Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Books
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 This study boldly reconceives the realist novel, not as an outdated artifact, but as witness to the material and environmental dispossession of enclosure—and bearer of utopian energies.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
Chelsea House Publishers Robert Browning
Book SynopsisWhile his detractors found his verse to be deliberately obscure, Robert Browning resisted such charges and went on to become one of he most critically acclaimed and popular English poets of the 19th century. Known for his imaginative originality and dramatic power, Browning is one of the most undervalued major poets of the English language, as is evidence in his enduring works such as ""My Last Duchess"", ""Fra Lippo Lippi"", ""Childe Roland"" to the ""Dark Tower Came"", ""Andrea del Sarto"", and ""Caliban Upon Setebos"". This volume of essays featuring criticism from both Browning's contemporaries and later critics also includes a chronology, an index, and an introduction from literary critic Harold Bloom.
£35.96
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
University of Iowa Press Alice beyond Wonderland: Essays for the
Book SynopsisAlice beyond Wonderland explores the ubiquitous power of Lewis Carroll’s imagined world. Including work by some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the field of Lewis Carroll studies, all introduced by Karoline Leach’s edgy foreword, Alice beyond Wonderland considers the literary, imaginative, and cultural influences of Carroll’s 19th-century story on the high-tech, postindustrial cultural space of the twenty-first century.The scholars in this volume attempt to move beyond the sexually charged permutations of the ""Carroll myth,"" the image of an introverted man fumbling into literary immortality through his love for a prepubescent Alice. Contributions include an essay comparing Dantean and Carrollian underworlds, one investigating child characters as double agents in untamed lands, one placing Wonderland within the geometrical and algebraic “fourth dimension,” one investigating the visual and verbal interplay of hand imagery, and one exploring the influence of Japanese translations of Alice on the Gothic-Lolita subculture of neo-Victorian enthusiasts. This is a bold, capacious, and challenging work.Trade Review“Alice beyond Wonderland both defines the continuing strangeness of the Alice books and offers a surprising and fresh reading of the ongoing ‘work’ of Carroll’s writing on Wonderland in the twenty-first century. This fresh consideration, determined not to repeat the critical tropes of the past, indicates the ways Alice has crossed cultures and literary, political, and technological spaces. Hollingsworth deserves our praise for being so bold a thinker in conceiving this project.”- Barry Qualls, author, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction: The Novel as Book of Life;“Alice beyond Wonderland offers an exciting range of new perspectives on the Alice books, linked around the core theme of space. This impressive collection will make an excellent and original contribution to the literature on Alice and Carroll.”- Will Brooker, author, Alice’s Adventure: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture
£22.75
University of Iowa Press Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice
Book SynopsisHumanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining to others why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are certainly no exception. To help remedy this problem, literary scholars Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field’s relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us better understand current events, from the proliferation of media to ongoing social justice battles. The result is a book that offers a range of approaches to engaging with undergraduates, non-professionals, and broader publics into an appreciation of eighteenth-century literature. Essays draw on innovative projects ranging from a Jane Austen reading group held at the public library to students working with an archive to digitize an overlooked writer’s novel. Reminding us that the eighteenth century was an exhilarating age of lively political culture—marked by the rise of libraries and museums, the explosion of the press, and other platforms for public intellectual debates—Draxler and Spratt provide a book that will not only be useful to eighteenth-century scholars, but can also serve as a model for other periods as well. This book will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum directors, scholars, and others interested in digital humanities in the public life.
