Search results for ""fairleigh dickinson university press""

An American Art Colony demonstrates the social dimension of American art in the 20th century, paying special attention to the role of fellow artists, nonartists and the historical context of art production. The book treats the art colony, not as a static addendum to an artist’s profile, but rather an essential ingredient in artistic life. The art colony here becomes an historical entity that changes over time and influences the kind of art that ensues. It is a special methodology of the study that collective features of three generation of artists help clarify how artists engage their audiences. Since many of these artists worked within the cultural confines of metropolitan New York and its magazine industry, they cultivated subjects that were recognizable by ordinary citizens. Early on, they drew from the emergent suburban life of their neighbors for their artistic themes. Gradually these contexts become more formally institutionalized and their subjects gravitated away from themes of ordinary life to themes more exotic, expressionistic and fanciful. A key methodology for this study consisted of an analysis of collective biographies of 170 participating artists. The theme of modern art explains here how abstraction was suborned to public images, widening the very meaning of the term modern.

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What forms can religious experience take in a world without cult or creed? Organized religion is notably absent from J. R. R. Tolkien's Secondary Universe of elves, dwarves, men and hobbits despite the author's own deep Catholic faith. Tolkien stated that his goal was 'sub-creating' a universe whose natural form of religion would not directly contradict Catholic theology. Essays in Light Beyond All Shadows examine the full sweep of Tolkien's legendarium, not only The Lord of the Rings but also The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-Earth series plus Peter Jackson's film trilogy. Contributions to Light Beyond All Shadows probe both the mind of the maker and the world he made to uncover some of his fictional strategies, such as communicating through imagery. They suggest that Tolkien's Catholic imagination was shaped by the visual appeal of his church's worship and iconography. They seek other influences in St. Ignatius Loyola's meditation technique and St. Philip Neri's 'Mediterranean' style of Catholicism. They propose that Tolkien communicates his story through Biblical typology familiar in the Middle Ages as well as mythic imagery with both Christian and pagan resonances. They defend his 'comedy of grace' from charges of occultism and Manichaean dualism. They analyze Tolkien's Christian friends the Inklings as a supportive literary community. They show that within Tolkien's world, Nature is the Creator's first book of revelation. Like its earlier companion volume, The Ring and the Cross, edited by Paul E. Kerry, scholarship gathered in Light Beyond All Shadows aids appreciation of what is real, meaningful, and truthful in Tolkien's work.

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Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrou’s The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Kean and Jean Genet’s The Blacks; Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion comique with Tony Kushner’s The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Impresario with Luigi Pirandello’s theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Pirandello’s Henry IV and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Molière’s Impromptu de Versailles with “impromptus” by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eugène Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.

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Louis Trezevant Wigfall was a violent, mercurial man. He participated in multiple duels, wounding one opponent and killing another. In an outburst on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Wigfall called upon a Brutus to assassinate Texas governor Sam Houston. During the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861, Wigfall rowed out to the fort and arranged its surrender. While still in the U.S. Senate, Wigfall committed treason by operating a station to recruit soldiers for the Confederacy by supplying arms to seceded states and by forwarding information on Union decisions and movements. Wigfall’s oratorical skills convinced Southern ruling classes there was nothing to fear by seceding. He assured them that the North would not fight, that they could not blockade southern ports, that Europe needed Southern cotton, and that England would aid the Confederacy. Wigfall was able to convince Southern states to secede. In this succinct biography of Wigfall, Edward S. Cooper discusses how this violent and mercurial man contributed to the disintegration of the Union and why he was a primary factor in the collapse of the Confederacy.

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The Exile in the Maghreb entails the first attempt at describing the historical reality of the legal and social condition of the Jews in the Muslim countries of North Africa (principally Algeria and Morocco) over a thousand year period from the Middle Ages (997 C.E.) to the French colonization (1830 Algeria/1912 Morocco.). The Exile is not a formal history but a chronological anthology of documents drawn from literary (section A) and archival sources (section B), many of which are published for the first time. In section A, Arabic and Hebrew chronicles, Muslim legal, and theological texts are followed by the accounts culled from European travelers—captives, diplomats, doctors, clerics, and adventurers. Each document is introduced and annotated in such a way as to bring out its importance. The second section (B) reflects the diplomatic activity deployed by humanitarian organizations in favour of North African Jewry. Spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries, these are mainly drawn from the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris) and the Anglo-Jewish Association (London). The documents are richly elucidated with illustrations taken from the international press. The book presents a new and illuminating insight into the status of Jews under the Crescent. The Jews of North Africa were the only minority under Islam, in this region and their history reflects Judaism's exclusive encounter with Islam.

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Caribbean Ghostwriting addresses a question central to the fields of postcolonial, feminist, and African diasporic studies:how are we to know the colonial past when the lives of colonized and enslaved people were largely written out of history? Caribbean authors Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Dionne Brand address the silences and gaps of historiography by fleshing out overlooked historical figures in literary form. These authors do not simply reconstruct lost lives, but rather they foreground the tension between the real, material traces of peoples lives and the fact of their erasure. In novels that are at once historical, biographical, and artistic, they portray real but sparsely documented and therefore haunting histories through a strategy identifiable as ghostwriting. Erica L. Johnson defines ghostwriting as an important genre of Caribbean literature through which authors literally ghostwrite stories for lost historical figures even while they poetically preserve the unspeakable nature of the archival lacunae their novels engage.

