Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books
Cornell University Press The Forms of Historical Fiction
Book SynopsisHarry Shaw's aim is to promote a fuller understanding of nineteenth-century historical fiction by revealing its formal possibilities and limitations. His wide-ranging book establishes a typology of the ways in which history was used in prose fiction during the nineteenth century, examining major works by Sir Walter Scottthe first modern historical novelistand by Balzac, Hugo, Anatole France, Eliot, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy.Trade ReviewShaw's is a distinguished book, a worthy sequel to the studies of Lukács, Fleishman, Iser, and others who have opened our eyes to the nature of historical fiction and of Scott's craft of historical fiction in particular. The Forms of Historical Fiction is a major contribution to fiction studies. -- Frank Jordan * The Wordsworth Circle *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Who What Am I
Book SynopsisGod only knows how many diverse, captivating impressions and thoughts evoked by these impressions... pass in a single day. If it were only possible to render them in such a way that I could easily read myself and that others could read me as I do... Such was the desire of the young Tolstoy. Although he knew that this narrative utopiaturning the totality of his life into a bookwould remain unfulfilled, Tolstoy would spend the rest of his life attempting to achieve it. Who, What Am I? is an account of Tolstoy''s lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience.This book guides readers through the voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings that Tolstoy produced from the 1850s until his death in 1910. The variety of these texts is enormous, including diaries, religious tracts, personal confessions, letters, autobiographical fragments, anTrade ReviewOffers a rare exploration into the internal world of Tolstoy by examining his nonfictional, first-person writings, including diaries, letters, reminiscences, autobiographical and confessional statements, and essays.... Paperno makes an invaluable contribution to Tolstoy scholarship. -- R. A. Erb * CHOICE *Paperno reads all his [Tolstoy’s] writings in relation to the central project of his life: the transformation of his life into a book that would teach others how to live.... ‘Who, What Am I?’ is an important book that will become a standard source for students, general readers and scholars alike. * SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW *Paperno deftly shows how Tolstoi's attempt to write an autobiography failed, but his perceived failure at capturing the moral, philosophical, and technical issues accurately becomes a testament to his literary honesty (102). "Who, What Am I?" is highly important for any Tolstoi researcher, as it brings together the whole of his writings dealing with the exploration of the self. -- Radha Balasubramanian * Slavic Review *This is a relatively short book, yet it is rich in content, taking on some of the most important and challenging problems Tolstoy faced as a writer and thinker. [Irina Paperno] draws on a full range of Tolstoy's nonfiction writings from the 1850s until his death in 1910: diaries, letters, reminiscences, autobiographical and confessional statements, essays, and religious tracts. In addition, her book is informed by vast reading in other sources, primary and secondary. -- Randall A. Poole * The Russian Review *Table of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1. "So That I Could Easily Read Myself": Tolstoy's Early DiariesTolstoy Starts a Diary—The Moral Vision of Self and the Temporal Order of Narrative—What Is Time? Cultural Precedents—“A History of Yesterday”— Time and Narrative—The Dream: The Hidden Recesses of Time—What Am I? The Young Tolstoy Defines Himself—What Am I? Cultural PrecedentsInterlude: Between Personal Documents and FictionFrom Diaries to Childhood: Tolstoy Becomes a Writer (1852)—“I Think I Will Never Write Again”: Tolstoy Attempts to Renounce Literature (1859)—“I . . . Don’t Even Think about the Accursed Lit-t-terature and Lit-t-terateurs”: Tolstoy Renounces Literature Again (1870); and Again (1874–75)Chapter 2. “To Tell One’s Faith Is Impossible. . . . How to Tell That Which I Live By. I’ll Tell You, All the Same. . . .” Tolstoy in His Correspondence“What Is My Life? What Am I?”: Tolstoy’s Philosophical Dialogue with Nikolai Strakhov—“I Wish that You, Instead of Reading Anna Kar [ enina ], Would Finish It. . . .”—“In the Form of Catechism,” “In the Form of a Dialogue”—To Tell One’s Life—Rousseau and His Profession/Confession—The Parting of Ways: Tolstoy Writes His Confession, and Strakhov Continues to Confess in His Letters to TolstoyChapter 3. Tolstoy’s Confession : What Am I?Tolstoy Publishes his Confession—The Conversion Narrative: Excursus on the Genre—Tolstoy’s Confession : Step by Step—Tolstoy’s Confession Related to Rousseau’s and Augustine’s—After Confession: “Presenting Christ’s Teaching as Something New after 1,800 Years of Christianity”—Coda: Tolstoy’s InfluenceChapter 4. “To Write My Life ”: Tolstoy Tries, and Fails, to Produce a Memoir or AutobiographyThe Author Biography—“My Life”: “On the Basis of My Own Memories”—“Reminiscences”: “More Useful Than All That Artistic Prattle with Which the Twelve Volumes of My Works Are Filled”—“Reminiscences”: “I Cannot Provide a Coherent Description of Events and States of Mind”—“The Green Stick”: “Où Suis-Je? Pourquoi Suis-Je? Que Suis-Je?”—Tolstoy and the Autobiographical TraditionChapter 5. “What Should We Do Then?”: Tolstoy on Self and Other“Why Have You, a Man from a Different World, Stopped near Us? Who Are You?”—Master and Slave: Tolstoy Rewrites Hegel—Tolstoy and the Washerwoman—The Order of Things: The Church, the State, the Arts and Sciences—“Master and Man”—Coda: Nonparticipation in EvilChapter 6. “I Felt a Completely New Liberation from Personality”: Tolstoy’s Late DiariesTolstoy Resumes his Diary—The Temporal Order of Narrative: The Last Day—“On Life and Death ”—The Diary as a Spiritual Exercise—“I, the Body, Is Such a Disgusting Chamber Pot”—“I Am Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself Being Conscious of Myself. . . .”—“I Have Lost the Memory of Everything, Almost Everything. . . . How Can One Not Rejoice at the Loss of Memory?”—Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening—Tolstoy’s Dreams—Dreams: The World beyond Time and Representation—The Book of life: “It Is Written on Time”—The Circle of Reading: “To Replace the Consciousness of Leo Tolstoy with the Consciousness of All Humankind”—“The Death of Socrates”—Tolstoy’s DeathAppendix: Russian QuotationsNotesIndex
£21.84
Cornell University Press Homicide in American Fiction 17981860
Book SynopsisHomicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 17981860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the unwritten law of a husband''s revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of andTrade ReviewHomicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is an excellent reference work, one that I will use often in determining the full implication of such acts as murder and seduction, not only in pre–Civil War fiction, but also in social and psychological attitudes of the same period. -- Philip Durham * American Quarterly *Because the approach to an old problem is new, the book is stimulating. Because its treatment is not definitive it is provocative. It is the sort of writing that might well be used to initiate interdisciplinary discussions on both content and method. -- Albert Morris * American Sociological Review *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Tainted Souls and Painted Faces
Book SynopsisProstitute, adulteress, unmarried woman who engages in sexual relations, victim of seductionthe Victorian fallen woman represents a complex array of stigmatized conditions. Amanda Anderson here reconsiders the familiar figure of the fallen woman within the context of mid-Victorian debates over the nature of selfhood, gender, and agency. In richly textured readings of works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, she argues that depictions of fallen women express profound cultural anxieties about the very possibility of self-control and traditional moral responsibility.Trade ReviewAs the subtitle suggests, Anderson’s subject is not so much the prostitute in Victorian literature as it is the rhetoric the Victorians used to construct ‘fallenness.’ * CHOICE *Some ideas in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces will be useful in classroom discussions about the pressures exerted on authors by specific literary forms and generalized cultural anxieties. -- Sally Mitchell * Victorian Studies *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change
Book SynopsisSixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable''s protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians'' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholarsMalcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracysuggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens'' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens chanTrade ReviewThis book will delight Dickens scholars and prove an asset to any university library.... It is one that will inspire readers to consider the changes the great writer has wrought in them, and that they, in their turn, may bring to Dickens scholarship. * Modern Language Review *This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors... consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others.... As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens's discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later. * Dickens Quarterly *An enjoyable and wide-ranging collection of articles exploring Dickens and change. * English Studies *Excellent discussions of condition-of-England novels. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Changing Dickens I. Dickens and Social Change Repetitions and Reversals: Patterns for Social Change in Pickwick Papers Three Revolutions: Alternate Routes to Social Change in Bleak House Dickens, Society, and Art: Change in Dickens's View of Effecting Social Reform The World Changing Dickens, Dickens Changing the World II. Dickens and Changes of Power Parrots, Birds of Prey, and Snorting Cattle: Dickens's Whig Agenda "The Tremendous Potency of the Small": Dickens, the Individual, and Social Change in a Post-America, Post-Catastrophist Age Money, Power, and Appearance in Dombey and Son III. Dickens and Literary Change The Passing of the Pickwick Moment The Chimes and the Rhythm of Life Radical Dickens: Dickens and the Tradition of Romantic Radicalism Modern Characters in the Late Novels of Charles Dickens IV. Dickens and Changes in Popular Culture and in the Theater The Cultural Politics of Dickens's Hard Times Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop Popular Dickens: Changing Bleak House for the East End Stage The Frozen Deep: Gad's Hill, June-July 1857 How to Read Dickens in English: A Last Retrospect Index
£97.20
Cornell University Press Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change
Book SynopsisSixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable''s protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians'' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholarsMalcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracysuggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens'' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens chanTrade ReviewThis book will delight Dickens scholars and prove an asset to any university library.... It is one that will inspire readers to consider the changes the great writer has wrought in them, and that they, in their turn, may bring to Dickens scholarship. * Modern Language Review *This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors... consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others.... As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens's discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later. * Dickens Quarterly *An enjoyable and wide-ranging collection of articles exploring Dickens and change. * English Studies *Excellent discussions of condition-of-England novels. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Changing Dickens I. Dickens and Social Change Repetitions and Reversals: Patterns for Social Change in Pickwick Papers Three Revolutions: Alternate Routes to Social Change in Bleak House Dickens, Society, and Art: Change in Dickens's View of Effecting Social Reform The World Changing Dickens, Dickens Changing the World II. Dickens and Changes of Power Parrots, Birds of Prey, and Snorting Cattle: Dickens's Whig Agenda "The Tremendous Potency of the Small": Dickens, the Individual, and Social Change in a Post-America, Post-Catastrophist Age Money, Power, and Appearance in Dombey and Son III. Dickens and Literary Change The Passing of the Pickwick Moment The Chimes and the Rhythm of Life Radical Dickens: Dickens and the Tradition of Romantic Radicalism Modern Characters in the Late Novels of Charles Dickens IV. Dickens and Changes in Popular Culture and in the Theater The Cultural Politics of Dickens's Hard Times Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop Popular Dickens: Changing Bleak House for the East End Stage The Frozen Deep: Gad's Hill, June-July 1857 How to Read Dickens in English: A Last Retrospect Index