£44.60
University of Iowa Press Transnational Modernity and the Italian
Book SynopsisCaterina Bernardini gauges the effects that Walt Whitman's poetry had in Italy from 1870 to 1945: the reactions it provoked, the aesthetic and political agendas it came to sponsor, and the creative responses it facilitated. Particular attention is given to women writers and noncanonical writers often excluded from previous discussions in this area of study. Bernardini also investigates the contexts and causes of Whitman's success abroad through the lives, backgrounds, beliefs, and imaginations of the people who encountered his work. Studying Whitman's reception from a transnational perspective shows how many countries were simultaneously carving out a new modernity in literature and culture. In this sense, Bernardini not only shows the interconnectedness of various international agents in understanding and contributing to the spread of Whitman's work, but, more largely, illustrates a constellation of similar pre-modernist and modernist sensibilities. This stands in contrast to the notion of sudden innovation: modernity was not easy to achieve, and it did not imply a complete refusal of tradition. Instead, a continuous and fruitful negotiation between tradition and innovation, not a sudden break with the literary past, is at the very heart of the Italian and transnational reception of Whitman. The book is grounded in archival studies and the examination of primary documents of noteworthy discovery.Trade ReviewWe have always known that Italian writers took an intense interest in Walt Whitman, but Caterina Bernardini's exciting study now fully opens us up to the astonishing degree to which Italy is Whitmanland. Whitman's reception in Italy, up to the breakdown of fascism in 1945, is not only a revealing story in itself but it also offers a history of transatlantic modernism in the context of the political and cultural distortions of the twentieth century. Bernardini's book is a case study demonstrating Whitman's place in Goethe's ever-relevant formula of Weltliteratur." - Walter Grünzweig, author, Constructing the German Walt Whitman"A spirited look at the intercultural conversations sparked by Whitman in Italy. Familiar names like Gabriele D'Annunzio and Cesare Pavese are joined by socialist Ada Negri and feminist Sibilla Aleramo, giving us a vibrant new map of Italian writings. Translation and reinvention transform the very meaning of 'literature' itself." - Wai Chee Dimock, author, Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival
£69.30
University of Iowa Press Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American
Book SynopsisWalt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?” Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.Trade Review“The arrival of this virtuosic study is surely cause for celebration. Barnat brilliantly illuminates the rich tapestry of complex intersections between America’s ‘Bard of Democracy’ and generations of significant Jewish American poets whom he inspired and provoked. Truly groundbreaking, it is an indispensable gift to scholars of Whitman and Jewish literature alike.” - Ranen Omer-Sherman, author, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film“In Barnat’s highly readable, well-researched account, the enduring affinity between Jewish poets and Whitman becomes a prism through which to understand the history of Jewish American poetry itself. A welcome and timely contribution to the ongoing conversation about the remaking of Jewish culture and identity in the United States.” - Julian Levinson, author, Exiles on Main Street: Jewish American Writers and American Literary Culture“From Emma Lazarus to Allen Ginsberg and beyond, Jewish American poets’ reactions to Whitman have been intense and nuanced, and formative of some of our country’s most impressive and influential literature. In this compact, long-overdue study, Barnat shows how these poets and others, have interpreted Whitman as ‘implicitly Jewish’ and in doing so redefined Whitman, themselves, and the American poetic tradition.” - Matt Miller, coeditor, Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments
£71.10
University of South Carolina Press Proust and His Banker: In Search of Time
Book SynopsisWhat Marcel Proust wanted from life most of all was unconditional requited love, and the way he went after it—smothering the objects of his affection with gifts—cost him a fortune. To pay for such extravagance, he engaged in daring speculations on the stock exchange. The task of his cousin and financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, was to make sure these speculations would not go sour. In Proust and His Banker, Gian Balsamo reveals that Proust was quite aware of the advantageous trade-off between financial indulgence and artistic inspiration; his liberal squandering of money provided the grist for fictional characters and incidents of surprising effectiveness, both in the artistic sphere and later on in the commercial one. But Hauser was not aware of this odd aspect of Proust’s creativity, nor could he have been since the positive returns from the writer’s masterpieces were late in coming. Focusing on more than 350 letters between Proust and Hauser and drawing on records of the Rothschild Archive and financial data assembled from the twenty-one-volume Kolb edition of Proust’s letters, Balsamo reconstructs Proust’s finances and provides a fascinating window into the writer’s creative and speculative process. Balsamo carefully follows Proust’s financial activities, including investments ranging from Royal Dutch Securities to American railroads to Eastern European copper mines, his exchanges with various banks and brokerage firms, his impetuous gifts, and the changing size and composition of his portfolio. Successes and failures alike provided material for Proust’s fiction, whether from the purchase of an airplane for the object of his affections or the investigation of a deceased love’s intimate background. Proust was, Balsamo concludes, a master at turning financial indulgence into narrative craftsmanship, economic costs into artistic opportunities.Over the course of their fifteen-year collaboration, the banker saw Proust squander three-fifths of his wealth on reckless ventures and on magnificent presents for the men and women who struck his fancy. To Hauser the writer was a virtuoso in resource mismanagement. Nonetheless, Balsamo shows, we owe it to the altruism of this generous relative, who never thought twice about sacrificing his own time and resources to Proust, that In Search of Lost Time was ever completed.
£32.36
University of South Carolina Press Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America
Book SynopsisJames Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales - The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer (1823-1841) - romantically portray frontier America during the colonial and early republican eras. Bill Christophersen's Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America suggests they also highlight problems plaguing nineteenth-century America during the contentious decades following the Missouri Compromise, when Congress admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state.During the 1820s and 1830s, the nation was riven by sectional animosity, slavery, prejudice, populist politics, and finally economic collapse. Christophersen argues that Cooper used his fictions to imagine a path forward for the Republic. Cooper, he further suggests, brought back Leather-Stocking to test whether the common man, as empowered by Jackson's presidency, was capable of republican virtue - something the author considered key to renewing the nation.
