Search results for ""Associated University Presses""

This groundbreaking study demonstrates the profound influence of Ramon Lull (c. 1232-1316?) upon Donne. Albrecht traces Donne's ecumenical vision back to Lull, back to Pico della Mirandola, Lull's disciple, and back to the Jewish cabala, sources for both. She shows how Donne refashioned Lull's abstract version of Mary and, like Lull, used this "Mary" to include Muslims and Jews in the church universal. She shows how pseudo-Lullian alchemical theories allowed him to describe, with impunity, Mary's function in "theologial alchemy," a works-oriented theology that included the female principle in the Tetragrammaton - that name that cannot be spoken. Finally, she shows how Donne incorporated the corporeal images of medieval iconography into Lull's mnemotechnics in order to construct texts whereby God's attributes, perceived as a series of ever-changing combinations, reveal an ecumenical frame of mind far more advanced than hitherto supposed. This study will appeal to new historicists and those interested in alchemy, emblems, or theology. Roberta J. Albrecht is an independent scholar.

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The essays in this volume represent multiple perspectives on Lawrence Durrell's sojourn in the Hellenic diaspora and his art's connection to the Greek world. Essays include reminiscences by Durrell's only living child, Penelope Durrell-Hope, and friends, such as Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis, H. R. Stoneback, Penelope Tremayne, and John Letham. Another group of critical essays examine Durrell's imaginative evocation of the "spirit of place," specifically his depiction of Corfu, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Alexandria, Egypt, which are locales that have provided settings for his travel books, poetry, and cycle of novels, The Alexandria Quartet. Other critical essays discuss more literary themes in Durrell's work, including his use of myth and his parallels with other artists and thinkers, such as John Fowles, Constantine Cavafy, Gostan Zarian, George Seferis, Edward Lear, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The volume concludes with David Radavich's poems that were inspired by Durrell's Corfu. Anna Lillios is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Central Florida.

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To praise Jane Austen's novels only as stylistic masterpieces is to strip them of the historical, cultural, and literary contexts that might otherwise illuminate them. By focusing primarily on the political, historical, satiric, actively intertextual, and deeply sexualized text of Persuasion, Jocelyn Harris seeks to reconcile the so-called insignificance of her content with her high canonical status, for Austen’s interactions with real and imagined worlds prove her to be innovative, even revolutionary. This book answers common assertions that Austen’s content is restricted; that being uneducated and a woman, she could only write unconsciously, realistically, and autobiographically of what she knew; that her national and sexual politics were reactionary; and that her novels serve mainly as havens from reality. Such ideas arose from literal readings of Austen’s letters, the family’s representation of her as a gentle, unlearned genius, and the assumption that she could not write about the Napoleonic Wars. Persuasion is, though, permeated with references to war as well as peace. Harris suggests that Persuasion may respond to Walter Scott’s review of Emma, Austen’s correspondence with Fanny Knight, hostile reviews of Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, contemporary attacks on the novel, and her own defense of fiction in Northanger Abbey. Self-critical in revision, Austen calls on Byron, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Cook to modify wartime constructions of English masculinity such as Southey’s Nelson. Similarly, her critique of Scott’s first three novels confirms that her attitude toward class and gender is far from reactionary. Persuasion reveals Austen’s patriotism, her pioneering lyricism, and her hopes for sexual equality. Although like Turner she portrays Lyme as sublime and liminally open to change, she attacks Bath, a city shadowed by mortality and corruption, with a savage indignation characteristic of contemporary satire. Persuasion sketches a society founded on merit and distributive justice, its turn from woe to joy derived not so much from her own life as from the seasonal resurrections of Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies, her religious beliefs, and the nation’s mixed grief and jubilee after Waterloo. Harris draws on new information to argue that Austen is an outward looking, intertextually aware, and remarkably self-conscious author.