£25.64
Cornell University Press Life Is Elsewhere
Book SynopsisIn Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called the provincesa place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature''s representation of the nation''s space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficultTrade ReviewThis is another excellent release in the NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies... a nuanced and enlightening book written in clear, jargon-free prose. * Choice *This highly important book provides a new understanding of what the author calls the provincial trope in Russian literature.The book has significant implications for history as well as literary criticism. * The Russian Review *The book's scope is one of its strongest qualities: Lounsbery goes beyond Gogol' and Chekhov and includes a range of other writers' uses of the provincial trope. The result is a fascinating and exhaustive analysis of the symbolic geography of Russian nineteenth-century literature. * Slavonic and East European Review *This book does a rare thing: it takes a topic that all readers of nineteenth-century Russian literature think they understand, provintsiia, and demonstrates that this apparently selfevident construct, associated with boredom and meaninglessness, is multifaceted, vibrant, and significant. In so doing, Life is Elsewhere genuinely transforms our understanding of nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. * Canadian Slavonic Papers *Life Is Elsewhere is a striking example of a successful thematic approach to literary analysis. At the same time, it is a bold re-evaluation of overlooked themes and texts in Russian literature, lending itself both to classroom discussion and to the rediscovery of individual writers in new contexts. * Modern Language Review *This is a magisterial book, generous in its wealth of information and citations, theoretically informed, thorough, and beautifully written.Lounsbery has proven that the Russian provinces are in fact deeply interesting, both as a foil and as a broader vehicle for helping us grapple with challenges of Russian identity and Russia's place both in the canon of world literature and geopolitically in the world. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Translation 1. Geography, History, Trope: Facts on the Ground 2. Before the Provinces: Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Pushkin's Countryside 3. Inventing Provincial Backwardness, or "Everything is Barbarous and Horrid" (Herzen, Sollogub, and Others) 4. "This is Paris itself!": Gogol in the Town of N 5. "I Do Beg of You, Wait, and Compare!": Goncharov, Belinsky, and Provincial Taste 6. Back Home: The Provincial Lives of Turgenev's Cosmopolitans 7. Transcendence Deferred: Women Writers in the Provinces 8. Melnikov and Leskov, or What is Regionalism in Russia? 9. Centering and Decentering in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 10. "Everything Here is Accidental": Chekhov's Geography of Meaninglessness 11. In the End: Shchedrin, Sologub, and Terminal Provinciality 12. Conclusion: The Provinces in the Twentieth Century List of Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
£97.20
Cornell University Press Heavens Interpreters
Book SynopsisIn Heaven''s Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women''s individual agency and collective action.Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook ediTable of ContentsIntroduction: Writing Women's Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America 1. "My Resolve Is the Feminine of My Father's Oath": Ritual Agency and Religious Language in the Early National Historical Novel 2. "Unsheathe the Sword of a Strong, Unbending Will": Sentimental Agency and the Doctrinal Work of Woman's Fiction 3. "I Have Sinned against God and Myself ": Bearing Witness to Enslaved Women's Agency in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 4. "The Human Soul...Makes All Things Sacred": Communal Agency in the Theological Romances of Harriet Beecher Stowe 5. "I Have No Disbelief ": Women's Spiritualist Novels and Nonliberal Agencies Conclusion: Women's Religious Agency Today
£17.99
Cornell University Press Behind the Times
Book SynopsisVirginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a lady novelist. As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents'' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it.Exploring the connections between Woolf''s immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation''s concerns and controversies to Woolf''s considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf''s creative works, politics, and criticism in Trade ReviewCorbett's meticulously researched study... locates influence socially as well as literarily, and details the societal changes wrought by the female Victorian writers... * Choice *In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Well-written and well-informed, this book draws on the latest debates in Woolf scholarship concerning public life, political activism, the professions, and history, and it adds an important dimension to discussion of Woolf and the Victorians. * Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature *The book provides a road map to guide us through the obscured routes of Woolf's neglected second-generation female predecessors. Corbett makes us pause to consider diversions from the Victorian male-dominated high road trodden by Woolf's father's venerated literary companions—Hardy, James, Meredith—and in some ways by Woolf herself. Through extensive research—patiently plodding along these archival paths—Corbett has made some of those second-generation voices more richly accessible to us. * Virginia Wolf Miscellany *A considerable achievement. For too long Woolf has been placed on a pedestal as the 'exceptional' modernist woman, despite the efforts of scholars to challenge this narrative. Corbett offers us a different Woolf, one entangled and immersed in a world richly populated with exceptional women; perhaps a messier, more complicated picture, but one truer and all the more interesting for that. * Modernism/modernity *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Gender, Greatness, and the "Third Generation" Interlude I: Grand Reads Woolf 2. New Women and Old: Sarah Grand, Social Purity, and The Voyage Out Interlude II: Disinterestedness 3. "Ashamed of the Inkpot": Woolf and the Literary Marketplace Interlude III: Duckworth and Company 4. "To Serve and Bless": Julia Stephen, Isabel Somerset, and Late-Victorian Women's Politics Interlude IV: Somerset, Symonds,Stephen, and Sexuality 5. "A Diferent Ideal": Representing the Public Woman
£38.70
Cornell University Press The Masses Are Revolting
Book SynopsisThe Masses Are Revolting reconstructs a pivotal era in the history of affect and emotion, delving into an archive of nineteenth-century disgust to show how this negative emotional response came to play an outsized, volatile part in the emergence of modern British society. Attending to the emotion''s socially productive role, Zachary Samalin highlights concrete scenes of Victorian disgust, from sewer tunnels and courtrooms to operating tables and alleyways. Samalin focuses on a diverse set of nineteenth-century writers and thinkersincluding Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, and Charlotte Brontëwhose works reflect on the shifting, unstable meaning of disgust across the period.Samalin elaborates this cultural history of Victorian disgust in specific domains of British society, ranging from the construction of London''s sewer system, the birth of modern obscenity law, and the development of the conventTrade ReviewThe assiduity with which Samalin has charted 1857 to 1860 is complemented by the laser-like precision with which he has uncovered a valuable array of arguments and ideas that would be largely illegible without the cogent and precise accounting of disgust this book ably puts forth. * Victorian Studies *This rich genealogy of theory, and the preference for historicist method, leave open a number of avenues of conceptual exploration that should invigorate readers. [Tthe book so voraciously reads primary nineteenth-century journalism, social science, and evolutionary science, and so skillfully threads these with twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychology, law, and social theory, while nonetheless defining its core object as "political aesthetics." * Modern Philology *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Of Origins and Orifices Part I: The Rationalization of Revulsion 1. The Odor of Things 2. Realism and Repulsion Part II.: Primal Scenes, Human Sciences 3. Darwin's Vomit 4. The Masses Are Revolting; or, The Birth of Social Theory from the Spirit of Disgust Part III: The Disenchantment of Disgust 5. The Age of Obscenity Conclusion: Horizons of Expectoration
£32.40
Cornell University Press Inscrutable Malice
Book SynopsisIn Inscrutable Malice, Jonathan A. Cook expertly illuminates Melville''s abiding preoccupation with the problem of evil and the dominant role of the Bible in shaping his best-known novel. Drawing on recent research in the fields of biblical studies, the history of religion, and comparative mythology, Cook provides a new interpretation of Moby-Dick that places Melville''s creative adaptation of the Bible at the center of the work.Cook identifies two ongoing concerns in the narrative in relation to their key biblical sources: the attempt to reconcile the goodness of God with the existence of evil, as dramatized in the book of Job; and the discourse of the Christian end-times involving the final destruction of evil, as found in the apocalyptic books and eschatological passages of the Old and New Testaments.With his detailed reading of Moby-Dick in relation to its most important source text, Cook greatly expands the reader''s understanding of the moralTrade ReviewThis book has an added advantage of serving as a reader's guide to the novel, one which will be indispensable to any serious reader of Moby-Dick, whether for the first or the twentieth time. * Sewanee Review *The best reading of this iconic novel in recent memory. Under Cook's expert eye, Moby-Dick divulges secrets of the Second Coming and Melville's conflicting religious inclinations. Cook's masterful and wide-ranging command of Melville's library makes Moby-Dick into a guided tour through the Western canon. * Religion & Literature *Of all books about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (and there are many), Jonathan A. Cook's is one that needed to be written. Cook organizes this potentially unwieldy and unfathomable topic in a way that scholars will find useful as a reference for repeated consultation. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *
£26.59
Cornell University Press Populating the Novel