£41.36
Dartmouth College Press Writing for Justice
Book SynopsisTransnational battles for freedom and a personal work of remembrance
£36.10
Purdue University Press Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846-2018
Book Synopsis Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias's "Canção do exílio." Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, "Song of Exile" has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem's Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country's progress over the years. Based on a core of five hundred texts painstakingly gathered over a five-year span, this book catalogs the networks of the poem's reinvention as pastiche and parody in Brazilian print culture from nineteenth-century periodicals to new media. Mapping the reoccurrences of the original's keywords and phrases over time, the book uncovers how the poem has been used by successive generations to write and rewrite the nation's history. This process of reinvention has guaranteed the permanency of "Song of Exile" in Brazilian culture, making it not only the nation's most popular poem, but one of the most imitated in the world.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One: "Minha terra tem palmeiras" : A Brief Introduction to Brazil's Most Popular Poem Chapter Two: "Adeus Coimbra inimiga": Precedents and Contexts Chapter Three: "Onde canta o rouxinol": Early Portuguese Responses Chapter Four: "Onde canta o periquito": The First Republic to the Vargas Era (1889–1945) Chapter Five: "Minha terra só tem tanques": The Military Regime (1964–1985) Chapter Six: "As sirenes que aqui apitam": Twenty-First-Century Songs of Exile (1999–2015) Chapter Seven: "Sou ali": Variations by Female Authors (1867–2015) Chapter Eight: "As aves que aqui twittam": Twitter, Instagram, and Beyond Chapter Nine: The Word, the Database, and the Algorithm Afterword: Literary Research as Data Art: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Manuel Portela) Appendix: Table of 500 Texts Notes Works Cited Index
£73.10
University of Massachusetts Press Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American
Book SynopsisThat the Romantic movement was an international phenomenon is a commonplace, yet to date, historical study of the movement has tended to focus primarily on its national manifestations. This volume offers a new perspective. In thirteen chapters devoted to artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading scholars of the period examine the international exchanges that were crucial for the rise of Romanticism in England and the United States.In the book’s introduction, Andrew Hemingway—building on the theoretical work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre—proposes that we need to remobilize the concept of Weltanschauung, or comprehensive world view, in order to develop the kind of synthetic history of arts and ideas the phenomenon of Romanticism demands. The essays that follow focus on the London and New York art worlds and such key figures as Benjamin West, Thomas Bewick, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville. Taken together, these essays plot the rise of a romantic anti-capitalist Weltanschauung as well as the dialectic between Romanticism’s national and international manifestations.In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Matthew Beaumont, David Bindman, Leo Costello, Nicholas Grindle, Wayne Franklin, Janet Koenig, William Pressly, Robert Sayre, William Truettner, Dell Upton, and William Vaughan.
£25.60
University of Massachusetts Press Thinking Outside the Book
Book SynopsisIn Thinking Outside the Book, Augusta Rohrbach works through the increasing convergences between digital humanities and literary studies to explore the meaning and primacy of the book as a literary, material, and cultural artifact. Rohrbach assembles a rather unlikely cohort of nineteenth-century women writers—Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, Augusta Evans, and Mary Chesnut—to consider the publishing culture of their period from the perspective of our current digital age, bringing together scholarly concepts from both print culture and new media studies.In nineteenth-century America, women from a variety of racial and class affiliations were bombarding the print market with their literary productions, taking advantage of burgeoning rates of literacy and advances in publishing technology. Their work challenged prevailing modes of authorship and continues to do so today. Each chapter of Thinking Outside the Book positions a focal figure as both paradigmatic and problematic within the context of key terms that define the study of the book. In lieu of terms such as literacy, authorship, publication, edition, and editor, Rohrbach develops an alternate typology that includes mediation, memory, history, testimony, and loss. Recognizing that the field spans radio, cinema, television, and the Internet, she draws comparisons to the present day, when Web 2.0 allows writers from varying backgrounds and positions to seek out readers without “gatekeepers” limiting their exposure.More than a literary history, this book takes up theories of recovery, literacy, authorship, narrative, the book, and new media in connection with race, gender, class, and region.
£21.80
University of Massachusetts Press Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American
Book SynopsisIn the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.
