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History, Criticism, Arts and entertainment
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Criticism, Music, Religion, General non-fiction
Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox… lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype in Women of Valor to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves. She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations. Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem “Eshes Chayil,” the Biblical description of an Orthodox “Woman of Valor.” This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values. Ultimately, these women create paths that unite their work, passions, and families under the framework of an “Eshes Chayil,” a woman who situates religious conviction within her own power.
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Criticism, General non-fiction
The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and… criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of “separate spheres”—one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women’s political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, Tricia Lootens models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly attest, is traumatized and haunted by histories of slavery. Setting aside late Victorian attempts to forget the unfulfilled, sentimental promises of early antislavery victories, The Political Poetess restores Poetess performances like Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” to view—and with them, the vitality of the Black Poetess within African-American public life. Crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline to “connect the dots” of Poetess performance, Lootens demonstrates how new histories and ways of reading position poetic texts by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, and Frances E. W. Harper as convergence points for larger engagements ranging from Germaine de Staël to G.W.F. Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Walker, and beyond.
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Criticism
From Harold Bloom one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time as well as a beloved professor who… has taught the Bard for over half a century an intimate wise deeply compelling portrait of Falstaff Shakespeare s greatest enduring and complex comedic character Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare s three Henry plays Henry IV Parts One and Two and Henry V He is companion to Prince Hal the future Henry V who loves him goads him teases him indulges his vast appetites and commits all sorts of mischief with him some innocent some cruel Falstaff can be lewd funny careless of others a bad creditor an unreliable friend and in the end devastatingly reckless in his presumption of loyalty from the new King Award-winning author and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal Just as we encounter one type of Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are young adults and another when we are middle-aged Bloom writes about his own shifting understanding of Falstaff over the course of his lifetime Ultimately we come away with a deeper appreciation of this profoundly complex character and the book as a whole becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare s characters make He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Falstaff inviting us to look at a character as a flawed human who might live in our world The result is deeply intimate and utterly compelling
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Journals and memoirs, Writing, Criticism
From Charles Johnson--a National Book Award winner Professor Emeritus at University of Washington and one of America s… preeminent scholars on literature and race--comes an instructive inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing An award-winning novelist philosopher essayist screenwriter professor and cartoonist Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings For thirty-three years Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing The Way of the Writer is his record of those years and the coda to a kaleidoscopic boundary-shattering career Organized into six accessible easy-to-navigate sections The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom starting with word choice sentence structure and narrative voice and delving into the mechanics of scene dialogue plot and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer What separates literature from industrial fiction What lies at the heart of the creative impulse How does one navigate the literary world And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant Luminous inspiring and imminently accessible The Way of the Writer is a revelatory glimpse into the mind of the writer and an essential guide for anyone with a story to tell
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Criticism
This book repositions thinking about rhythm meter and versification during the Mechanical Age … Cutting across disciplinary boundaries the book examines the rhythmical workings of poems alongside not only Victorian theories of prosody and poetics but also contemporary thinking about labor practices pedagogical procedures scientific experiments and technological innovations By offering an exploded definition of meter one that extends beyond conventional foot-based scansion this book explicates the conceptual and at times material exchanges between poetic meter and machine culture The machines of meter include mid-century theories of abstraction and technologies of smoothness and even spacing a deeply influential though rarely credited system of metrical manufacture verse produced by a Victorian automaton the mechanics of the human body and mind and the meters that issued from them and the promise of scientific machines to resolve metrical dilemmas once and for all
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Biography, Literature biography, Criticism
A revealing and insightful look at one of the modern world s most acclaimed historical novelistsPatrick O Brian was well… into his seventies when the world fell in love with his greatest creation the maritime adventures of Royal Navy Captain Jack Aubrey and ship s surgeon Stephen Maturin But despite his fame little detail was available about the life of the reclusive author whose mysterious past King uncovers in this groundbreaking biography King traces O Brian s personal history beginning as a London-born Protestant named Richard Patrick Russ to his tortured relationship with his first wife and child to his emergence from World War II with the entirely new identity under which he would publish twenty volumes in the Aubrey-Maturin series What King unearths is a life no less thrilling than the seafaring world of O Brian s imagination
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European history, Criticism, Arts and entertainment, Politics and government, General non-fiction
