Search results for ""author richard"

Entertainment Weekly's BIG FALL BOOKS PREVIEW SelectionBest Book of 2019 -- Publisher's WeeklyBased on new and revelatory material from Brando’s own private archives, an award-winning film biographer presents a deeply-textured, ambitious, and definitive portrait of the greatest movie actor of the twentieth century, the elusive Marlon Brando, bringing his extraordinarily complex life into view as never before.The most influential movie actor of his era, Marlon Brando changed the way other actors perceived their craft. His approach was natural, honest, and deeply personal, resulting in performances—most notably in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront—that are without parallel. Brando was heralded as the American Hamlet—the Yank who surpassed British stage royalty Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson as the standard of greatness in the mid-twentieth century. Brando’s impact on American culture matches his professional significance; he both challenged and codified our ideas of masculinity and sexuality. Brando was also one of the first stars to use his fame as a platform to address social, political, and moral issues, courageously calling out America’s deeply rooted racism.William Mann’s brilliant biography of the Hollywood legend illuminates this culture icon for a new age. Mann astutely argues that Brando was not only a great actor but also a cultural soothsayer, a Cassandra warning us about the challenges to come. Brando’s admonitions against the monetization of nearly every aspect of the culture were prescient. His public protests against racial segregation and discrimination at the height of the Civil Rights movement—getting himself arrested at least once—were criticized as being needlessly provocative. Yet those actions of fifty years ago have become a model many actors follow today.Psychologically astute and masterfully researched, based on new and revelatory material, The Contender explores the star and the man in full, including the childhood traumas that reverberated through his professional and personal life. It is a dazzling biography of our nation’s greatest actor that is sure to become an instant classic.The Contender includes sixteen pages of photographs.

Read more less

Entertainment Weekly's BIG FALL BOOKS PREVIEW SelectionBest Book of 2019 -- Publisher's WeeklyBased on new and revelatory material from Brando’s own private archives, an award-winning film biographer presents a deeply-textured, ambitious, and definitive portrait of the greatest movie actor of the twentieth century, the elusive Marlon Brando, bringing his extraordinarily complex life into view as never before.The most influential movie actor of his era, Marlon Brando changed the way other actors perceived their craft. His approach was natural, honest, and deeply personal, resulting in performances—most notably in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront—that are without parallel. Brando was heralded as the American Hamlet—the Yank who surpassed British stage royalty Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson as the standard of greatness in the mid-twentieth century. Brando’s impact on American culture matches his professional significance; he both challenged and codified our ideas of masculinity and sexuality. Brando was also one of the first stars to use his fame as a platform to address social, political, and moral issues, courageously calling out America’s deeply rooted racism.William Mann’s brilliant biography of the Hollywood legend illuminates this culture icon for a new age. Mann astutely argues that Brando was not only a great actor but also a cultural soothsayer, a Cassandra warning us about the challenges to come. Brando’s admonitions against the monetization of nearly every aspect of the culture were prescient. His public protests against racial segregation and discrimination at the height of the Civil Rights movement—getting himself arrested at least once—were criticized as being needlessly provocative. Yet those actions of fifty years ago have become a model many actors follow today.Psychologically astute and masterfully researched, based on new and revelatory material, The Contender explores the star and the man in full, including the childhood traumas that reverberated through his professional and personal life. It is a dazzling biography of our nation’s greatest actor that is sure to become an instant classic.The Contender includes sixteen pages of photographs.

Read more less

Today, in the era of the spoiler alert, "surprise" in fiction is primarily associated with an unexpected plot twist, but in earlier usage, the word had darker and more complex meanings. Originally denoting a military ambush or physical assault, surprise went through a major semantic shift in the eighteenth century: from violent attack to pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling. In Surprise, Christopher R. Miller studies that change as it took shape in literature ranging from Paradise Lost through the novels of Jane Austen. Miller argues that writers of the period exploited and arbitrated the dual nature of surprise in its sinister and benign forms. Even as surprise came to be associated with pleasure, it continued to be perceived as a problem: a sign of ignorance or naïveté, an uncontrollable reflex, a paralysis of rationality, and an experience of mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In close readings of exemplary scenes—particularly those involving astonished or petrified characters—Miller shows how novelists sought to harness the energies of surprise toward edifying or comic ends, while registering its underpinnings in violence and mortal danger. In the Roman poet Horace’s famous axiom, poetry should instruct and delight, but in the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison signally amended that formula to suggest that the imaginative arts should surprise and delight. Investigating the significance of that substitution, Miller traces an intellectual history of surprise, involving Aristotelian poetics, Cartesian philosophy, Enlightenment concepts of the passions, eighteenth-century literary criticism and aesthetics, and modern emotion theory. Miller goes on to offer a fresh reading of what it means to be "surprised by sin" in Paradise Lost, showing how Milton’s epic both harks back to the symbolic functions of violence in allegory and looks ahead to the moral contours of the novel. Subsequent chapters study the Miltonic ramifications of surprise in the novels of Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, as well as in the poems of Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on surprise in its inflections as emotion, cognition, and event, Miller’s book illuminates connections between allegory and formal realism, between aesthetic discourse and prose fiction, and between novel and lyric; and it offers new ways of thinking about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of the novel as the genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