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In 1932, Benno Weiser Varon was a student of medicine in Vienna. During a brawl at the Anatomic Institute he rescues a Jewish fellow student, when he cracked the skull of a huge Nazi with two outsized metal keys, while some thirty Nazis watched from an upper floor. He considered this event his rite of passage, in which he proved to himself that “Jews are no cowards.” Life would give him many an opportunity to prove it again. A Jewish Rambo? Not at all. Fellow Viennese remember him for making them laugh. He wrote, directed, and performed in literary cabarets. Gerhard Bronner, Vienna’s foremost entertainer, claims that watching Weiser perform inspired his choice of career. “All I could take along from Nazi Vienna,” says Weiser Varon, “was my accent.” But he also exported his fighting spirit. As Ecuador’s first syndicated columnist, blending drama with satire, he dispensed faith to those who rooted for the Allies and heartburn to the powerful Nazi colony. The Axis powers sponsored seven weeklies to counteract his influence, there was an interpellation in parliament, a “promise” by the minister of the interior to silence him, an op-ed dual with a Vichy diplomat. The New York Times, reporting on his struggle, called him one of Latin America’s best known columnists. In 1946 the World Zionist Organization drafted him into its campaign to convince the nations of Latin America of the justice of the Jewish fight for statehood. Varon’s niche in history is the U.N. Palestine Partition Resolution of 1947. The Encyclopedia Judaica credits him and a colleague with the decisive Latin American votes. In 1964 Golda Meir appointed him ambassador to a succession of Latin American countries. In 1970 Baron survived an assassination attempt by Palestinian terrorists. In 1972 he retired from diplomacy and returned to journalism. Varon met Albert Einstein and Aleksandr Kerensky as well as the Who’s Who of Latin-American writers, painters, intellectuals, and statesmen, such as Perón, Castro, the Somozas, Stroessner. He also placed second-best in a joke contest with Bob Hope and, together with his actress-wife, wrote a play, “A Letter to the Times,” which was produced in both English and Spanish.

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This book examines the treatment of literary influence in the first six books of poetry from Mexico's Jose Emilo Pacheco.

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Long a figure of spectacular epic imagination appearing in the central cosmological and philosophical literatures extending as far back as the Hellenic texts, "hermaphrodites" have been made to bear the burden of cultural anxieties regarding sexual difference and the transgression of boundaries separating male from female, men from women, in a strained binary system. As threatening evidence that sex is not the natural basis upon which oppositional gender roles are built, the intersexed are made to disappear into normative categories, thus aligning once again the rightful place of male and female as opposites.

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Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church. The twentieth-century church born in Howatch's later fiction is a huge, sometimes monstrous, sometimes life-giving creature whose various dimensions make it entirely engaging and weirdly central to the center-less postmodern world. ""Scandalous Truths"" provides a way into Howatch's new world by presenting for the first time many of her own considerations of her work, and by allowing a group of scholars to engage in a wide-ranging discussion of Howatch's art. Bruce Johnson is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University. Charles Huttar is Professor of English, Emeritus, at Hope College.

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Essays on various aspects of the work of the French poet Stephane Mallarme on the centenary of his death (1998).

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Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare’s women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare’s female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book’s analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare’s dramas to reveal women’s profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

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Using Mikhal Bakhtin's concept of dialogism as a theoretical starting point, this volume investigates the manifestations of competing 'voices' within the tradition of lyric poetry. The lyric subject's understanding of himself/herself - through the very act of speaking/writing - is irrevocably connected, on multiple levels, to the heard and unheard voices of others. No matter how 'private' the voice of the lyric speaker appears to be, nearly every utterance is formed from and then positioned between what others have said or will say.Included here are essays on the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric. Some of the essays engage Bakhtin 'head-on'; others by focusing explicitly on the construction of the subject through multiple discursive dialogues, implicitly bring Bakhtin to bear. These essays engage multiple elements of dialogism, including the convergence of masculine and feminine voices, public and private discourse, intertextuality and the 'voices of the past', the dialogue between literature and art, and the always present dialogue between speaker(s) and reader(s).

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Rev. George D. Byers, Presbyterian missionary at Kachek, Hainan island, China, was murdered by bandits in front of his home on June 24, 1924, setting off an extraterritorality incident that involved American, British, and Chinese government officials ranging from the local Chinese military commander to the British consul at Hoihow, Hainan, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wellington Koo, U.S. Congressmen, Presbyterians in China and the U.S., and friends of the Byers family. Based on American and British consular archives and those of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and members of the Hainan mission, this is the story of how Mrs. Byers and her ally, Mrs. Mabel Roys, the sole woman on the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (BFM), successfully got the government and their church to take action. Kathleen L. Lodwick is a Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley.

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This is the first detailed exploration of one of the earliest major poems by Alexander Pope, Windsor-Forest (1713). The book reveals how Pope used the artistic conventions of the Stuart court, such as masque, architecture, allegorical painting, and heraldry to create the last great Renaissance poem in English. A coherent symbolic design is constructed around the themes of the river and the forest. Pope organizes the structure and style of the poem to create a prophetic version of nationhood, drawing on such sources as the plays of Ben Jonson, the Whitehall paintings of Rubens, the architecture of Inigo Jones, the panegyric work of Dryden, and the topographical poetry of Drayton. The political dimensions of the poem are considered in relation to the foundation of the South Sea Company in 1711, with its foreshadowing of imperial issues to come. The book will spark further interest in a poem that has been gaining increasing attention recently from writers such as E. P. Thompson and Laura Brown. It shows the centrality of Windsor-Forest in Pope's own career, and the centrality of Pope in the debates of his time. Pat Rogers is DeBartolo Professor in the Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida.

