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Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction
By Pamela Robertson Wojcik. 2016
In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be…
viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children's books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid's independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children--girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England
By Will Tosh. 2016
Male Friendship and Testimonies of Love in Shakespeare's England reveals the complex and unfamiliar forms of friendship that existed between men…
in the late sixteenth century. Using the unpublished letter archive of the Elizabethan spy Anthony Bacon (1558-1601), it shows how Bacon negotiated a path through life that relied on the support of his friends, rather than the advantages and status that came with marriage. Through a set of case-studies focusing on the Inns of Court, the prison, the aristocratic great house and the spiritual connection between young and ardent Protestants, this book argues that the 'friendship spaces' of early modern England permitted the expression of male same-sex intimacy to a greater extent than has previously been acknowledged.Petrarch's 'Fragmenta': The Narrative and Theological Unity of 'Rerum vulgarium fragmenta'
By Thomas E Peterson. 2016
Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, a collection of lyric poems on sacred and profane love and other subjects, has traditionally been…
viewed as reflecting the conflicted nature of its author. However, award winning author Thomas E. Peterson argues that Petrarch's Fragmenta is an ordered and coherent work unified by narrative and theological structures.By concentrating on the poem's reliance on Christian tenets and distinguishing between author, narrator and character, Peterson exposes the underlying narrative and theological unity of the work. Building on recent Petrarch scholarship and broader studies of medieval poetics, poetic narrativity, and biblical intertextuality, Peterson conducts a rigorous examination of the Fragmenta's poetic language. This combination of stylistic and philological analysis recasts Petrarch's poetry in a new light revealing its radically innovative and liberating character.Ethics and Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay, 1970-2000
By Carlos M. Amador. 2016
This book argues for a new reading of the political and ethical through the literatures of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay…
from 1970-2000. Carlos Amador reads a series of examples from the last dictatorship and the current post-dictatorship period in the Southern Cone, including works by Augusto Roa Bastos, Roberto Bolaño, Ceferino Reato, Horacio Verbitsky, Nelly Richard, Diamela Eltit, and Willy Thayer, with the goal of uncovering the logic behind their conceptions of belonging and rejection. Focusing on theoretical concepts that make possible the formation of any and all communities, this study works towards a vision of literature as essential to the structure of ethics.The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel
By Elizabeth Mannion. 2016
Irish detective fiction has enjoyed an international readership for over a decade, appearing on best-seller lists across the globe. But…
its breadth of hard-boiled and amateur detectives, historical fiction, and police procedurals has remained somewhat marginalized in academic scholarship. Exploring the work of some of its leading writers--including Peter Tremayne, John Connolly, Declan Hughes, Ken Bruen, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Tana French, Jane Casey, and Benjamin Black--The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel opens new ground in Irish literary criticism and genre studies. It considers the detective genre's position in Irish Studies and the standing of Irish authors within the detective novel tradition. Contributors: Carol Baraniuk, Nancy Marck Cantwell, Brian Cliff, Fiona Coffey, Charlotte J. Headrick, Andrew Kincaid, Audrey McNamara, and Shirley Peterson.Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction
By Ben Davies. 2016
Combining close readings of literature and theory, Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction opens up new ways to consider…
the sex-time-space nexus. In an exciting and compelling contribution to contemporary literary studies, this book takes the concept of 'exceptionality' as its point of departure as developed through an exploration of Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception and the work of theorists including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Through an analysis of a range of widely read contemporary fiction, including On Chesil Beach, Gertrude and Claudius, The Act of Love and Room, Ben Davies provides a rigorous exploration of narrative form and offers original theories of the prequel, narrative relations in terms of set theory, and the practice of reading itself.Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism
By Leif Sorensen. 2016
During the 1930s, ethnic literary modernists played a crucial role in the development of what we now recognize as multiethnic…
literature in the United States. Presenting a new view of the history of multicultural literature, Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism focuses on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers: Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors' works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book presents a new model of twentieth-century American literary history.Ted Hughes
By Jonathan Bate. 2015
Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most…
important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry.Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes's inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honors, though not uncritically, Hughes's poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes's own.Nashville Predators: The Making of Smashville (Sports)
By Pete Weber, Justin B. Bradford. 2015
Nashville may be the country music capital, but local hockey fans know it as Smashville. The Predators adopted their name…
from the bones of a saber-toothed tiger found beneath a local building. Craig Leipold first purchased the expansion rights in 1997, and the team quickly built a loyal following. It won twenty-eight games in the inaugural season. Twelve seasons later, the team finished second in the Central Division and appeared in its first-ever conference semifinals. One year later, it finally dispatched its long-standing rival Detroit Red Wings 4-1 in the opening round of the playoffs. Author Justin Bradford details the fascinating history through unique player anecdotes and perspectives from those involved in the team's rise to prominence.Crisis in Identity
By Arthur G. Kimball. 1973
This book is intended to encourage the reading, study, and appreciation of contemporary Japanese fiction and, through it, an understanding…
of Japan and Japanese culture. The various chapters, including the Syllabus at the end, aim to stimulate and encourage general readers and students to deepen their knowledge of the available literature. The Syllabus in particular aims to encourage the teaching of Japanese literature in the classroom, at both high school and university level, by supplying the teacher and student with study aids. The book is based on an important and much-discussed contemporary theme, that of identity.Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties
By Robert Peters. 1993
No nostalgic tale of the good old days, Robert Peters’s recollections of his adolescence vividly evoke the Depression on a…
