anglo-Saxon England." -- Andy Orchard, FBA FRSC , Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of OxfordTable of ContentsPreface Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Juvencus' Euangeliorum libri quattuor (c. 330 CE) Chapter 3 Cyprianus' Heptateuch (c. 400-425 CE) Chapter 4 Sedulius' Carmen paschale (c. 425-450 CE) Chapter 5 Avitus' Historia spiritalis (c. 500 CE) Chapter 6 Arator's Historia apostolica (c. 544 CE) Chapter 7 Reading Biblical Epics in Early England: Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin Chapter 8 Old English Biblical Verse: Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus Chapter 9 Conclusion Appendices Bibliography
£57.80
MP-OKL Uni of Oklahoma Art as Performance Story as Criticism
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£15.40
LSU Press William Faulkner Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond
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£21.95
LSU Press Freedoms Lawmakers
Book SynopsisProvides the first comprehensive directory of the over 1,500 African Americans who held political office in the South during the Reconstruction era. The book presents an impressive amount of information about the antebellum status, occupations, property ownership, and military service of these officials.
£21.80
Louisiana State University Press Two Covenants
Book SynopsisTwo Covenants serves to expand the definition of the American South by focusing on the contributions of Jews to the culture. While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of southern Jewishness and also considers literary representations.
£30.56
LSU Press The Scary MasonDixon Line African American Writers and the South Southern Literary Studies
Book SynopsisNew Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, Trudier Harris explores why black writers have consistently both loved and hated the South.
£21.95
Louisiana State University Press Women Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Spain and
Book SynopsisInvestigates the mystery and unease surrounding the issue of women called before the Inquisition in Spain and its colonial territories in the Americas. The collection gathers scholarship that considers how the Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned as a closed, secret world defined by patriarchal hierarchy and grounded in misogynistic standards.
£36.51
Louisiana State University Press Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£35.06
Louisiana State University Press Frank Lloyd Wright and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Book SynopsisAn interdisciplinary volume of literary and cultural scholarship that examines the link between two pivotal intellectual and artistic figures. The book probes the degree to which the transcendentalist author influenced the architect’s campaign against dominant strains of American thought.Trade ReviewPart intellectual biography and part history of American architecture, Ayad Rahmani's book is a rich and engaging exploration of Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophical scaffolding. Rahmani demonstrates, in particular, the centrality of Ralph Waldo Emerson's contributions to Wright's worldview and his architectural theories and craft." - Scott Slovic, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Idaho
£36.51
Louisiana State University Press How to Reread a Novel
Book SynopsisA novel is among the most intricate of human creations, the result of thousands of choices and decisions. In How to Reread a Novel, Matthew Clark explicates the intricacies of fiction writing through practical analysis of the resources of narration, demystifying some of the tools novelists use to build worlds.Trade Review“In this refreshingly down-to-earth and approachable book, Matthew Clark focuses on the handling of rhetorical figures and narrative situations in a wide range of authors from Homer to Toni Morrison, revealing in detail the mechanisms by which literary effects are created. Lucidly written, patiently argued, and deeply grounded in a lifetime of literary experience, How to Reread a Novel can change the way we read, amplifying both our understanding and our pleasure.” - Peter J. Rabinowitz, author of Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
£38.66
Louisiana State University Press How to Reread a Novel
Book SynopsisA novel is among the most intricate of human creations, the result of thousands of choices and decisions. In How to Reread a Novel, Matthew Clark explicates the intricacies of fiction writing through practical analysis of the resources of narration, demystifying some of the tools novelists use to build worlds.Trade Review“In this refreshingly down-to-earth and approachable book, Matthew Clark focuses on the handling of rhetorical figures and narrative situations in a wide range of authors from Homer to Toni Morrison, revealing in detail the mechanisms by which literary effects are created. Lucidly written, patiently argued, and deeply grounded in a lifetime of literary experience, How to Reread a Novel can change the way we read, amplifying both our understanding and our pleasure.” - Peter J. Rabinowitz, author of Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
£25.60
Louisiana State University Press Seamus Heaneys Gifts
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£30.56
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina The Land Before Her Fantasy and Experience of
Book SynopsisTo discover how women constructed their own mythology of the West, Kolodny examines the evidence of three generations of women's writing about the frontier. She finds that, although the American frontiersman imagined the wilderness as virgin land, an unspoiled Eve to be taken, the pioneer woman at his side dreamed more modestly of a garden to be cultivated.