Read more less

Literary historians have tended to associate the eighteenth century with the rise of the tyranny of the clock—the notion of time as ruled by mechanical chronometry. The transition to standardized scheduling and time-discipline, the often-told story goes, inevitably results in modernity's time-keeper societies and the characterization of modern experience as qualitatively diminished. In Feeling Time, Amit Yahav challenges this narrative of the triumph of chronometry and the consequent impoverishment of individual experience. She explores the fascination eighteenth-century writers had with the mental and affective processes through which human beings come not only to know that time has passed but also to feel the durations they inhabit. Yahav begins by elucidating discussions by Locke and Hume that examine how humans come to know time, noting how these philosophers often consider not only knowledge but also experience. She then turns to novels by Richardson, Sterne, and Radcliffe, attending to the material dimensions of literary language to show how novelists shape the temporal experience of readers through their formal choices. Along the way, she considers a wide range of eighteenth-century aesthetic and moral treatises, finding that these identify the subjective experience of duration as the crux of pleasure and judgment, described more as patterned durational activity than as static state. Feeling Time highlights the temporal underpinnings of the eighteenth century's culture of sensibility, arguing that novelists have often drawn on the logic of musical composition to make their writing an especially effective tool for exploring time and for shaping durational experience.

Read more less

How did the creation of the "Other" woman in English narratives contribute to the displacement of sexuality onto the exotic or savage woman? How did this cultural invention reinforce the cult of domesticity at home? What were the social and economic forces driving the process? Among the first books to consider issues of empire in relation to literary texts of the eighteenth century, Torrid Zones offers a compelling revision of the history of feminism in a postcolonial context. Felicity Nussbaum argues that the need to control women's sexuality in eighteenth-century England intensified as the demands of trade and colonization required an ever-larger, able-bodied population. Describing how women's reproductive labor was harnessed to that task, Nussbaum explores issues such as the production of life, of goods, and of desire. She also considers a variety of cultural practices (usually construed as exotic) in England and the empire, including polygamy, infanticide, prostitution, homoeroticism, and arranged marriages. Torrid Zones includes new readings of significant texts by and about female subjects, including novels by Defoe, Richardson, Johnson, Cleland, Lennox, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Phebe Gibbes. It also considers the more broadly defined texts of culture such as travel narratives, medical documents, legal records, and engravings. "I take as a central metaphor for the consideration of maternity and sexuality the concept of torrid zones, both the geographical torrid zones of the territory between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and the torrid zone mapped onto the human body, especially the female body. A premise of my study is that the contrasts among the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones of the globe are formative in imagining that a sexualized woman of empire is distinct from domestic English womanhood. The general category of 'woman' muddles the binaries between mother and whore, self and Other, center and periphery."-from the Introduction

Read more less

This outstanding Handbook establishes the relationship between political citizenship and social movements as an area of study. As an in-depth and well-conceived source for beginners, experienced scholars and students alike, it provides theoretically rich, methodologically diverse, and empirically wide-ranging chapters on political struggles over citizenship. Moreover, the bridging between sociological and political theories of movements and citizenship reveals both in a different light.'- Engin Isin, The Open UniversitySince the 1960s, social movements and political citizenship have become buzzwords not only in social and political life but also in social and political science. The impact of the environmental and women's movements, and the advance of multicultural, European and cosmopolitan citizenship in modern history are cases in point.The study of citizenship traditionally refers to the individual dimension of social and political behavior. Social movement studies, however, refer to the collective dimension of such behavior. Despite distinct trajectories in their theoretical development, the social movement and citizenship paradigms converge where social movements are viewed as collective forms of political citizenship. This Handbook uniquely collates results of several decades of academic research in these two fields. The expert contributions successively address the different forms of political citizenship and current approaches and recent developments in social movement studies. Salient social movements in recent history are explored in depth, covering the environmental, women's, international human rights, urban, Tea Party, and animal rights movements. Social movements and political citizenship in the global South : China, India, Africa, and the Arab World, are discussed, presenting a novel empirical insight into these fields of study.Social scientists, MA and PhD students conducting research in social movements and citizenship, at a theoretical and empirical level, will benefit from the authoritative assessment of forms of political citizenship and major developments in social movement studies.Contributors: E. Ashbee, J. Bohman, P. Bond, A.M. Clark, R.J. Dalton, P. Danyi, J. Earl, B. Edwards, E. Evans, H. Flam, R.K. Garrett, S. Griggs, P. Hamel, D. Howarth, J. Hunt, M. Kane, D. Kapoor, S. MacGregor, N. Massoumi, N. Meer, R. Meijer, D.S. Meyer, S. Monro, L. Munro, E.D.H. Olsen, M. Reddy, J. Reger, D. Richardson, C. Scholl, S. Tijsterman, H-A. Van der Heijden, P. Wood, L. Xie