This book examines performative strategies that contest nationalist prejudices in representing the conditions of refugees the stateless and the… dispossessed In the light of the European Union failing to find a political solution to the current migration crisis it considers a variety of artistic works that have challenged the deficiencies in governmental and transnational practices as well as innovative efforts by migrants and their hosts to imagine and build a new future It discusses a diverse range of performative strategies moving from a consideration of recent adaptations of Greek tragedy to performances employing fictive identification documentary dramas immersive theatre over-identification and subversive identification nomadism and political activism This study will appeal to those interested in questions of statelessness migration and the problematic role of the nation-state
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Literature biography, Anthologies, Criticism
A prominent and prolific Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg 1916-1991 is known for her novels plays … short stories and essays This collection brings together for an English-speaking audience a variety of critical perspectives on Ginzburg s work The essays all by North American scholars examine the author s entire production The topics examined include Ginzburg s struggle to define herself as a woman a writer and an intellectual her interpretation of the relationship between historical events and private lives her reflections on the women s movement and the changing nature of the family and her mastery of a distinctly personal writing style What emerges here is a nuanced and complex portrait of Ginzburg and her work The reader is given a sense of the importance of her contribution not only as a writer but as a witness to the events of the twentieth century The volume also includes a chronology a bibliography and translations of some of Ginzburg s lesser-known writings including three articles a poem and a one-act play
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Criticism, Sports and games
Fishers Craft and Lettered Art provides editions English translations and analysis from social cultural and… environmental perspectives of the three oldest European extended tracts on fishing Richard Hoffmann discusses the history of fishing in popular culture and outlines the economic and ecologic considerations needed to examine and understand the fishing manuals Hoffmann further explores how continental fishing traditions were conveyed from oral craft practice into printed culture and proposes that these manuals demonstrate a lively and complex interaction between written texts and popular culture The tracts are presented in their original languages - Spanish and German - with facing page translations Close attention is paid to original setting functions and possible range of readings with detailed explanatory notes to help modern fishers and historians Fishers Craft and Lettered Art is a fascinating look at one vital aspect of everyday life at the end of the Middle Ages
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Criticism
Exorcism and demonic possession appear as recurrent motifs in early modern Spanish and English literatures In Exorcism and Its… Texts Hilaire Kallendorf demonstrates how this infection was represented in some thirty works of literature by fifteen different authors ranging from canonical classics like Shakespeare Cervantes Ben Jonson and Lope de Vega to obscure works by anonymous writers From comic and tragic drama to picaresque narrative and eight other genres possession worked as a paradigm through which authors could convey extraordinary experience including not only demonic possession but also madness or even murder The devil was thought to be able to enter the bodily organs and infect memory imagination and reason Some came to believe that possession was tied to enthusiasm poetic frenzy prophecy and genius Authors often drew upon sensational details of actual exorcisms In some cases such as in Shakespeare curing the body and the body politic meant affirming cultural authority in others as with Zamora it clearly meant subverting it Drawing on the disciplines of literary theory and history Exorcism and its Texts is the first comprehensive study of this compelling topic
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Criticism
Giovanni Boccaccio s Decameron is the best known and most read work in Italian literature next to Dante s Divine… Comedy In the tradition of Lectura Dantis the practice of story-by-story critical readings of Dante s work Elissa Weaver has collected essays from some of the most prominent American Boccaccio scholars to provide critical readings of the Decameron Proem Introduction and the ten stories that constitute the first of the ten days of storytelling The first of the twelve essays opens the volume with a consideration of the Proem demonstrating the importance of Boccaccio s literary subtexts Ovidian and Dantean for understanding his poetics The second essay on the Introduction discusses the title of the work and the framing tale The remaining ten contributions treat in detail each story examining the literary ethical and social concerns embodied in the short narratives and in the context provided by the comments and discussions of the story-tellers and exploring the intertextual relations within the Decameron and with sources and analogues This inaugural book in a new series of critical essays on the Decameron will provide an important guide to reading the complex series of narratives that constitute the opening of the Decameron and will serve as a guide to reading the entire work
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Arts and entertainment, Criticism, General non-fiction
Broken Time Fragmented Space A Cultural Map for Post-war Italy examines how the artists and intellectuals of post-war… Italy dealt with the shameful heritage of their fascist upbringing and education by trying to craft a new cultural identity for themselves and the country The continuities between the culture of the fascist and post-fascist periods were however far greater than what intellectuals were ready to admit creating an uncomfortable sometimes schizophrenic relation to time as a painful urge to erase the past Drawing on a variety of critical approaches Torriglia investigates the efforts to reconstruct a personal as well as a collective self by analyzing both canonical and lesser-known cinematic and literary texts Organized around four main themes - the use of language the interaction between personal and public spheres the perceptual categories of history and memory and the reconstruction of the female identity - the study also includes historical introductions and sociological commentary that provides an extensive and captivating picture of the cultural production in 1950s Italy a period that has not yet been extensively studied
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Criticism
Giovanni Pascoli 1855 1912 is one of Italy s most canonical and beloved poets… In Beyond the Family Romance Maria Truglio offers fresh insight into the uncanny qualities of Pascoli s domestic verse As suggested by the Freudian title this study opens a dialogue between Pascoli s literature and Freud s theories with a particular focus on each author s interrogation of origins Through close readings and historical contextualization themes of regression memory and other manifestations of origins are analyzed moving Pascoli s poetry beyond the biographical strictures that have hitherto confined it Truglio s post-structuralist readings question the dichotomy between safety within the home and the threatening outside world revealing the ambivalences with which images of the home are fraught in Pascoli s poetry In addition to the sustained comparison with Freud s writing Beyond the Family Romance explores parallels between Pascoli s work and such writers as Tarchetti Boito Poe and Invernizio Rethinking the concept of the fanciullino little child Truglio shows that Pascoli s poetry enacts a symbiosis between the logic of the rational modern adult and the mythic vision of the child