Book SynopsisFrom the teeming streets of Dickens''s London to the households of domestic fiction, nineteenth-century British writers constructed worlds crammed beyond capacity with human life. In Populating the Novel, Emily Steinlight contends that rather than simply reflecting demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought. She shows how the nineteenth-century novel in particular claimed a new cultural role as it took on the task of narrating human aggregation at a moment when the Malthusian specter of surplus population suddenly and quite unexpectedly became a central premise of modern politics.In readings of novels by Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad that link fiction and biopolitics, Steinlight brings the crowds that pervade nineteenth-century fiction into the foreground. In so doing, she transforms the subject and political stakes of the VictoTrade ReviewPopulating the Novel is an impressive and thought-provoking work. It lays down a gauntlet to other scholars for further examination of biopower and surplus in nineteenth-century literature and culture. * Dickens Quarterly *Steinlight's study moves across a truly impressive array of materials and does so without ever sacrificing close attention to the particular texts under consideration. The book moves fluently beyond the rigid periodizations that continue to govern the professional life of nineteenth-century scholars. * Modern Philology *Populating the Novel is an extremely accomplished and wide-ranging monograph that contributes forcefully to the field of nineteenth-century novel studies. The argument that the multitude, not the individual, is the focus of nineteenth-century fiction takes criticism in an exciting new direction. * Modern Language Review *Populating the Novel is a compelling, thought-provoking work of criticism. Steinlight's reading of traditional narratives in the nineteenth century helps redefine pre-existing ideas about the novel's cultural role while simultaneously considering how its form was heavily influenced by demographics. This significant contribution to scholarship helps reimagine life in the aggregate while demonstrating a unique approach to socio-political aspects of the English novel. * Victorian Review *A work of scholarship that fulfills and exceeds the multitude of promises contained in its title. After describing and delineating the overcrowded demographics of Romantic and Victorian writing, Steinlight makes a provocative claim about population: in an age of efflorescence of biopolitical principles and quantitative social science, population becomes a political, economic, sociological, and, above all, literary problem. * V21 Collations Book Forum *While England's population more than tripled during the nineteenth century, the congested narratives of this era's fiction do not simply reflect demographic change. Instead, as Steinlight powerfully contends, they turn that reality into a pressing political problem that exposes the limits of social and political institutions to contain, manage, and care for the biological life of the populace. * Studies in the Novel *
£24.69
Cornell University Press Dickenss Idiomatic Imagination
Book SynopsisDickens''s Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens''s use of low and slangular (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens''s use of bodily idiomsright-hand man, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstoneagainst the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London''s streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the
£97.20
Cornell University Press Dickenss Idiomatic Imagination
Book SynopsisDickens''s Idiomatic Imagination offers an original analysis of how Charles Dickens''s use of low and slangular (his neologism) language allowed him to express and develop his most sophisticated ideas. Using a hybrid of digital (distant) and analogue (close) reading methodologies, Peter J. Capuano considers Dickens''s use of bodily idiomsright-hand man, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstoneagainst the broader lexical backdrop of the nineteenth century. Dickens was famously drawn to the vernacular language of London''s streets, but this book is the first to call attention to how he employed phrases that embody actions, ideas, and social relations for specific narrative and thematic purposes. Focusing on the mid- to late career novels Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Capuano demonstrates how Dickens came to relish using common idioms in uncommon ways and the
£22.49
Stanford University Press Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of
Book SynopsisAt the turn of the twentieth century, tuberculosis was a leading cause of death across America, Europe, and the Russian Empire. The incurable disease gave rise to a culture of convalescence, creating new opportunities for travel and literary reflection. Tubercular Capital tells the story of Yiddish and Hebrew writers whose lives and work were transformed by a tubercular diagnosis. Moving from eastern Europe to the Italian Peninsula, and from Mandate Palestine to the Rocky Mountains, Sunny S. Yudkoff follows writers including Sholem Aleichem, Raḥel Bluvshtein, David Vogel, and others as they sought "the cure" and drew on their experiences of illness to hone their literary craft. Combining archival research with literary analysis, Yudkoff uncovers how tuberculosis came to function as an agent of modern Jewish literature. The illness would provide the means for these suffering writers to grow their reputations and find financial backing. It served a central role in the public fashioning of their literary personas and ushered Jewish writers into a variety of intersecting English, German, and Russian literary traditions. Tracing the paths of these writers, Tubercular Capital reconsiders the foundational relationship between disease, biography, and literature.Trade Review"This brilliant study combines thorough historical research with a fine-grained analysis of texts produced under the shadow of the 'White Death,' all framed by a powerful account of the cultural and economic matrix within which both the career of the individual poet and the tradition of tubercular writing are most fruitfully articulated." -- Ernest B. Gilman * New York University *"Resisting the sentimental transformation of illness into metaphor described by Susan Sontag, while attending to the persistently romanticized 'consumptive artist,' Sunny Yudkoff's brilliant study provides a new model for understanding the relationship between literary creativity and tuberculosis. Tubercular Capital argues that writers strategically mobilized their tuberculosis, both for their careers and in their work, even as they were laid low by disease. From Sholem Aleichem's 'tubercular Jubilee' to the sickrooms and sanatoria of other Hebrew and Yiddish writers, tuberculosis was inextricable from the burgeoning of early twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture." -- Naomi Seidman * University of Toronto *"Yudkoff's exploration seamlessly merges speculation with concrete history....Tempting as it may be to imbue illness with its own transcendental power, she chooses to depict its force with a more material and pragmatic truth, warning of the dangerous contortions of pain that come with romanticization." -- Arshy Azizi * Los Angeles Review of Books *"This research on the role that tuberculosis played in the lives and creative output of modern Jewish writers is original and fascinating....Highly recommended for academic libraries collecting in the area of Jewish culture and literature." -- Yaffa Weisman * Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter *"A major asset of [Tubercular Capital] is the fact that it retains an unromanticized view of suffering artists, which is even more important when examining their treasured poetic work." -- Heidi Stern * The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Jewish Literature and Tubercular Capital chapter abstractThe Introduction sets the stage for a larger investigation into the intersection of tuberculosis, biography, and literary output. To do so, the Introduction offers an account of the state of Yiddish and Hebrew literature at the turn of the twentieth century as well as an overview of various cultural-historical connotations of tuberculosis among Jewish and non-Jewish readers. This includes an examination of Romantic notions about consumption, anti-Semitic discourses surrounding tuberculosis, and the reputation of the disease among Zionists, communists, and Jewish public health officials across the globe. The Introduction further introduces the methodological intervention of the study—tubercular capital—by bringing together sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" with anthropologist Didier Fassin's investigations into the "politics of life." 1In the Hands of Every Reader: Sholem Aleichem's Tubercular Jubilee chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by disease in the life and career of the classic Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (né Sholem Rabinovitsh). After being diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1908, a global campaign known as "The Jubilee" was initiated to help the destitute author recuperate in Nervi, Italy. Drawing on archival sources, newspaper articles, and multiple memoirs, this chapter plots how the campaign promoted the author's reputation, stabilized his finances, and inaugurated the first formal stage of literary-critical assessments of his work. It further analyzes the importance of tuberculosis in Sholem Aleichem's literary output, in the development of his literary persona, and in the establishment of a mutually-effective relationship with his readership. 2In a Sickroom of Her Own: Raḥel Bluvshtein's Tubercular Poetry chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role of tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew poet known as Raḥel. To do so, the chapter draws on the comparative model of the Victorian sickroom to examine how Raḥel transformed the space of her recuperation into a veritable salon of literary exchange and creativity. Reading Raḥel's correspondence and poetry and drawing on the memoiristic accounts published by her visitors, this chapter reveals that Raḥel's Tel Aviv sickroom became the center of her public self-fashioning as an ailing female poet. The sickroom further serves as the key for interpreting the link between Raḥel's poetics of space, simplicity (pashtut), and the spread (hitpashtut) of disease. This chapter also sharpens scholarly understanding of Raḥel's literary biography by situating her work within an Eastern European Romantic tradition of writing about consumption that stands in tension with contemporaneous Zionist ideas concerning illness. 3In the Kingdom of Fever: The Writers of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the literary scene of the Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society (JCRS), a Coloradan sanatorium for indigent Jews. There, a cohort of Yiddish tubercular writers engaged in a reciprocal relationship with the institution, becoming the public faces of the sanatorium and, in turn, being offered new venues to see their work published and translated. These writers include the lyric poet and Bible translator Yehoash, the epic poet H. Leivick, and the prose stylist Shea Tenenbaum. Drawing on archival records, newspaper reports, and memoirs, the chapter further explores how the JCRS supported the establishment of a tubercular American Yiddish literary tradition. 4In the Sanatorium: David Vogel Between Hebrew and German chapter abstractThis chapter examines the role played by tuberculosis in the life and writing of the Hebrew modernist David Vogel. After taking the cure in Merano, Italy in the winters of 1925 and 1926, he published his first novella, Be-vet ha-marpe (In the Sanatorium) in 1927. The text draws heavily on the tropes and concerns of German-language sanatorium fiction, including works by Arthur Schnitzler, Klabund, and Thomas Mann. Specifically, this chapter argues that Vogel writes his account of the sanatorium in a tense intertextual exchange with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). Vogel challenges the possibility of a Hebrew-German literary conversation through a series of interlingual puns, wordplays, and jokes about tuberculosis. Illness emerges in this chapter as the hermeneutic key to Vogel's modernism. Epilogue: After the Cure chapter abstractThis chapter explores post-Holocaust iterations of tuberculosis and sanatoria in the work of the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld. Although he did not suffer from tuberculosis, Appelfeld frequently turns to the disease and its institutions, such as in his 1975 novella, Badenheim, 'ir nofesh (English: Badenheim 1939). Bringing his work into dialogue with the texts of the tubercular writers of the pre-WWII period, this chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of tubercular capital as a methodological prism and analytic category, even after a diagnosis of tuberculosis was no longer commonplace among modern Jewish writers.