£32.21
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina An American Triptych Anne Bradstreet Emily Dickinson and Adrienne Rich
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£28.76
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Labor and Desire Womens Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£33.96
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina This Violent Empire The Birth of an American
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn this much anticipated work, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg takes up Crevecoeur's challenge 'What then is the American, this new man?' and boldly answers: A deeply divided subject of This Violent Empire, this United States. In exposing republican citizens' desires and fears, she not only opens up new realms of thought and inquiry--she makes clear that no genuine understanding of the new nation can overlook the profoundly confounded and contested cultural construction of 'the American, this new man.'--Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles|""Smith-Rosenberg maps the genesis of a historical dilemma, how the United States' vaunted diversity and emphasis on unity often function in bitter opposition. Historically rich and theoretically sophisticated, This Violent Empire studies the social, material, urban, intercultural, and international contexts through which an impossibly unified American identity was imagined in the magazines, literature, and art of the early United States.""--Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University|""Scholars of the new nation and its culture have been waiting twenty years for this book--and it is well worth the wait. We will no longer hear that the most powerful actors of the 'founding' did not think or talk creatively about Indians, or slaves, or women. This Violent Empire reaches deep into the national psyche and broadly into the cultural practices that defined Americans and their 'Others' in a formative period; it is a tour de force of political and cultural analysis that informs us all.""--David Waldstreicher, Temple University
£33.71
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Other Voices A Study of the Late Poetry of Luis
Book SynopsisThrough careful reading of Luis Cernuda's later poetry, written after 1936, Alexander Coleman argues that Luis Cernuda was a poet whose primary impulse in his art was the suppression of the subjective and the consequent objectivization of poetry.
£23.96
MP-NCA Uni of North Carolina Jorge Luis Borges and His Predecessors Notes Towards a Materialist History of Linguistic Idealism
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£22.46
Northwestern University Press Romanticism
Book SynopsisThe renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.
£37.95
Northwestern University Press The Sublime South
Book SynopsisPresents the first systematic study of cultural images of Andalusia as Spain's Orient and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization. José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain's shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection.
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Strategic Occidentalism
Book SynopsisExamines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture.Trade ReviewStrategic Occidentalism is a landmark study in contemporary Mexican literature that combines exhaustive, original research with clear thinking and stylish prose. Sanchez Prado establishes critical dialogues with major theorists in world, Latin American, and Mexican literary studies, but does so in constructively critical ways. "" - Brian Price, author of Cult of Defeat in Mexico's Historical Fiction: Failure, Trauma, and Loss
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Feeling Faint
Book SynopsisExplores human consciousness in its most basic sense: the awareness, at any given moment, that we live and feel. Such awareness, it argues, is distinct from the categories of selfhood to which it is often assimilated, and can only be uncovered at the margins of first-person experience. What would it mean to be conscious without being a first person - to be conscious in the absence of a self?Trade ReviewThis is important and original work, argued with passion, eloquence, and style, and it will meet an interested audience in the growing group of Renaissance and early modern scholars interested in affects, environments, cognition, and phenomenology."" - Julia Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life
£74.25
Northwestern University Press Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity
Book SynopsisReconsiders the literary works of the Viennese satirist, journalist, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Ari Linden reads Kraus's work both on its own terms and alongside philosophy and critical theory, yielding a portrait of Kraus as an irrepressible figure in the modernist tradition.Trade ReviewAri Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers an illuminating view onto Kraus's three major creative works, The Last Days of Mankind, Cloudcuckooland, and The Third Walpurgisnacht. Linden's principal contribution is an original analysis of Kraus's use of language in its relation to his contemporary reality-and in particular World War I, the creation of the Austrian Republic in the 1920s, and the era of National Socialism." - Michael W. Jennings, coauthor of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life "Ari Linden's Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity offers a compelling portrait of Kraus as a cultural critic in dark times, whose work runs parallel to other major figures of modernism. Linden offers measured assessments of Kraus's successes and limitations, his power and powerlessness, and what they offered, and continue to offer, to later generations of readers and critics." - Kirk Wetters, author of The Opinion System: Impasses of the Public Sphere from Hobbes to Habermas "Enormously erudite and enviably conversant with critical theory, Ari Linden convincingly argues that modernism cannot be fully understood without taking account of the towering - but still often neglected - figure of Karl Kraus." - William Collins Donahue, author of Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink's "Nazi Novels" and Their FilmsTable of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Toward a Krausian Theory of Modernity 1. Reciting War: The Last Days of Mankind (1915-22) 2. On Birds, Wars, and Fragile Republics: Cloudcuckooland (1923) 3. "Where Illegality Becomes the Law": The Third Walpurgis Night (1933/52) 4. "A Monstrous Non-Entity": Kierkegaard, Kraus, and Benjamin 5. "Origin is the Goal": Adorno and Kraus Coda: "Shadows Cast Bodies": Kraus and Posterity Bibliography Notes Index
£89.10
Northwestern University Press The Saving Line Benjamin Adorno and the Caesuras