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Empiricism, one of Raymond Williams's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr. Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to this term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Rushkin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occured at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism.

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This book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with respect to three broad issues–authorship, the posthumous, and cultural revisionism–that arise in reading such works from a contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction 'postmodernizes' romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Blue Flower', Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton', Peter Carey's 'Jack Maggs', Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', Colm Toibin's 'The Master', and Geoff Dyer's 'Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence - 'the mighty dead' (Harold Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies that project a postmodern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality.

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This is a study of the changing relationship between two of the most important political figures of the first decades of the twentieth century. The author contrasts their backgrounds and training, their mind-sets, and their understanding of the power of the president to understand how they came to a parting of the ways.

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This study analyzes British wartime cinema, offering extended examination of a wide selection of feature films and documentaries made in Britain between 1939 and 1946, and using textual analyses of these films to explore the historical, social, and cultural context of social class in Britain within the overall situation of `total war’ and its concomitant propaganda imperative of `The People’s War.’ Includes 20 photos.

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Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed and embodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has.com e to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualties. This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian and modernist writers re-imagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or performance power in figures of sexual difference- most often a feminized, often homosexual male body, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity. This study reconstructs the cultural history of this transsexual figure through readings of work by late Victorian and modernist writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, who collaborated using the pen name 'Michael Field', and whose work may inaugurate the shift in Tiresian mythographies; T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land includes arguably the most well-known uses of Tiresias in modern English Literature; Djuna Barnes, whose queer Irish-American Tiresias provides an insistent voice of sexual and social marginalization; and Irish poet Austin Clarke who set out to revise Eliot's use of Tiresias but ended up narrating a myth of sexual panic. The book also examines work by writers whose use of Tiresian figures consistently linked sexual differences, especially homosexuality, to forms of performative, poetic, and aesthetic power. If The Waste Land established Tiresias as a figure of modernist textual and sexual ambiguity, this book displaces that canonically central representation into a more complex tra

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While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his "borrowing" from painters or his proto-Derridean use of language, but his preoccupation with self exploration and the temporal effects of his work as artifacts. Following Pasternak's understanding of artistic inspiration as an act of love for the material world, O'Hara explores moments of experience in an effort to both complicate and enrich our experience of the material world. On the one hand, in poems such as Second Avenue, for example, O'Hara works to "muddy" language through which experience is, in part, mediated with the use of parataxis, allusions, and absurd metaphors and similes. On the other, in his "I do this I do that" poems, he names the events of his lunch hour in an effort, among other things, to experience time as a moment of fullness rather than as a moment of loss. The book argues, furthermore, that O'Hara's view of the self as both an expression of the creative force at work in the world and as the temporal aggregate of finite experiences, places him between so-called "Romantic" and "postmodern" theories of the lyric. While it is often argued that O'Hara is a forerunner of a new, critically informed, "materialist" poetics, this study concludes that O'Hara's work is somewhat less radical in its understanding of poetic meaning than is often claimed. Moreover, while O'Hara is preoccupied with his experience in his poems, the book argues that he espouses, in some respects, a rather traditional view of love. In addition to being a metaphor for the creative act, love, for O'Hara, is the chance coming together of two entities. Yet, one of the ironies of this is that while love is, for O'Hara, a feeling that is the result of movement, or the unexpected coming together of two otherwise separ

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The Carlyle Encyclopedia is the new standard, single-volume reference work on Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. It offers concise, detailed accounts of central issues related to the Carlyles’ lives and writings, and provides bibliographic citations that direct the reader’s attention to a wide range of additional sources.

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New Modernist Studies, while reviving and revitalizing modernist studies through lively, scholarly debate about historicity, aesthetics, politics, and genres, is struggling with important questions concerning the delineation that makes discussion fruitful and possible. This volume aims to explore and clarify the position of the so-called ‘core’ of literary modernism in its seminal engagement with the Great War. In studying the years of the Great War, we find ourselves once more studying ‘the giants,’ about whom there is so much more to say, as well as adding hitherto marginalized writers – and a few visual artists – to the canon. The contention here is that these war years were seminal to the development of a distinguishable literary practice which is called ‘modernism,’ but perhaps could be further delineated as ‘Great War modernism,’ a practice whose aesthetic merits can be addressed through formal analysis. This collection of essays offers new insight into canonical British/American/European modernism of the Great War period using the critical tools of contemporary, expansionist modernist studies. By focusing on war, and on the experience of the soldier and of those dealing with issues of war and survival, these studies link the unique forms of expression found in modernism with the fragmented, violent, and traumatic experience of the time.

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This book is both a celebration of the life and career of the eminent literary scholar, critic, and journalist John Sutherland and an extension of Sutherland’s work in various fields, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, the publishing industry, and its impact upon creativity and literary puzzles. With contributions from over twenty-five distinguished critics, literary journalists and scholars, this book goes beyond merely describing Sutherland’s work. The essayists pay homage to Sutherland while also staking their own critical/scholarly claims. From investigating the publishing dimension, Victorians major and minor, the complexities of Dickens and George Eliot, the “archeology” of Pride and Prejudice to examining the implications of Shakespearean souvenirs, literary puzzles, and Non-Victorians, the essays offer fresh dimensions to Sutherland’s rich career as a professor, critic, and journalist.

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