£53.60
Stanford University Press Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary
Book SynopsisPhonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.Trade Review"Camlot's riveting account of the oldest surviving poetry recordings delivers one dazzling close listening after another. Not a crackle, hum, trill, or vibrato goes unnoticed by the author's exquisitely tuned ear. Drawing on a lifetime spent in the company of vintage phonographs, Phonopoetics will be an essential guide to historic spoken word recordings of literature." -- Matthew Rubery * Queen Mary University of London *"Phonopoetics is a book best appreciated 'in stereo' as a fresh and compelling perspective on the early phonograph industry and a generative new framework for understanding the culture and practice of poetry recitation." -- Jacob Smith * Northwestern University *"Camlot challenges assumptions of contemporary literary criticism by taking the heard audio-text as a primary object of analysis....Recommended." -- S. Schmidt Horning * CHOICE *"Camlot breaks entirely new ground. His study provides, without exaggeration, something truly original for the field of sound studies, opening up entirely new archives and objects of analysis, new questions and answers." -- Tyler Whitney * Modernism/modernity *"Camlot's groundbreaking work teaches us myriad techniques for newly engaging with the audible content of media artifacts. His Phonopoetics models for us a novel audiotextual criticism and form of close listening through which we may freshly access the signals of some of history's earliest recorded sounds." -- Andrew Burkett * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Audiotextual Criticism chapter abstractThe introduction explores the strange sonic and material qualities of early sound recordings and outlines a methodology for the critical study of early spoken recordings as literary artifacts. It defines concepts that are at the core of the book, including the meaning of "literary recording", "sound", "signal", "audiotextual genres" and "sound media formats." In outlining a sound-based approach to literary studies, and in considering the synergies between textual criticism and literary sound recordings, it provides a schema for the pursuit of audiotextual criticism, that is, the formal and historical study of literary sound recordings. 1The Voice of the Phonograph chapter abstractChapter 1 analyzes the early promotional discourse surrounding the phonograph as a medium of natural fidelity and then situates the idea of the phonograph as a "pure voice" medium within the context of popular recitation anthologies in order to identify key elocutionary preconceptions that informed the vocal performances heard in early spoken recordings. In revealing the affinities that existed between late Victorian short spoken recordings and the brief texts meant for speaking aloud that were collected in nineteenth-century recitation anthologies, this opening chapter explains the preconceived notions about the phonograph as a new media technology and the significance of sound recording for the performance of literary texts, in particular. 2Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction chapter abstractChapter 2 focuses on the development and production of the earliest sound recordings drawn from the novels of Charles Dickens. The Dickens recordings of Bransby Williams and William Sterling Battis stand as the earliest fiction-based audio adaptations produced specifically for pedagogical application, and represent an interesting bridge between earlier conceptions of the talking record as a novel form of popular entertainment and the later, pedagogically motivated category of the literary recording. To shed light on the historical transition from "talking record" to "literary recording" and the emergence of what we now call educational technology, this chapter examines the particular kinds of literary adaptation in early recordings produced specifically for teaching literature in the classroom. 3Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Spectral Energy: Historical Intonation in Dramatic Recitation chapter abstractChapter 3 tells the story of the multiple recordings made between 1890 and 1920, both by the poet himself and by actors and elocutionists, of Tennyson's poem "The Charge of The Light Brigade." It analyzes the kinds of performance and genre that informed the production of these recordings and locates the speech sounds heard on them in debates of the period about elocution and verse speaking. An account of late Victorian methods of "dramatic" interpretation as elaborated by Samuel Silas Curry in Imagination and Dramatic Instinct opens into a longer genealogy of oral interpretation, and considers the import of New Criticism as a method of literary interpretation that worked to silence oral performance in the classroom. The close listening in this chapter also explores the potential of digital speech analysis tools to help us to fix and visualize elocutionary, prosodic features of these recordings of "Charge." 4T. S. Eliot's Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking chapter abstractChapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot's 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot's attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry. Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter situates Eliot's audible reading experiments within contemporary debates surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot's work for the BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot's reading experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in reading. Eliot's method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the abstract conception of "voice" that functions as an organizing principle in New Critical discourse. Eliot's recorded readings are heard to sound an organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an overarching oracular or otherworldly voice. Conclusion: Conclusion: Analog, Digital, Conceptual chapter abstractThe Conclusion to Phonopoetics explores conceptions of voice preservation and models of the voice archive. It takes early ideas of the audible archival artifact (the sound recording) and the event-oriented scenario of its use as useful points of departure for a historically motivated theorization of the voice recording and voice archive at the present time. Specifically, it considers the impact of digital media technologies on the status of the record and its archive. The Conclusion mediates on how the analogue artifact of the sound archive has shaped our ideas and expectations about what a digital repository should be, and reflects on the status of the artifact of study as we move increasingly from the study of material media artifacts to virtual instantiations of the signals those media may once have held, in the form of digital media files.
£49.30
Stanford University Press The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese
Book SynopsisThe Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt—Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.Trade Review"Elegantly parsing both continuities and discontinuities in racial formation from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Caroline Yang charts the peculiar survivals of the minstrel form. The power of antiblackness to deform Blackness and Chineseness on both stage and page is everywhere evident in this assiduously researched and argued book." -- Tavia Nyong'o * Yale University *"The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery offers fascinating new insights into minstrelsy as an enduring cultural form. Caroline Yang's nuanced comparative analyses enrich by challenging us to reconceptualize minstrelsy in the development of US literature and our ideas of the 'West.'" -- Edlie L. Wong * University of Maryland, College Park *"Yang provides new insights into the role of blackface minstrelsy in the post–Civil War period, particularly in California....Readers should bear in mind that the author's aim is not to explore the personal racism of any given author. Rather, it is to elucidate an evolving system of racial representation deployed across literature and popular culture that underpinned white supremacy, US imperialism, and settler colonialism. Recommended." -- J. R. Wendland * CHOICE *"Situating the 'Chinese question' in relation to Reconstruction, The Peculiar Afterlife assiduously documents continuities between the white supremacy of the antebellum South and the racial logics of the frontier... Yang's excavation of the Chinese worker's representational ties to blackface minstrelsy provides a timely illustration of the pervasive and constitutive role of antiblackness in US racial discourses." -- Amy C. Tang * The American Literary History Online Review *
£86.40
Stanford University Press The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese
Book SynopsisThe Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Examining texts by major American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sui Sin Far, and Charles Chesnutt—Yang traces the intertwined histories of blackface minstrelsy and Chinese labor. Her bold rereading of these authors' contradictory positions on race and labor sees the figure of the Chinese worker as both hiding and making visible the legacy of slavery and antiblackness. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States.Trade Review"Elegantly parsing both continuities and discontinuities in racial formation from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Caroline Yang charts the peculiar survivals of the minstrel form. The power of antiblackness to deform Blackness and Chineseness on both stage and page is everywhere evident in this assiduously researched and argued book." -- Tavia Nyong'o * Yale University *"The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery offers fascinating new insights into minstrelsy as an enduring cultural form. Caroline Yang's nuanced comparative analyses enrich by challenging us to reconceptualize minstrelsy in the development of US literature and our ideas of the 'West.'" -- Edlie L. Wong * University of Maryland, College Park *"Yang provides new insights into the role of blackface minstrelsy in the post–Civil War period, particularly in California....Readers should bear in mind that the author's aim is not to explore the personal racism of any given author. Rather, it is to elucidate an evolving system of racial representation deployed across literature and popular culture that underpinned white supremacy, US imperialism, and settler colonialism. Recommended." -- J. R. Wendland * CHOICE *"Situating the 'Chinese question' in relation to Reconstruction, The Peculiar Afterlife assiduously documents continuities between the white supremacy of the antebellum South and the racial logics of the frontier... Yang's excavation of the Chinese worker's representational ties to blackface minstrelsy provides a timely illustration of the pervasive and constitutive role of antiblackness in US racial discourses." -- Amy C. Tang * The American Literary History Online Review *
£23.39
Stanford University Press The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism,
Book SynopsisThe enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.Trade Review"Complex and subtle in theoretical approach, sensitive to the slow time of historical transformation, and written with great clarity and energy, this is a carefully researched book animated by a powerful and timely argument for the distinctive power of literature to capture experiences of the 'unenclosed' and to convey a sense of futural possibilities."—Amanda Anderson, Brown University"Reconceiving enclosure as a form of slow violence akin to other forms of environmental dispossession, Carolyn Lesjak generates deep and entirely new readings of the Victorian realist novel. Her analysis approaches literature as a political resource for the ongoing struggle against neoliberalism's destruction of the commons."—Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis"The Afterlife of Enclosure is a remarkable text that extends the ideas of Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams in its timely understanding of enclosures as local phenomena with global reach and ultimate catalysts for contemporary catastrophes... [Lesjak's] monograph itself becomes a radical thought experiment, in line with popular forms of resistance, as Lesjak's investigation of 19th-century novels as material artefacts is transformed into a call to action for sociopolitical change."—Sophia Möllers, Journal for the Study of British Cultures"By illuminating how nineteenth-century realist fiction can serve as an atlas to our enclosed world, Lesjak provides a model of reading that is at once critical and reparative, deeply historical and attuned to the crises of the present."—Gregory Vargo, Modern Philology"Carolyn Lesjak's [The Afterlife of Enclosure] is a deeply researched, lucid and broadly compelling study that simultaneously brings new attention to an understudied connection between social history and nineteenth-century fiction, challenges longstanding critical assumptions about the intrinsic value of forms of novelistic characterization, and valuably interrogates the often unquestioned alignment between the canonical texts it considers and the evolution of Victorian liberalism."—Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"Taking down the fence and finding common ground to start broader public conversations about the enduring legacies of race and colonialism in nineteenth-century literature feel like the right task. But if anything, that makes a study like Lesjak's, which conveys the power of these great works to imagine a world otherwise, only more vital as a resource of hope and optimism of the will for what is ahead."—Ruth Livesey, Victorian Literature and CultureTable of ContentsIntroduction: Realism and the Commons 1. The Persistence of the Commons, The Persistence of Enclosure 2. Dickensian Types and a Culture of the Commons 3. Eliot, Cosmopolitanism, and the Commons 4. The Typical and the Tragic in Hardy's Geopolitical Commons Afterword: Old and New Enclosures
£92.80
Stanford University Press Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear
Book SynopsisNotework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures. Trade Review"Encountering writers' notebooks on their own terms, Simon Reader carves out fresh and rewarding territory in the landscape of Victorian studies. Notework offers brilliant, wide-ranging commentary on little-studied archival materials in dialogue with, but not subordinated to, well-known works of the period."—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia"Written in an energetic, witty, and clear style, Notework is full of interest and fresh insight—an unexpected and provocative view on material that has wider implications for how we read."—Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford"Contrasting with the disjointed fragments he quotes, Reader's own fluent and energetic style guides us through discussions of formalism generally, and Formalism in particular, into the direct engagement that he promises."—Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement"Notework offers a major contribution to the genre theory and the history of reading because it makes valuable, really for the first time, an absolutely ubiquitous practice... Reader's approach can return us to the archive and attune us beyond the canon because it so profoundly values formal multiplicity."—Elisha Cohn, Modern Philology"Critics often view authorial notes as adjunct to the study of major works, and this purpose is still central. However, Reader contends, in addition to providing insight into the creative process, notes serve as a distinct body of literary work... Incidentally, his observations about the disconnected nature of communication in social media (think Twitter) lead one to wonder how these instances of "note work" might figure as a genre to future readers."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICE"As a study in how to interpret those primary sources that make up much of nineteenth-century literary history, Notework is an engaging reimagining of the Victorian information landscape and an important reconsideration of how literary studies treats ephemera in the nineteenth century and beyond.... Notework promises to be a cornerstone in the aesthetics of information and in the ongoing reassessment of the parts of the long nineteenth century that carry into our present."—Sierra Eckert, Modern Language Quarterly"Simon Reader's 'notework,' a new and happily-coined literary term, avoids the book in 'notebook' while evoking the dream in 'dreamwork' and the art in 'artwork.' In other words, the term itself does a lot of work for this excellent study of important noteworks in Victorian literature. By conceptualizing and naming it, Reader's term will generate further work on this novel genre."—Carolyn Williams, Prose Studies
£53.60
Stanford University Press The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism,
Book SynopsisThe enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of "slow violence" that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the nineteenth century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath. This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies. These writers reinvented a commons committed to the collective nature of the social world. Illuminating the common at the heart of the novel—from common characters to commonplace events—Carolyn Lesjak reveals an experimental figuration of the lost commons, once a defining feature of the British landscape and political imaginary. In the face of privatization, climate change, new enclosures, and the other forms of slow violence unfolding globally today, this book looks back to a literature of historical trauma and locates within it a radical path forward.Trade Review"Complex and subtle in theoretical approach, sensitive to the slow time of historical transformation, and written with great clarity and energy, this is a carefully researched book animated by a powerful and timely argument for the distinctive power of literature to capture experiences of the 'unenclosed' and to convey a sense of futural possibilities."—Amanda Anderson, Brown University"Reconceiving enclosure as a form of slow violence akin to other forms of environmental dispossession, Carolyn Lesjak generates deep and entirely new readings of the Victorian realist novel. Her analysis approaches literature as a political resource for the ongoing struggle against neoliberalism's destruction of the commons."—Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis"The Afterlife of Enclosure is a remarkable text that extends the ideas of Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams in its timely understanding of enclosures as local phenomena with global reach and ultimate catalysts for contemporary catastrophes... [Lesjak's] monograph itself becomes a radical thought experiment, in line with popular forms of resistance, as Lesjak's investigation of 19th-century novels as material artefacts is transformed into a call to action for sociopolitical change."—Sophia Möllers, Journal for the Study of British Cultures"By illuminating how nineteenth-century realist fiction can serve as an atlas to our enclosed world, Lesjak provides a model of reading that is at once critical and reparative, deeply historical and attuned to the crises of the present."—Gregory Vargo, Modern Philology"Carolyn Lesjak's [The Afterlife of Enclosure] is a deeply researched, lucid and broadly compelling study that simultaneously brings new attention to an understudied connection between social history and nineteenth-century fiction, challenges longstanding critical assumptions about the intrinsic value of forms of novelistic characterization, and valuably interrogates the often unquestioned alignment between the canonical texts it considers and the evolution of Victorian liberalism."—Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"Taking down the fence and finding common ground to start broader public conversations about the enduring legacies of race and colonialism in nineteenth-century literature feel like the right task. But if anything, that makes a study like Lesjak's, which conveys the power of these great works to imagine a world otherwise, only more vital as a resource of hope and optimism of the will for what is ahead."—Ruth Livesey, Victorian Literature and CultureTable of ContentsIntroduction: Realism and the Commons 1. The Persistence of the Commons, The Persistence of Enclosure 2. Dickensian Types and a Culture of the Commons 3. Eliot, Cosmopolitanism, and the Commons 4. The Typical and the Tragic in Hardy's Geopolitical Commons Afterword: Old and New Enclosures
£23.79
Stanford University Press Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in
Book SynopsisNovels are often said to help us understand how others think—especially when those others are profoundly different from us. When interpreting a character's behavior, readers are believed to make use of "Theory of Mind," the general human capacity to attribute mental states to other people. In many well-known nineteenth-century American novels, however, characters behave in ways that are opaque to readers, other characters, and even themselves, undermining efforts to explain their actions in terms of mental states like beliefs and intentions. Writing the Mind dives into these unintelligible moments to map the weaknesses of Theory of Mind and explore alternative frameworks for interpreting behavior. Through readings of authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, Martin Delany, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain, Hannah Walser explains how experimental models of cognition lead to some of the strangest formal features of canonical American texts. These authors' attempts to found social life on something other than mental states not only invite us to revise our assumptions about the centrality of mind reading and empathy to the novel as a form; they can also help us understand more contemporary concepts in social cognition, including gaslighting and learned helplessness, with more conceptual rigor and historical depth.Trade Review"This deeply interdisciplinary book is also a call to literary scholars to attend to the ways in which cognitive theory can enhance our understanding of how fiction operates formally. Elegantly written, thoughtful, and thorough."—Justine S. Murison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"Walser provides a stunning reevaluation of the work fiction does to experiment with the problem of other people's minds. Essential for scholars interested in thinking about social cognition, cognitive diversity, and how those phenomena were explored in the nineteenth century."—Sari Altschuler, Northeastern University"Writing the Mind carefully parses through canonical nineteenth-century American texts, sagaciously teasing new readings from familiar and rich passages. Covering a stunning array of primary texts and theorists, Walser offers a compelling new lens through which to read the socio-cognition of some of the nineteenth-century's most familiar, if baffling, characters."—Kassie Jo Baron, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Toward a Literary History of Cognition 1. Boundedness 2. Epistemic Reality 3. Causal Power 4. Responsibility
£45.90
Stanford University Press Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor
Book SynopsisUncle Tom charts the dramatic cultural transformation of perhaps the most controversial literary character in American history. From his origins as the heroic, Christ-like protagonist of Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, Uncle Tom has become a widely recognized epithet for a black person deemed so subservient to whites that he betrays his race. Readers have long noted that Stowe's character is not the traitorous sycophant that his name connotes today. Adena Spingarn traces his evolution in the American imagination, offering the first comprehensive account of a figure central to American conversations about race and racial representation from 1852 to the present. We learn of the radical political potential of the novel's many theatrical spinoffs even in the Jim Crow era, Uncle Tom's breezy disavowal by prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and a developing critique of "Uncle Tom roles" in Hollywood. Within the stubborn American binary of black and white, citizens have used this rhetorical figure to debate the boundaries of racial difference and the legacy of slavery. Through Uncle Tom, black Americans have disputed various strategies for racial progress and defined the most desirable and harmful images of black personhood in literature and popular culture.Trade Review"Stowe's blockbuster novel continues to provoke debate and touch raw nerves. For Adena Spingarn, it serves as an introduction to the long history of haggling over the meanings of race in America. There are numerous studies of Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is the richest, most provocative, and most stylishly written of the lot."—Benjamin Reiss, Emory University"Adena Spingarn's grand history of Uncle Tom is both a rich study of the nineteenth-century reception of the novel and a timely analysis of the twentieth-century role of Jim Crow, the myth of the Lost Cause, and the codes of Hollywood in reshaping a major political and cultural symbol. A stirring and revelatory book."—Elaine Showalter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University"Spingarn's ambitious volume traces how "Uncle Tom," first seen as a revolutionary exemplar of black dignity and spiritual power, became a potent racial slur....Drawing on her extensive research in digitized archives of periodicals and adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Spingarn unfolds ambivalent responses to the Uncle Tom figure by both white and African Americans....Essential."—M. L. Robertson, CHOICE"[Uncle Tom] demonstrates how careful re-reading of contemporary materials can make us rethink the received interpretation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Spingarn's book is extremely useful for scholars who wish to know how Uncle Tom turned from martyr into traitor and how a new generation of black intellectual leaders reshaped the meaning of an iconic literary character."—Debra J. Rosenthal, Review 19"With crisp prose and a broad array of materials that spans representational forms,Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitoris necessary reading for anyone interested in how the title character of the most influential work of American literature became so much more than, and so very different from, what his creator could have ever imagined."—Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The American Historical ReviewTable of Contents1. A Manly Hero 2. Uncle Tom on the American Stage 3. Uncle Tom and Jim Crow 4. Writing the Old Negro 5. Uncle Toms and New Negroes 6. Writing Off Uncle Tom
£20.89
Stanford University Press Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of
Book SynopsisIn this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication. Trade Review"Refiguring Speech is a daring and deft new work within Victorian studies as well as colonial and postcolonial theory. Its brilliant, timely argument for retheorizing 'talk' as racially embodied linguistic production represents the next generation of research."—Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside"This book makes a sophisticated argument about the distinction between speech and talk in the late Victorian novel and how, when the propriety of speech gives way to talk, glimpses of an anticolonial aesthetic come into view. Illuminating and eloquent."—Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College"InRefiguring Speech, Wong analyzes four Victorian novels that illustrate a breakdown in the notion of speech as an indication of cultural self-possession and the erosion of the assumption of Ango-European civilization as universal.... Recommended."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker's White Cosmopolitics 3. George Meredith's Profuse Inarticulacy 4. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's Dysfluent End of the World Conclusion
£50.40
University of Pennsylvania Press Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography:
Book SynopsisIn Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.Trade Review"An ambitious essay in the history of ideas—one based on lots of close reading and scrupulous attention to the actual positions in the debates examined." * Paul Hamilton, Queen Mary University of London *"This book stands to be of great value to literary studies, both because of the precision it helps introduce into discussions of literary history—suddenly revealed to be an even looser, baggier monster than even far-reaching projects of distant reading have revealed—and because of the compelling microhistories it unearths within the genealogy of literary studies." * Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University *
£53.60
University of Pennsylvania Press A Marsh Island
Book SynopsisToward the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) made a surprising disclosure. Instead of the critically lauded The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett declared her “best story” to be A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel. Why? One reason is that it demonstrates Jewett’s range. Known primarily for her vignettes, Jewett accomplished in these pages a truly great novel. Undoubtedly, another reason lies in the novel’s themes of queer kinship and same-sex domesticity, as enjoyed by the flamboyant protagonist Dick Dale. Written a few years into Jewett’s decades-long companionship with Annie Fields, A Marsh Island echoes Jewett’s determination to split time between her family home in Maine and Fields’s place on Charles Street in Boston. The novel follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts and envisions the latter region’s saltmarsh as a figure for dynamic selfhood: the ever-shifting boundaries between land and sea a model for valuing both individuality and a porous openness to the gifts of others. Jewett’s works played a major role in popularizing the genre of American regionalism and have garnered praise, both in her time and ours, for her skill in rendering the local landscapes and fishing villages along or near the coasts of New England. Just as Jewett brought attention to the unique beauty and value of the Great marsh region, editor Don James McLaughlin reveals a convergence of regionalism and sexuality in Jewett’s work in his introduction. A Marsh Island reminds us that queer kinship has a long tradition of being extended to incorporate queer ecological belonging, and that the meaning of “companionship” itself is enriched when we acknowledge its indebtedness to environment.