Book SynopsisThrows fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and their appropriations of ancient and modern legacies.Trade ReviewTrenchant, lucid, and compelling. This book is a rare achievement: a study by an extraordinarily gifted literary and philosophical thinker who patiently and carefully elucidates notoriously obscure and challenging texts, fully cognizant of the larger intellectual claims informing them and his readings of them. The book alters and deepens our understanding of Adorno and Benjamin, reveals new depths to their implicit dialogue with each other within their writings, and demonstrates how their work continues to provide insights and inspiration for the study of literary narrative." - Henry W. Pickford, author of Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art (Northwestern University Press, 2016)Table of Contents Frequently Cited Texts Introduction 1. Benjamin's Hard Caesura: The Hopeful Narrator of Elective Affinities 2. Adorno's Hard Caesura: The Impassive Homeric Narrator 3. Adorno's Soft Caesura: The Immanent Utopia of Penelope's Remark 4. Benjamin's Soft Caesura: The Immanent Utopia of the Embedded Novella Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
£27.96
Northwestern University Press At the Limit of the Obscene German Realism and
Book SynopsisExamines the fear of materiality in German-language realist and postrealist literature. The book argues that with German literature's turn in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction.Trade ReviewAt the Limit of the Obscene is a masterful study of the concept of obscenity, in both its historical and theoretical permutations, as it played out in the tradition of nineteenth-century German realist literature and its afterlife in the early twentieth century. Weitzman moves with enviable grace through the German intellectual tradition from Kant forward, weaving in references to legal cases and contemporary critical interventions, and with great originality leads the discussion into the equally important tradition of French phenomenology." - Eric Downing, author of The Chain of Things: Divinatory Magic and the Practice of Reading in German Literature and Thought, 1850-1940"In her impeccably researched and elegantly written book, Weitzman uses the category of the obscene to unlock Poetic Realism's contradictions as well as its solutions. Mandatory reading for all those interested in 19th-century German prose and, more generally, in questions of materialism and literature." - Eva Geulen, author of The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after HegelTable of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: 'Scenes that do not belong in the light of day' 1. Against Nature: Adalbert Stifter 2. Base Matter: Gustav Freytag 3. Iconoclasm and Iconolatry: Theodor Fontane 4. Presence as Profanation: Arno Holz 5. Dead Ends: Gottfried Benn 6. Filth: Franz Kafka Coda: "As if she were saying something shameless" Notes Bibliography Index
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Wages of Evil
Book SynopsisIncorporates sources from philosophy, criminology, psychology, and history to argue that Dostoevsky's thinking about punishment was shaped not only by his Christian ethics but also by the debates on penal theory and practice unfolding during his lifetime.Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: The Scaffold and the Rod: Dostoevsky on the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment Chapter 2 : "Squaring the Circle": The Justice of Punishment Chapter 3: Foregoing Punishment: Dostoevsky’s Third Category and the Case of Ekaterina Kornilova Chapter 4: "A Mummy" or a "Resurrected" Self? Chapter 5: "India Rubber," the "Living Soul," and the Process of Moral Change Chapter 6: Approximations of Justice: The Novel in the CourtroomAfterwordNotesBibliography
£29.96
Northwestern University Press Literary Conclusions
Book SynopsisPresents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analysing works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts.Trade Review“This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons’s command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book’s contribution to current discussions in the scholarship—about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study—is substantial.” —David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature“Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons’s book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment.” —Rüdiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist""This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn."" —Márton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Thinking Through Conclusions 1. Lessing’s Form of Reason 2. Goethe and the Powers of Conclusion 3. Kleist’s Genres Literary Conclusions: From Urteilskraft to Schlusskraft Notes Bibliography Index
£84.15
Northwestern University Press The Origins of Russian Literary Theory
Book SynopsisReconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. By recontextualising Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism's legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.Trade Review“Merrill's book is a major reinterpretation of the early stages of literary theory in Russia and their wider impact. Her narrative is attentive to detail, while remaining sure-footed when capturing the bigger picture. A rewarding piece of research that makes a strong contribution to the field.” —Galin Tihanov, author of The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond“With impressive erudition and admirable lucidity, Jessica Merrill offers a strikingly novel reconstruction of Russian Formalism, placing it in a rich and largely neglected historical context. Her extended discussions of folklore and folkloristics, of the emphasis on the spoken as well as the written word, of the relevance of psychological theories and of contemporary politics, force us to reconsider the movement, its achievements, and its legacy. The book is a major contribution to the study of Western literary theory, and more generally, to twentieth-century intellectual history.” —Michael Wachtel, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory is remarkable for the lucidity of its composition. This clear and wide-ranging book makes an original and significant contribution to the study of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism, and thereby also to our understanding of the history of literary theory in the twentieth century—and perhaps its future in the twenty-first.” —Ilya Kliger, author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature“Merrill’s book attests to the inspiring vitality of Russian Formalism for contemporary literary studies. It approaches this subject from a new and insightful perspective and provides provocative vistas on this seminal school of criticism.” —Peter Steiner, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory focuses on the role of comparative philology in the formation of Formalist concepts. The author efficiently considers both branches of the Formalist School—OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle—and explores why they favored folklore studies and sociolinguistic disciplines, such as dialectology (a fact largely disregarded in previous scholarship). As it is quite a departure from the traditional narrow view of Russian Formalism, Merrill’s book is a fascinating read for both literary theorists and intellectual historians.” —Igor Pilshchikov, coeditor of Epokha “ostraneniia” (The Age of “Estrangement”: Russian Formalism and Contemporary Humanities)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction: The Philological Paradigm 1.Comparative Philology 2.The Author as Performer 3.The Psychology of Poetic Form 4.Inside the Moscow Linguistic Circle: Poetic Dialectology 5.Structuralisms Conclusion: Formalism and Philology in the Twenty-First Century Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
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