£69.30
University of Massachusetts Press Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American
Book SynopsisIn the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, only the wealthiest Americans could afford to enjoy illustrated books and prints. But, by the end of the next century, it was commonplace for publishers to load their books with reproductions of fine art and beautiful new commissions from amateur and professional artists.Georgia Brady Barnhill, an expert on the visual culture of this period, explains the costs and risks that publishers faced as they brought about the transition from a sparse visual culture to a rich one. Establishing new practices and investing in new technologies to enhance works of fiction and poetry, bookmakers worked closely with skilled draftsmen, engravers, and printers to reach an increasingly literate and discriminating American middle class. Barnhill argues that while scholars have largely overlooked the efforts of early American illustrators, the works of art that they produced impacted readers' understandings of the texts they encountered, and greatly enriched the nation's cultural life.
£27.50
University of Massachusetts Press Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early
Book SynopsisIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic. Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.Trade ReviewCrane’s book makes a very clear case for why writing about Barbary piracy matters to the development of American ideas and ideas of race, freedom, and citizenship. He recovers several different early American works that can be used as the basis for further scholarship while also adding to the extant scholarship on the transatlantic and transnational origins of US literature." - Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, author of Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature"Blood and Ink draws attention to a significant but critically neglected area of focus in early US print culture concerning Barbary discourse. It will have a major impact within early American studies of print culture and its relationship to race, nation, and global perceptions in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries." - Keri Holt, author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Appealing to the Nation Part One: Of Pirates and Print Chapter One The Patriot and the Sable Bard Chapter Two Barbary(an) Invasions Part Two: The Barbary and the Jewish Atlantic Chapter Three “A Vague Resemblance to Something Seen Elsewhere” Chapter Four Performing Diaspora in Noah’s Travels Part Three: The Long Shadow of the Barbary Chapter Five “The Advantage of a Whip-Lecture” Chapter Six Peter Parley in Tripoli Coda: Selim’s Archive Fever Notes Index
£24.61
University of Massachusetts Press Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early
Book SynopsisIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic. Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.Trade ReviewCrane’s book makes a very clear case for why writing about Barbary piracy matters to the development of American ideas and ideas of race, freedom, and citizenship. He recovers several different early American works that can be used as the basis for further scholarship while also adding to the extant scholarship on the transatlantic and transnational origins of US literature." - Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, author of Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature"Blood and Ink draws attention to a significant but critically neglected area of focus in early US print culture concerning Barbary discourse. It will have a major impact within early American studies of print culture and its relationship to race, nation, and global perceptions in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries." - Keri Holt, author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830
£72.25
University of Massachusetts Press The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in
Book Synopsis By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Examining a diverse archive of historical periodicals, grammar books, toys, machinery displays, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of “mechanical literacy,” competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.Trade ReviewReading and learning about the physical world go hand in hand in Hoiem’s fascinating archive, and her focus on working-class children as well as middle-class ones redresses the bias toward the latter in much children’s literature criticism." - Hannah Field, author of Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader"The Education of Things is an important contribution to the study of children’s literature and the history of education—as well as to histories of object-based knowledge. Hoiem’s creative, multidisciplinary approach makes connections among fields that are often considered separately, making this a particularly exciting and novel intervention." - Sarah Anne Carter, author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material WorldTable of Contents List of Illustrations Preface Introduction Chapter 1 What Children Grasp The Tangible Properties of Objects Chapter 2 Moving Bodies Manual Labor and Children’s Play in Mechanical Philosophy Books Chapter 3 “The Empire of Man over Material Things” Children’s Books on Manufacturing and Trade Chapter 4 Self-Governing Machines Automata and Autonomy in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction Chapter 5 “Knowledge That Shall Be Power in Their Hands” Radical Grammars for Working-Class Readers Conclusion William Lovett’s Case of Moveable Type Notes Index
£24.26
University of Massachusetts Press The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in
Book SynopsisBy the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Examining a diverse archive of historical periodicals, grammar books, toys, machinery displays, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of “mechanical literacy,” competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.Trade ReviewReading and learning about the physical world go hand in hand in Hoiem’s fascinating archive, and her focus on working-class children as well as middle-class ones redresses the bias toward the latter in much children’s literature criticism." - Hannah Field, author of Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader"The Education of Things is an important contribution to the study of children’s literature and the history of education—as well as to histories of object-based knowledge. Hoiem’s creative, multidisciplinary approach makes connections among fields that are often considered separately, making this a particularly exciting and novel intervention." - Sarah Anne Carter, author of Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World
£72.25
Clemson University Digital Press Genial Perception: Wordsworth, Coleridge and
Book Synopsis
£109.50