£27.20
University of Minnesota Press What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton
Book SynopsisExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making. Trade Review "A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring ‘an ethos of collecting’—and for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."—Scott Herring, Indiana University "This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Liming’s study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."—Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism "It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Liming’s fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."—Los Angeles Review of Books "An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most literary bibliophiles."—ALH Online Review Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton
Book SynopsisExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making. Trade Review "A generous reassessment of Edith Wharton and materialized cultures. With this exceptional interpretation of the modern bookshelf, Sheila Liming offers page after page of unanticipated insight into gender and literary production. This is mandatory reading for those of us committed, like Wharton, to harboring ‘an ethos of collecting’—and for those of us, like this brave critic, committed to Wharton herself."—Scott Herring, Indiana University "This imaginative, deeply learned study illuminates the role of libraries and books for Edith Wharton, but it also provides an important examination of what the art of collecting books in the late nineteenth century tells us about how women writers and readers created networks of intellectual labor and ambition. Lyrically written and brilliantly argued, Sheila Liming’s study is also an indispensable meditation on the act of collecting and the unseen worlds ordinary and extraordinary readers and writers created through it."—Stephanie Foote, author of The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism "It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women. Sheila Liming’s fascinating book proves her to be an exemplary heir."—Los Angeles Review of Books "An enormously valuable addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s most literary bibliophiles."—ALH Online Review Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Library as Space: Self-Making and Social Endangerment in The Decoration of Houses and Summer2. The Library as Hoard: Collecting and Canonicity in The House of Mirth and Eline Vere3. The Library as Network: Affinity, Exchange, and the Makings of Authorship4. The Library as Tomb: Monuments and Memorials in Wharton’s Short FictionConclusionNotesIndex
£20.69
University of Minnesota Press Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Book SynopsisWhy Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsRethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist TurnMeredith FarmerPart I. Ontologies1. Sailing without AhabSteve Mentz2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with WhalesBranka Arsić3. Ahab after Agency Mark D. Noble4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New MaterialismChristian P. Haines Part II. Relations5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch SynesthesiaPilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic PainMichael D. Snediker7.‘The King is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist ReadingRussell Sbriglia8. Approaching Ahab BlindChristopher CastigliaPart III. Politics9. ‘this post-mortemizing of the whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and OldBonnie Honig10.Ahab’s Electromagnetic ConstitutionDonald E. Pease11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of MonomaniaJonathan D. S. Schroeder12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of ReasonJonathan LambPart IV. New Melvilles13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’Matthew A. Taylor 14. Israel Potter; or, the ExcrescenceColin Dayan15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and LaborIvy Wilson16. Melville’s Basement TapesJohn ModernAfterword: Melville Among the MaterialistsSamuel OtterAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex
£80.00
University of Minnesota Press Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn
Book SynopsisWhy Captain Ahab is worthy of our fear—and our compassion Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab is perennially seen as the paradigm of a controlling, tyrannical agent. Ahab Unbound leaves his position as a Cold War icon behind, recasting him as a contingent figure, transformed by his environment—by chemistry, electromagnetism, entomology, meteorology, diet, illness, pain, trauma, and neurons firing—in ways that unexpectedly force us to see him as worthy of our empathy and our compassion. In sixteen essays by leading scholars, Ahab Unbound advances an urgent inquiry into Melville’s emergence as a center of gravity for materialist work, reframing his infamous whaling captain in terms of pressing conversations in animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, political theory, and posthumanism. By taking Ahab as a focal point, we gather and give shape to the multitude of ways that materialism produces criticism in our current moment. Collectively, these readings challenge our thinking about the boundaries of both persons and nations, along with the racist and environmental violence caused by categories like the person and the human.Ahab Unbound makes a compelling case for both the vitality of materialist inquiry and the continued resonance of Melville’s work.Contributors: Branka Arsić, Columbia U; Christopher Castiglia, Pennsylvania State U; Colin Dayan, Vanderbilt U; Christian P. Haines, Pennsylvania State U; Bonnie Honig, Brown U; Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt U; Pilar Martínez Benedí, U of L’Aquila, Italy; Steve Mentz, St. John’s College; John Modern, Franklin and Marshall College; Mark D. Noble, Georgia State U; Samuel Otter, U of California, Berkeley; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College; Ralph James Savarese, Grinnell College; Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall U; Michael D. Snediker, U of Houston; Matthew A. Taylor, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Ivy Wilson, Northwestern U.Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsRethinking Ahab: Melville and the Materialist TurnMeredith FarmerPart I. Ontologies1. Sailing without AhabSteve Mentz2. Ambiental Cogito: Ahab with WhalesBranka Arsić3. Ahab after Agency Mark D. Noble4. Thinking with a Wrinkled Brow; or, Herman Melville, Catherine Malabou, and the Brains of New MaterialismChristian P. Haines Part II. Relations5. Phantom Empathy: Ahab and Mirror-Touch SynesthesiaPilar Martínez Benedí and Ralph James Savarese6. Phenomenology beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic PainMichael D. Snediker7.‘The King is a Thing’; or, Ahab as Subject of the Unconscious: A Lacanian Materialist ReadingRussell Sbriglia8. Approaching Ahab BlindChristopher CastigliaPart III. Politics9. ‘this post-mortemizing of the whale’: The Vapors of Materialism, New and OldBonnie Honig10.Ahab’s Electromagnetic ConstitutionDonald E. Pease11. The Whiteness of the Will: Ahab and the Matter of MonomaniaJonathan D. S. Schroeder12. Diet on the Pequod and the Wreck of ReasonJonathan LambPart IV. New Melvilles13. Ahab’s After-Life: The Tortoises of ‘The Encantadas’Matthew A. Taylor 14. Israel Potter; or, the ExcrescenceColin Dayan15.Melville, Materiality, and the Social Hieroglyphics of Leisure and LaborIvy Wilson16. Melville’s Basement TapesJohn ModernAfterword: Melville Among the MaterialistsSamuel OtterAcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex
£21.59
University of Minnesota Press Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a
Book SynopsisReading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human–animal relations From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon.Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.Trade Review"Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation—aesthetic, scientific, and political—dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction."—Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice"Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Capture offers a thought-provoking tour through the ways human-animal relations were reimagined in nineteenth-century America."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition is striking and, one is tempted to say, captivating...a deep, intelligent and well-written study."—Transatlantica"A fascinating genealogy of the representations of nonhuman animals that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century."—Textual PracticeTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A New Animal ConditionPart I. Last Vestiges of the Hunt1. Still Lifes: Audubon2. Land Speculations: CooperPart II. New Genres of Capture3. The Fugitive Animal: Poe4. Fabulous Taxonomy: Hawthorne5. The Stock Image: MuybridgeConclusion: Life in CaptureAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£77.60
University of Minnesota Press Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a
Book SynopsisReading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human–animal relations From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon.Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.Trade Review"Capture is a major intervention in critical animal studies and an important rethinking of American culture during the period in which the romance of the frontier gave way to the routinized violence of settler biopower. Antoine Traisnel shows how the disappearance of animals generated a countermovement: new modes of representation—aesthetic, scientific, and political—dedicated to reproducing animal life as commodifiable vitality but also as fugitivity and finitude. This is a bracing prehistory of our contemporary situation haunted by both the industrial feedlot and the sixth mass extinction."—Tobias Menely, author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice"Investigating figures such as Audubon, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Antoine Traisnel brings extraordinary new insights into our understanding of how technology not only influences but often decides the artistic and philosophical understanding of animal life. Based on rich historical archives but also deeply theoretical, Capture persuasively argues that in the effort to bring to the fore what is unapproachable in the animal, nineteenth-century art redefined what or who counts as an animal and, in so doing, reinvented the human-animal relationship."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Capture offers a thought-provoking tour through the ways human-animal relations were reimagined in nineteenth-century America."—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition is striking and, one is tempted to say, captivating...a deep, intelligent and well-written study."—Transatlantica"A fascinating genealogy of the representations of nonhuman animals that emerged in the United States during the nineteenth century."—Textual PracticeTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: A New Animal ConditionPart I. Last Vestiges of the Hunt1. Still Lifes: Audubon2. Land Speculations: CooperPart II. New Genres of Capture3. The Fugitive Animal: Poe4. Fabulous Taxonomy: Hawthorne5. The Stock Image: MuybridgeConclusion: Life in CaptureAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£20.69
Fordham University Press Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in
Book SynopsisToy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.Table of ContentsPreface: A Toy Is Being Beaten | ix Introduction: Child’s Play | 1 1 Proper Objects | 27 2 Possible Persons | 54 3 Our Plays | 82 4 Bildung Blocks | 110 Conclusion: Toy Stories | 137 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 149 Works Cited | 189 Index | 205
£79.90
University of Massachusetts Press Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's
Book SynopsisA study of the poet's distinctive compositional practices; Debates about editorial proprieties have been at the center of Emily Dickinson scholarship since the 1981 publication of the two-volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Many critics have since investigated the possibility that autograph poems might have primacy over their printed versions, and it has been suggested that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes are all potentially integral to any given poem's meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents. In Measures of Possibility, Domhnall Mitchell sets out to test the hypothesis of Dickinson's textual radicalism, and its consequences for readers, students, and teachers, by looking closely at features such as spacing, the physical direction of the writing, and letter-shapes in hand-written lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with a critical apparatus by which to measure the extent to which contemporary approaches to Dickinson's autograph procedures can reasonably be formulated as corresponding to the poet's own purposes.Trade ReviewIn this admirable and ambitious study, Domhnall confronts the thorny question of whether any set of editing practices can adequately represent in print the distinctive characteristics of Emily Dickinson's writing.... This book will do for our generation of Dickinson scholars what Franklin's The Editing of Emily Dickinson did in the wake of the Johnson edition, but it will draw a lot more attention because editing issues now claim a tremendous amount of attention in ways that force everyone who proposes to write on Dickinson (or perhaps even to teach her poems) to arrive at some sort of considered justification for individual choices. This will be an important and timely book - and a controversial one. - Jane Donahue Eberwein, editor of An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia; ""Domhnall Mitchell's critical persona is witty and humane, engaging and astute.... the book is sure to have a major impact on Dickinson studies and on editorial politics and practices further afield."" - Vivian Pollak, author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender
£26.06
University of Massachusetts Press The Emily Dickinson Handbook
Book SynopsisThis book is a source of quick reference containing basic and up-to-date information on the poet's life, her art, the manuscripts, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship in general. For ease of use, individual essays have been structured as follows: Each essay provides a historical overview of the relevant issues under scrutiny. The essays offer detailed discussions of important aspects pertaining of the fields in question. Unlike encyclopedic entries, each of the several essays reflects the authors own perspective, presenting a distinct point of view, at times a controversial one. Trade ReviewThis book presents the most exhaustive and useful summary of Emily Dickinson scholarship in the 20th century-a series of short but amazingly comprehensive essays on almost every aspect of Dickinson studies, written especially for this volume by Dickinson's most formidable contemporary critics. Invaluable to the expert and novice alike, every page of this book is sheer pleasure, in a way comparable to few scholarly texts.-Virginia Quarterly Review; ""The best of recent Dickinson scholarship is gathered together in the multifaceted Emily Dickinson Handbook, a collection of essays that examine Dickinson's life, poetry, poetics, and social perspective.""-Booklist ""Satisfies a long-standing need in 19th-century U.S. literature studies, providing a ready reference guide with essential, up-to-date material about Dickinson's life and art, her manuscripts, and the present state of research.... Highly recommended.""-Choice; ""A single authoritative source for information about Dickinson's historical, cultural, and biographical contexts, as well as the editing and transmission of her texts, their critical reception, and the most recent interpretive, pedagogical, and theoretical approaches within Dickinson scholarship.... This book has it all.""-Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
£26.06
University of Massachusetts Press The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to
Book SynopsisIndifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference-by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain of poetic indifference began to emerge. The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others-works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming ""indifferent"" in the sense of ""mediocre."" Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself. This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.Trade ReviewExtraordinary from start to finish. Once I began reading it, I continued reading it almost nonstop, even in a period full of other obligations. The book is electric in its revelations and in its quality of writing a small work of art.-Elaine Scarry, Harvard University; ""A first-rate piece of work: original, daring, witty-just very perceptive page after page. Absolutely free from jargon or pomposity or any of the afflications that beset English study.""-William H. Pritchard, Amherst College
£26.96
University of Massachusetts Press Inventing the Addict: Drugs, Race, and Sexuality
Book SynopsisThis book reconstructs the literary and cultural history of addiction from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The notion of addiction has always conjured first-person stories, often beginning with an insidious seduction, followed by compulsion and despair, culminating in recovery and tentative hope for the future. We are all familiar with this form of individual life narrative, Susan Zieger observes, but we know far less about its history. 'Addict' was not an available identity until the end of the nineteenth century, when a modernizing medical establishment and burgeoning culture of consumption updated the figure of the sinful drunkard popularized by the temperance movement.In ""Inventing the Addict"", Zieger tells the story of how the addict, a person uniquely torn between disease and desire, emerged from a variety of earlier figures such as drunkards, opium-eating scholars, vicious slave masters, dissipated New Women, and queer doctors. Drawing on a broad range of literary and cultural material, including canonical novels such as ""Uncle Tom's Cabin"", ""The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"", and ""Dracula"", she traces the evolution of the concept of addiction through a series of recurrent metaphors: exile, self-enslavement, disease, and vampirism. She shows how addiction took on multiple meanings beyond its common association with intoxication or specific habit-forming substances - it was an abiding desire akin to both sexual attraction and commodity fetishism, a disease that strangely failed to meet the requirements of pathology, and the citizen's ironic refusal to fulfill the promise of freedom.Nor was addiction an ideologically neutral idea. As Zieger demonstrates, it took form over time through specific, shifting intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, reflecting the role of social power in the construction of meaning.Trade ReviewInventing the Addict is full of excellent things. It not only makes an important contribution to the field of addiction studies and many other areas of present interest in cultural, social, and material studies, it also functions partly as a summary and synthesis of much current work in nineteenth-century civilization. - Marty Roth, author of Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication
£26.31
University of Massachusetts Press In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women,
Book Synopsis
£26.06
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch
Book SynopsisCovers the major modernist literary works of Broch and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to his political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is best known for his two major modernist works, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols., 1930-1932) and The Death of Virgil (1945), which frame a lifetime of ethical, cultural, political, and social thought. A textile manufacturer by trade, Broch entered the literary scene late in life with an experimental view of the novel that strove towards totality and vividly depicted Europe's cultural disintegration. As fascism took over and Broch, a Viennese Jew, was forced into exile, his view of literature as transformative was challenged, but his commitment to presenting an ethical view of the crises of his time was unwavering. An important mentor and interlocutor for contemporaries such as Arendt and Canetti as well as a continued inspiration for contemporary authors, Broch wrote to better understand and shape the political and cultural conditions for a postfascist world. This volume covers the major literary works and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to Broch's political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Contributors: Graham Bartram, Brechtje Beuker, GiselaBrude-Firnau, Gwyneth Cliver, Jennifer Jenkins, Kathleen L. Komar, Paul Michael Lützeler, Gunther Martens, Sarah McGaughey, Judith Ryan, Judith Sidler, Galin Tihanov, Sebastian Wogenstein. Graham Bartram retired as Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. Sarah McGaughey is Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College, USA. Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK.Trade Review[A] fantastic volume that introduces Broch, his work, and his historical environment. This task is noble and its execution well done, and in this they have done a significant service to the field. Instructors should be encouraged to assign chapters from this collection - no given chapter is particularly long- to be read in tandem with the works they discuss. -- STUDIES IN 20TH AND 21ST CENTURY LITERATURESpecialists and general readers will find themselves repeatedly turning to this book for overall context and specific elucidation, especially since the editors validate their hope for wide appeal by translating all passages in German. . . . . [P]rovides reliable knowledge expertly presented in essays uniformly lucid, winnowing the full range of scholarship and keeping the topic in focus, never straying into side issues. . . . [A] truly indispensable guide to Broch. Very highly recommended. -- Vincent Kling * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Well suited to giving a broad readership an overview of Broch's work while providing certain historical accents...The volume succeeds overall in portraying in some detail the complexity of and also the inner tension in Broch's works, and at the same time demonstrating that his texts remain relevant for the present day. -- Martin Klebes * GERMANISTIK *This valuable collection suggests reevaluation of the neglected Austrian writer Hermann Broch (1886-1951). . . . This exciting collection, with its suggestions of new scholarly possibilities, will certainly heighten interest in one of the major literary figures of the 20th century. Recommended. * CHOICE *A Companion to the Works of Hermann Broch is an indispensable volume for all Broch readers, especially for new readers in the Anglophone world. Beyond its high level of scholarly contribution, the volume balances detailed readings of all Broch's major works (literary, dramatic, and political) with a longue durée view of Broch's intellectual development from his earlier years in Vienna to his transition to novelist to his exile in the United States. The editors have woven together individual readings with a universal assessment of Broch's wide-ranging intellectual commitments, and they have made a strong argument for the continued relevance of his novels, his aesthetic theory, and his humane politics. -Donald L. Wallace, Associate Professor, United States Naval Academy, author of Embracing Democracy: Hermann Broch, Politics, and Exile, 1918 to 1951 * . *[T]his Companion addresses a palpable need, namely to provide a point of entry for a larger readership to one of the major literary figures of European modernism. . . . While not every Broch text mentioned in this Companion will be accessible to those who do not read German, many are, and the book as a whole makes a strong case for seeking them out. -- Martin Klebes * Austrian Studies *[This Companion] is not only rigorous and thorough in its scholarship, but it is a pleasant book to read and spend time with. Its essayists strike a tone that is serious but companionable-which suggests strong leadership behind the scenes on the part of its editors. . . . [An] excellent collection. -- Steve Dowden * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Broch's Life and Works - Graham Bartram and Sarah McGaughey Perspectives on Broch's Die Schlafwandler: Narratives of History and the Self - Kathleen L. Komar Hermann Broch and the Dilemma of Literature in the Modern Age - Gunther Martens Interrogating Modernity: Hermann Broch's Postromanticism - Galin Tihanov Broch and the Theater: Die Entsühnung and Aus der Luft gegriffen as Tragic and Comic Dramatizations of the Economic Machine - Brechtje Beuker Limits of the Scientific: Broch's Die Unbekannte Größe - Gwyneth Cliver Broch's Die Verzauberung: Ludwig Klages and the Bourgeois Mitläufer - Gisela Brude-Firnau Hermann Broch's Massenwahnprojekt and Its Relevance for Our Times - Judith Ryan Human Rights and the Intellectual's Ethical Duty: Broch's Political Writings - Sebastian Wogenstein Broch's Der Tod des Vergil: Art and Power, Language and the Ineffable - Jennifer Jenkins From the "Tierkreis-Erzählungen" to Die Schuldlosen: The Creation of Broch's Last Novel - Judith Sidler Broch's Legacy and Resonance - Paul Michael Lützeler Selected Bibliography - Sarah McGaughey Notes on the Contributors Index
£89.10
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Wilhelm von Humboldt and Transcultural