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Juan Carlos Rodriguez's "State, Stage, Language: the Production of the Subject", now in its third Spanish edition (2001), first appeared in 1984, and has become, alongside the same author's "Theory and History of Ideological Production" (1974, 1990), one of the classic texts to emerge from the Althusserian tradition. Rodriguez's project is to analyze the ideological unconscious that always exists, without becoming explicit, in any discursive field.Ideology is unconscious because we live it without noticing it, and we fail to notice it because it is visible only as the effect of a specific set of social relations. Rodriguez surprises the ideological unconscious at work within linguistics (Chomsky), the classic theater (Diderot and Moratin), various poetic traditions (Mallarme, Machado, and Alberti), the realist novel and detective fiction (Baroja, Chandler), and the vampire myth (Stoker, Borges). In the process, he overcomes a variety of obstacles that had previously blocked the development of Marxist theory.

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Offers an insightful assessment of how the work of Alfonso Reyes helped to create the role of the writer as a public intellectual in Latin America. It reconstructs Reyes's model of intellectual community, tracing its links to the various strands of the nineteenth-century traditions of philology, and argues that Reyes was influential in forging a sense of unity among the Latin American writers of his generation.

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The annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This issue contains more than 6,800 entries.

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Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international journal committed to the publication of essays and reviews relevant to drama and theatre history to 1642. This issue includes eight new articles, a review essay, and reviews of nine new important books.

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From the "Personal to the Political" seeks to analyze the autobiographical perspective of mothering and motherhood not purely as their inner, emotional and private narratives. The collection aims at evidentiating how autobiographical writing gives voice to the historically determined experience of mothering and makes visible the importance of mothers as resilient and political agents. The volume is divided into two sections. The first focuses on what may be termed 'autobiographical theory'. The contributors in this section use their life stories to theorize upon a social maternal perspective such as that as single mothers, mothers of children with disabilities, mothers of older children, and mothers of bi-racial children. The focus of the second section is on autobiographical narratives and includes readings of memoirs, slave narratives, poetry, and fiction. The essays in this volume position autobiography, in both theory and fiction, as a profoundly cultural and political text that makes social change possible. Andrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of Women's Studies at York University. Silvia Caporale Bizzini is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Alicante.

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Cultural modernity has habitually been defined as a focus on the means of representation themselves, as opposed to art that imitates external reality or expresses its maker's inner life. The crucial moment is usually considered the emergence of Edouard Manet in mid-nineteenth-century France, and the features of French developments have been seen as defining terms in the theory of modernity. However, recent art and cultural history have often spoken of plural modernities, distinct from the pattern set in France. For the first time, this study in cultural history explores how Spanish culture took a radical turn toward the medium of representation itself in the 1850s and early 1860s. It argues that this happened in a way that is critically at odds with many fundamental theoretical suppositions about modernity.

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Using a multidisciplinary approach, this book argues that the operation of art-as-mirror is the key to the hidden unity of Huysmans' fiction. The author claims that only the elimination of Huysmans' stylistic distortions enabled his art finally to become faithful and clear.

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An intensely philosophical and religious poet, Olga Sedakova writes of nature, music, and the inner, spiritual life. As one of the preservers of traditional Russian culture, she stands in stark contrast to the rampant commercialization in contemporary Russian life, instead tracing her poetic roots back to the early avant-garde movements of pre-revolutionary Russia. For that stance, she endured years of censorship and silencing during the Soviet regime her poems distributed by hand in mimeographed copies or by word of mouth. This volume introduces to an English-speaking audience an extensive selection of poems by one of Russia's most distinguished lyric poets writing today.

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Between 1660 and 1682 seventeen versions of Shakespeare's plays were made for the newly reopened public theatres in London, and in its three parts 'Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice' offers a new view of why and how such adaptation was undertaken. Part I considers the seventeenth-century debate about how dramaric poetry works on the mind. Part II offers an analysis of each play with regard to its visual and metaphorical effects. Part III concludes with a review of Shakespeare's reputation in these years, drawing a distinction between what readers and playgoers would have known of him.

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