Read more less

Los Angeles, 1947. A housewife out for a walk with her baby notices a cloud of black flies buzzing ominously in Leimert Park. An "unsightly object" is identified as the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet from Massachusetts who had been lured west by the siren call of Hollywood. Her killer would never be found, but Short’s death would bring her the fame she had always sought. Her murder investigation transformed into a real-life film noir, featuring corrupt cops, femmes fatales, gun-slinging gangsters, and hungry reporters, replete with an irresistible, legendary moniker adapted from a recent film—The Black Dahlia. For over half a century this crime has maintained an almost mythic place in American lore as one of our most inscrutable cold cases. With the recently unredacted FBI file, newly released sections of the LAPD file, and exclusive interviews with the suspect’s family, relentless legal sleuth Piu Eatwell has gained unprecedented access to evidence and persuasively identified the culprit. Black Dahlia, Red Rose layers these findings into a gritty, cinematic retelling of the haunting tale. As Eatwell chronicles, among the first to arrive at the grisly crime scene was Aggie Underwood, the "tough-as-nails" city editor for the Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express; meanwhile, the chain-smoking city editor for the Los Angeles Examiner, Jimmy Richardson, sent out his own reporters. Eatwell reveals how, through a cutthroat race to break news and sell papers, the public image of Elizabeth Short was distorted from a violated beauty to a "man crazy delinquent." As rumors of various boyfriends circulated, the true story of the complex young woman ricocheting between jobs, lovers, and homes was lost. Instead, kitschy headlines tapped into a wider social anxiety about the city’s "girl problem," and Short’s black chiffon and smoldering gaze become a warning for "loose" women coming of age in postwar America. Applying her own background as a lawyer to the surprising new evidence, Eatwell ultimately exposes many startling clues to the case that have never surfaced in public. From the discovery of Elizabeth’s notebook, inscribed with the name of the city’s most notorious and corrupt businessman, to a valid suspect plucked from the hundreds of "confessing Sams" by a brilliant, well-meaning doctor, Eatwell compellingly captures every "big break" in the police investigation to reveal a truly viable resolution to the case. In rich, atmospheric prose, Eatwell separates fact from fantasy to expose the truth behind the sinewy networks of a noir-tinged Hollywood. Black Dahlia, Red Rose at long last accords the Elizabeth Short case its due resolution, providing a reliable and enduring account of one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history.

Read more less

This outstanding Handbook establishes the relationship between political citizenship and social movements as an area of study. As an in-depth and well-conceived source for beginners, experienced scholars and students alike, it provides theoretically rich, methodologically diverse, and empirically wide-ranging chapters on political struggles over citizenship. Moreover, the bridging between sociological and political theories of movements and citizenship reveals both in a different light.'- Engin Isin, The Open UniversitySince the 1960s, social movements and political citizenship have become buzzwords not only in social and political life but also in social and political science. The impact of the environmental and women's movements, and the advance of multicultural, European and cosmopolitan citizenship in modern history are cases in point.The study of citizenship traditionally refers to the individual dimension of social and political behavior. Social movement studies, however, refer to the collective dimension of such behavior. Despite distinct trajectories in their theoretical development, the social movement and citizenship paradigms converge where social movements are viewed as collective forms of political citizenship. This Handbook uniquely collates results of several decades of academic research in these two fields. The expert contributions successively address the different forms of political citizenship and current approaches and recent developments in social movement studies. Salient social movements in recent history are explored in depth, covering the environmental, women's, international human rights, urban, Tea Party, and animal rights movements. Social movements and political citizenship in the global South : China, India, Africa, and the Arab World, are discussed, presenting a novel empirical insight into these fields of study.Social scientists, MA and PhD students conducting research in social movements and citizenship, at a theoretical and empirical level, will benefit from the authoritative assessment of forms of political citizenship and major developments in social movement studies.Contributors: E. Ashbee, J. Bohman, P. Bond, A.M. Clark, R.J. Dalton, P. Danyi, J. Earl, B. Edwards, E. Evans, H. Flam, R.K. Garrett, S. Griggs, P. Hamel, D. Howarth, J. Hunt, M. Kane, D. Kapoor, S. MacGregor, N. Massoumi, N. Meer, R. Meijer, D.S. Meyer, S. Monro, L. Munro, E.D.H. Olsen, M. Reddy, J. Reger, D. Richardson, C. Scholl, S. Tijsterman, H-A. Van der Heijden, P. Wood, L. Xie

Read more less