Book SynopsisShows that the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) forms a philosophy of dialogue and communication that is crucially relevant to contemporary debates in the Humanities. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is the progenitor of modern linguistics and the originator of the modern teaching and research university. However, his work has received remarkably little attention in the English-speaking world. Humboldt conceives language as the source of cognition as well as communication, both rooted in the possibility of human dialogue. In the same way, his idea of the university posits the free encounter between radically different personalities as the source of education for freedom. For Humboldt, both linguistic and intellectual communication are predicated firstly on dialogue between persons, which is the prerequisite for all intercultural understanding. Linking Humboldt's concept of dialogue to his idea of translation between languages, persons, and cultures, this book shows how Humboldt's thought is of great contemporary relevance. Humboldt shows a way beyond the false alternatives of "culturalism" (the demand that a plurality of cultural and faith-based traditions be recognized as sources of ethical and political legitimacy in the modern world) and "universalism" (the assertion of the primacy of a universal culture of human rights and the renewal of the European Enlightenment project). John Walker explains how Humboldt's work emerges from the intellectual conflicts of his time and yet directly addresses the concerns of our own post-secular and multicultural age.Trade ReviewThis book is not only an important contribution to the Anglo-American scholarship on Wilhelm von Humboldt. It also constitutes an inspiring enrichment of a multitude of contemporary debates of high social and political relevance and thus demonstrates the prime importance of Humanities research for our time. -- Professor Dr Marko Pajevic, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, University of TartuTable of ContentsPreface A Note on Texts List of Abbreviations Introduction 1: Humboldt and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Language, Culture, and Freedom 2: Language, Dialogue, and Translation: The Human Relevance of the Comparative Study of Language 3: Language Interaction and Language Change: Humboldt on the Kawi Language of Java 4: Humboldt, "Orientalism," and Understanding the Other 5: Humboldt, Translation, and Dialogue between Faiths: Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Hauerwas, and Shahab Ahmed 6: Scriptural Reasoning: Dialogue and Translation in Practice 7: Secularity and Communities of Faith in the Public Sphere 8: Wilhelm von Humboldt: Translation, Dialogue, and the Modern University Bibliography Index
£80.75
Salem Press Inc The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
Book SynopsisThis title includes in-depth critical discussions of Edgar Allan Poe's work. This is a collection of sixteen essays by leading scholars examining the short stories and life of the 19th century American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Representing the best of a broad range of critical perspectives from the psychoanalytical to the postcolonial, the volume serves as an excellent introduction to Poe's tales and the critical conversation surrounding them. The volume is introduced by Steven Frye, Professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield, the author of ""Historiography and the American Romance: A Study of Four Authors"" (2001) and the editor of ""Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation"" (2008). Original essays illuminate the influences that shaped Poe, contextualize his work, and assess his enduring impact on American and Continental poetry and fiction. A sketch of the historical and cultural forces surrounding Poe illuminates their influence on his aesthetic; a reception history examines Poe's enduring contributions to the short story genre, the French Symbolist movement, and modernist aesthetics; a comparison of Poe's and Baudelaire's works reveals how the two authors exploited the duplicitous possibilities within the writer-reader relationship; and a critical reading of ""The Fall of the House of Usher,"" ""The Black Cat,"" ""The Tell-Tale Heart,"" ""Ligeia,"" and ""Bernice"" seeks to expose the stories' unifying aesthetic principles. Further, a varied selection of critical views offers detailed analyses of Poe's most essential tales like ""The Murders in the Rue Morgue"", ""The Fall of the House of Usher"", ""The Cask of Amontillado"", ""The Gold Bug"", and ""Ligeia"". Uniquely, the collection also contains an original essay by Nathaniel Rich, senior editor of ""The Paris Review"". Reflecting on Poe's insight into and fascination with the perverse instincts of humanity, Rich offers a writer's perspective on one of America's most enigmatic writers. Finally, a wealth of reference material, including a complete list of Poe's publications and a full biography, rounds out the volume by giving readers ample sources for continuing their studies. Edited and with an introduction by Steven Frye, the collection is a gateway into the best of Poe and his critics. Each essay is 5,000 words in length, and all essays conclude with a list of 'Works Cited', along with endnotes.
£83.20
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W.
Book SynopsisGrowing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issue as various as segregation, class among both blacks and white, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d’etat of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt’s works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice. In part 1 of this volume, ‘Materials,’ the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt’s works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, ‘Approaches,’ address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics and social justice.
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Hugo's Les Misérables
Book SynopsisThe greatest work of one of France's greatest writers, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables seemed stylistically and even politically out of date when it was published in 1862. But its indictment of injustice, concern for those suffering in misery, unapologetic embrace of the ideals of the French Revolution, and memorable characters have proved irresistible to readers for a century and a half. The novel's length, multiple narratives, and encyclopedic digressiveness make it a pleasure to read but a challenge to teach, and this volume is designed to address the needs of instructors in a variety of courses that include the novel in excerpts or as a whole.Part 1 of the volume, ""Materials,"" provides guidance on editions in French and in English translation, biographies, criticism, and maps. Part 2, ""Approaches,"" contains essays that discuss the novel's conceptions of misère, sexuality, and the politics of the time and that demonstrate techniques for teaching the context of its literary market, adaptations, place in popular culture, and relation to other novels of its time.Trade ReviewThis collection constitutes a rich educational tool for instructors of French who want to teach and study this great novel."" - Jacques Neefs, Johns Hopkins University
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion
Book SynopsisJane Austen is a favorite with many students, whether they've read her novels or viewed popular film adaptations. But Persuasion (1817), completed at the end of her life, can be challenging for students to approach. They are surprised to meet a heroine so subdued and self-sacrificing, and the novel's setting during the Napoleonic Wars may be unfamiliar. This volume provides teachers with avenues to explore the depths and richness of the novel with both Austen fans and newcomers.Part 1, "Materials," suggests editions for classroom use, criticism, and multimedia resources. Part 2, "Approaches," presents strategies for teaching the literary, contextual, and philosophical dimensions of the novel. Essays address topics such as free indirect discourse and other narrative techniques; social class in Austen's England; the role of the navy during war and peacetime; key locations in the novel, including Lyme Regis and Bath; and health, illness, and the ethics of care.Trade ReviewThe volume makes a valuable addition to Austen scholarship, and its pedagogical approaches are both thorough and innovative." - Laura White University of Nebraska, Lincoln "The purpose of this volume is to help instructors teach Persuasion in many different classroom contexts, and it succeeds marvelously. I am eager to try out the ideas gathered here!" -Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Austen's Persuasion
Book SynopsisJane Austen is a favorite with many students, whether they've read her novels or viewed popular film adaptations. But Persuasion (1817), completed at the end of her life, can be challenging for students to approach. They are surprised to meet a heroine so subdued and self-sacrificing, and the novel's setting during the Napoleonic Wars may be unfamiliar. This volume provides teachers with avenues to explore the depths and richness of the novel with both Austen fans and newcomers.Part 1, "Materials," suggests editions for classroom use, criticism, and multimedia resources. Part 2, "Approaches," presents strategies for teaching the literary, contextual, and philosophical dimensions of the novel. Essays address topics such as free indirect discourse and other narrative techniques; social class in Austen's England; the role of the navy during war and peacetime; key locations in the novel, including Lyme Regis and Bath; and health, illness, and the ethics of care.Trade ReviewThe volume makes a valuable addition to Austen scholarship, and its pedagogical approaches are both thorough and innovative." - Laura White University of Nebraska, Lincoln "The purpose of this volume is to help instructors teach Persuasion in many different classroom contexts, and it succeeds marvelously. I am eager to try out the ideas gathered here!" - Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University
£33.11
Modern Language Association of America Popular Literature from Nineteenth-Century
Book SynopsisThe city of Paris experienced rapid transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century: the population grew, industry and commerce increased, and barriers between social classes diminished. Innovations in printing and distribution gave rise to new mass-market genres: literary guidebooks known as tableaux de Paris and illustrated physiologies examined urban social types and fashions for a broad audience of Parisians hungry to explore and understand their changing society. The works in this volume offer a lively, humorous tour of the manners and characters of the flâneur (a leisurely wanderer), the grisette (a young working-class woman), the gamin (a street urchin), and more. While the names of authors such as Paul de Kock are no longer familiar, their works still open a window onto a vivid time and place.Trade Review"Popular Literature from Nineteenth-Century France will quickly become a reference for instructors and researchers across disciplinary lines." - Andrea Goulet, University of Pennsylvania"Popular Literature from Nineteenth-Century France is extremely compelling and pedagogically exciting." - Alexandra Wettlaufer, University of Texas, Austin
£28.01
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and
Book SynopsisRecounting the murder of an elderly woman by a student expelled from university, Crime and Punishment is a psychological and political novel that portrays the strains on Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its protagonist, Raskolnikov, moves in a world of dire poverty, disillusionment, radicalism, and nihilism interwoven with religious faith and utopianism. In Dostoevsky's innovative style, which he called fantastic realism, the narrator frequently reports from within the protagonist's mind. The depiction of the desperate lives of tradespeople, students, alcoholics, prostitutes, and criminals gives readers insight into the urban society of St. Petersburg at the time.The first part of this book offers instructors guidance on Russian editions and English translations, a map of St. Petersburg showing locations mentioned in the novel, a list of characters and an explanation of the Russian naming system, analysis of key scenes, and selected critical works on the novel. In the second part, essays address many of Dostoevsky's themes and consider the role of ethics, gender, money, Orthodox Christianity, and social justice in the narrative. The volume concludes with essays on digital media and film adaptations.
£72.80
University of Iowa Press Whitman's Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution
Book SynopsisThe American nineteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history. New communications technologies seemed to be everywhere, offering opportunities and threats that seem powerfully familiar to us as we experience today’s digital revolution. Walt Whitman’s poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: “See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press,” he wrote, “See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan.”Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced.Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.Trade Review"Matt Cohen’s innovative new book, demonstrates convincingly that in spite of the technological advances contributing to this puzzle, matters were no less complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [...] Ultimately, as his title suggests, attempting to understand the process and significance of literary circulation, whether in the nineteenth century or in a world where readers can find the poet’s work with the click of a mouse, requires not only thorough research but also considerable imagination. This noteworthy new study features a great deal of both." — ALH Online Review, XXVI.1 (2018)
£50.40