hardscrabble farm near Eagle River: Dad driving the Vilas County Relief truck, Lars the Swede freezing to death on his porch, the embarassment of graduation in a suit from welfare. The hard efforts to put fish and potatoes and blueberries on the table are punctuated by occasional pleasures: the Memorial Day celebration, swimming at Perch Lake, the county fair with Mother’s prizes for jam and the exotic delights of the midway. Peters’s clear-eyed memoir reveals a poet’s eye for rich and stark detail even as a boy of twelve. “Peters misses nothing, from the details of the town’s Fourth of July celebration to the cause and effect of a young cousin’s suicide to the calibrations of racism toward Indians that was so acceptable then. It is a fascinating, unsentimental look at a piece of our past. ”—Margaret E. Guthrie,New York Times Book Review “It’s unlikely that any other contemporary poet and scholar as distinguished has risen from quite so humble beginnings as Robert Peters. Born and raised by semiliterate parents on a subsistence farm in northeastern Wisconsin, Peters lived harrowingly close to the eventual stuff of his poetry—the dependency of humans on animal lives, the inexplicable and ordinary heroism and baseness of people facing extreme conditions, the urgency of physical desire. . . . Sterling childhood memoirs. ”—Booklist “Robert Peters has written a memoir exemplary because he insists on the specific, on the personal and the local. It is also enormously satisfying to read, and it is among the most authentic accounts of childhood and youth I know—a Wisconsin David Copperfield!”—Thom GunnThe Things That Matter
By Edward Mendelson. 2007
She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular…
thing; the thing that mattered . . .--Virginia Woolf, To The LighthouseAn illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts--portray the essential experiences of life.Edward Mendelson--a professor of English at Columbia University--illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human condition while expressing its author's complex individuality and intentions and emerging from the author's life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representation of child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal but almost impossible adult love, and leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us--in the most captivating way--why they matter.From the Trade Paperback edition.American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens
By Mark Noble. 2015
In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do…
our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? Noble proposes new readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens that explore a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, this book turns to poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the Battle for Cultural Memory
By Sandra Messinger Cypess. 2012
The first English-language book to place the works of Elena Garro (1916–1998) and Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in dialogue with each…
other, Uncivil Wars evokes the lives of two celebrated literary figures who wrote about many of the same experiences and contributed to the formation of Mexican national identity but were judged quite differently, primarily because of gender. While Paz’s privileged, prize-winning legacy has endured worldwide, Garro’s literary gifts garnered no international prizes and received less attention in Latin American literary circles. Restoring a dual perspective on these two dynamic writers and their world, Uncivil Wars chronicles a collective memory of wars that shaped Mexico, and in turn shaped Garro and Paz, from the Conquest period to the Mexican Revolution; the Spanish Civil War, which the couple witnessed while traveling abroad; and the student massacre at Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, which brought about social and political changes and further tensions in the battle of the sexes. The cultural contexts of machismo and ethnicity provide an equally rich ground for Sandra Cypess’s exploration of the tandem between the writers’ personal lives and their literary production. Uncivil Wars illuminates the complexities of Mexican society as seen through a tense marriage of two talented, often oppositional writers. The result is an alternative interpretation of the myths and realities that have shaped Mexican identity, and its literary soul, well into the twenty-first century.The Man of Letters as a Man of Busine
By William Dean Howells. 2012
He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave…
him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares.Studies of Lowell
By William Dean Howells. 2012
In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his talk then and at…
other times there remains to me an impression of his growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its increasing tendency towards the negative sort.Anomalies of the Short Story: From 'Literature and Life'
By William Dean Howells. 2012
William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American realist author and literary critic... In 1858,…
he began to work at the Ohio State Journal where he wrote poetry, short stories, and also translated pieces from French, Spanish, and German. He avidly studied German and other languages and was greatly interested in Heinrich Heine. In 1860, he visited Boston and met with American writers James Thomas Fields, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Said to be rewarded for a biography of Abraham Lincoln used during the election of 1860, he gained a consulship in Venice. On Christmas Eve 1862, he married Elinor Mead at the American embassy in Paris. Upon returning to the U.S., he wrote for various magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. From 1866, he became an assistant editor for the Atlantic Monthly and was made editor in 1871, remaining in the position until 1881. In 1869, he first met Mark Twain, which sparked a longtime friendship. Even more important for the development of his literary style--his advocacy of Realism--was his relationship with the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who in the 1870s wrote a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly on the lives of ordinary Americans. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his literary reputation took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which described the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His socialviews were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). He was particularly outraged by the trials resulting from the Haymarket RiotSchumann’s Music and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fiction
By John Macauslan. 2016
Four of Schumann's great masterpieces of the 1830s - Carnaval, Fantasiestücke, Kreisleriana and Nachtstücke - are connected to the fiction…
of E. T. A. Hoffmann. In this book, John MacAuslan traces Schumann's stylistic shifts during this period to offer insights into the expressive musical patterns that give shape, energy and individuality to each work. MacAuslan also relates the works to Schumann's reception of Bach, Beethoven, Novalis and Jean Paul, and focuses on primary sources in his wide-ranging discussion of the broader intellectual and aesthetic contexts. Uncovering lines of influence from Schumann's reading to his writings, and reflecting on how the aesthetic concepts involved might be used today, this book transforms the way Schumann's music and its literary connections can be understood and will be essential reading for musicologists, performers and listeners with an interest in Schumann, early nineteenth-century music and German Romantic culture.John Barleycorn
By Jack London.
The Measby Murder Enquiry
By Ann Purser. 2011
Cantankerous spinster Ivy Beasley has quickly learned that spending her golden years in the quaint village of Barrington won't be…
as quiet as she thought. Ivy hasn't been in assisted living at Springfields for long, but she's already found new friends, formed a detective agency, and solved a murder. And as autumn falls, Ivy and her team are asked to investigate a mysterious death in the village of Measby-in between card games, of course.