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Criticism, Reference
Critical editions of most classical authors are based on readings transmitted by medieval scholars that can be examined and collated… Modern editions of Petronius on the other hand are principally based on printed editions most of them published in France during the sixteenth century In this volume T Wade Richardson considers the use made of the Petronius manuscripts then extant by seven French humanist editors for their various editions commentaries and notes Some of the manuscripts they used may be equated with extant exemplars which therefore serve as a good check on the quality of their readings But as much as half of the text rests on the sixteenth-century witness alone Through a broad and integrated study of the problems of the Petronius text the author attempts to unravel the tangled skein of humanist work on Petronius to settle some of the old textual puzzles and to solidify the text and recast the apparatus Richardson also provides information on the codicology and palaeography of the texts and on the talents and habits of the scholars who created them
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Historical biography, Anthologies, Criticism
Italian poet novelist literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese 1908-1950 is generally recognized as one of… the most important writers of his period Between the years 1929 and 1933 Pavese enjoyed a rich correspondence with his Italian American friend the musician and educator Antonio Chiuminatto 1904-1973 The nature of this correspondence is primarily related to Pavese s thirst to learn about American culture its latest books its most significant contemporary writers as well as its slang This volume presents an annotated edition of Pavese and Chiminatto s complete epistolary exchange Mark Pietralunga s brilliant introduction provides historical and cultural context for the letters and traces Pavese s early development as a leading Americanist and translator The volume also includes an appendix of Chiuminatto s detailed annotations and thorough explanations of colloquial American terms and slang drawn from the works of Sinclair Lewis Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner A lively and illuminating exchange this collection ultimately corroborates critical opinion that America was the igniting spark of Pavese s literary beginnings as a writer and translator
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General non-fiction, Criticism
A Guide to Old English has established itself as the most thorough and most stimulating introduction to the language of… Anglo-Saxon England This revised edition adds ten basic texts together with full notes and a comprehensive glossary which convert the Guide into a self-contained course book for students beginning a study of Old English The texts such as Cynewulf and Cyneheard the story of Caedmon and the conversion of Edwin are those that have traditionally been chosen by teachers precisely becasue they offer the best introduction to the literature and culture of the time They are arranged in order of increasing difficulty The notes and glossary constantly refer to the grammatical explanations in the Guide so that course is fully integrated and easy to follow
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General non-fiction, Criticism, Arts and entertainment
Entropic comedy is the phrase coined by Patrick O Neill in this study to identify a particular mode of twentieth-century… narrative that is not generally recognized He describes it as the narrative expression of forms of decentred humour or what might more loosely be called black humour O Neill begins his investigation by examining the rise of an essentially new form of humour over the last three hundred years or so in the context of a rapid decay of confidence in traditional authoritative value systems O Neill analyses the resulting reorganization of the spectrum of humour and examines th implications of this for the ways in which we read texts and the world we live in He then turns from intellectual history to narratology and considers the relationship in theoretical terms of homour play and narrative as systems of discourse and the role of the reader as a textualizing agent Finally he considers some dozen twentieth-century narratives in French German and English with occasional reference to other literatures in the context of those historical and theoretical concerns Authors of the texts analysed include C line Camus Satre and Robbe-Grillet in French Heller Beckett Pynchon Nabokov and Joyce in English Grass Kafka and Handke in German The analyses proceed along lines suggested by structuralist semiotic and post-structuraist narrative and literary theory From his analyses of these works O Neill concludes they illustrate in narrative terms a mode of modern writing definable as entropic comedy and he develops a taxonomy of the mode
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Criticism, Reference
This third completely revised edition contains hundreds of new entries for a total of almost 2 000 children s… books and magazines carefully selected and described by a team of children s librarians Entries are arranged by subject with reading levels indicated where necessary and are also listed in a separate author-title index A list of prize-winning Canadian children s books and a basic book list for librarians teachers and parents are included in this charmingly illustrated volume
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Drama, Criticism, Arts and entertainment
This is the first book to survey comprehensively the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean citizen comedy Most studies of… the period focus on major authors this one follows recurring themes and motifs through a variety of plays by many authors from the moralizing comedies of the boys companies Professor Leggatt provides not only a fresh perspective on familiar plays by such figures as Jonson Middleton and Dekker but also a new look at a number of neglected comedies some by unfamiliar authors some by major authors working together Standard figures the usurer the prodigal and the prostitute and standard plots notably intrigues based on money or sex or both are traced to show the changes that occur in apparently stereotyped material at the hands of individual authors The result is to display the range and internal variety of a genre that too often is seen as all of a piece and to show the different ways in which social thinking can interact with the demands and comic form This book will interest students of Renaissance English drama both for its treatment of a neglected type of play and for its comments on individual citizen comedies Those who are concerned with drama as a vehicle for social commentary will find many points for discussion