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Showing 21 - 40 of 26278 items
By Alexander H. Japp.
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club…
where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: History / General; BiographyBy Mary Klages. 1999
From Tiny Tim to Helen Keller, disabled people in the nineteenth century were portrayed in sentimental terms, as afflicted beings…
whose sufferings afforded able-bodied people opportunities to practice empathy and compassion. In all kinds of representations of disability, from popular fiction to the reports of institutions established for the education and rehabilitation of disabled people, the equation of disability and sentimentality served a variety of social functions, from ensuring the continued existence of a sympathetic sensibility in a hard-hearted, market-driven world, to asserting the selfhood and equality of disabled adults. Unique in its focus on blindness and its examination of the interplay between institutional discourse and popular literature, Woeful Afflictions offers a detailed historical analysis of the types of cultural work performed by sentimental representations of disability in public reports and lectures, exhibitions, novels, stories, poems, autobiographical writings, and popular media portrayals from the 1830s through the 1890s in the United States. Woeful Afflictions combines contemporary scholarship on sentimentalism with the most recent works on the cultural meanings of disability to argue that sentimentalism, with its emphasis on creating emotional identifications between texts and readers, both reinforces existing associations between disability and otherness and works to rewrite those associations in portraying disabled people, in their emotional capacities, as no different from the able-bodied. This book will interest anyone concerned with disability studies and the social construction of the body, with the history of education and of public institutional care in the United States, and with autobiographical writings.By Christopher Macgowan. 2016
This Companion contains thirteen new essays from leading international experts on William Carlos Williams, covering his major poetry and prose…
works - including Paterson, In the American Grain, and the Stecher trilogy. It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and discusses a wide variety of topics: Williams and the visual arts, Williams and medicine, Williams's version of local modernism, Williams and gender, Williams and multiculturalism, and more. Authors examine Williams's relationships with figures such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and H. D. and Marianne Moore, and illustrate the importance of his legacy for Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, and numerous contemporary poets. Featuring a chronology and an up-to-date bibliography of the writer, The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams is an invaluable guide for students of this influential literary figure.By Helen Taylor. 1989
One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised…
Hollywood films of all time, Gone With the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have. Seventy-five years on from the cinematic release of Gone with the Wind, Helen Taylor looks at the reasons why the book and film have had such an appeal, especially for women. Drawing on letters and questionnaires from female fans, she brings together material from southern history, literature, film and feminist theory and discusses the themes of the Civil War and issues of race. She has previously written Gender, Race and Region in the writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin and The Daphne Du Maurier Companion.culture and the reasons why Gone With the Wind maintains a special place in female hearts. 'fascinating . . . an original original' Suzy Feay, Time OutBy Linda Furiya. 2008
When Linda Furiya decided to move to China with her boyfriend at the age of thirty, she hoped to find…
romance and ethnic kinship. Expecting common ground with locals as an Asian American, Furiya struggled with her ambition as a food writer in a nation where notions of race and gender are set in stone. During the six years she lived in Beijing and Shanghai, Furiya experienced a wide range of experiences--loneliness, isolation, friendship, and love--tied together by one common theme: food. Ultimately, Furiya surpassed these challenges and found inspiration from the courageous Chinese women who graced her life. The sensuous experience of preparing and eating authentic Chinese cuisine follows Furiya throughout her journey, and ultimately reveals the intimate, nurturing side of the Chinese culture and people. Part insightful memoir, part authentic cookbook, How to Cook a Dragon is a revealing look at race, love, and food in China.Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial dead white men,” are cannon fodder in the culture…
wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion? In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?By Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, Simon Karlinsky. 2001
Tracing in detail two decades of close friendship between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, this collection has been expanded to…
include 59 letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979.By Badia Sahar Ahad. 2010
This thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia Sahar Ahad…
details how Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, Adrienne Kennedy, and Danzy Senna employed psychoanalytic terms and conceptual models to challenge notions of race and racism in twentieth-century America. Freud Upside Down explores the relationship between these authors and intellectuals and the psychoanalytic movement emerging in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Examining how psychoanalysis has functioned as a cultural phenomenon within African American literary intellectual communities since the 1920s, Ahad lays out the historiography of the intersections between African American literature and psychoanalysis and considers the creative approaches of African American writers to psychological thought in their work and their personal lives.By Asya C. Sigelman. 2016
Modern scholarship tends to focus on the social, political and economic information that can be gleaned from Pindar's treatment of…
the subject of his victory odes - the athlete who brings immortality to his family and polis. In this book, Asya C. Sigelman offers a new approach to the odes, exploring the fact that Pindar's language and imagery suggest that the athlete's victory is only a weaker version of the poet's immortalizing feat. Examining several central Pindaric images, Sigelman shows that they are fundamentally reflexive, structured as expressions of poetic creativity engaged in a perpetual synthesis of intra-poetic time - of the unity of the past, present and future of the world of Pindar's song. As the book's case studies of several of the odes demonstrate, this synthesis is key to Pindar's notion of immortalization and constitutes the central poetic subject of Pindar's song which underlies and informs its praise of the victorious athlete.By Tereese Svoboda. 2002
This is the first full-length biography of this fascinating woman of arts and letters who was a major force both…
within the literary salons of New York City in the early 20th Century, but also on the streets as a protester of inequality and injustice which was rampant at the time. Author Terese Svoboda, award-winning poet, non-fiction writer, novelist, and videographer, provides a rich and detailed account of the life and world of Lola Ridge, poet, artist, editor, and activist for the cause of women’s rights, workers rights, racial equality and social reform. From her childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand with her mother who had fled with her infant daughter to Down Under in order to escape one bad marriage only to find herself in another; to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, Australia, which, even in its early days was a socially progressive and influential artistic hub; to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, where she joined forces with the literary and artistic world in the years leading up to WWI, and helped start and edit two major journals of the time, Others and Broom, as well as go on to publish several books of poetry. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day (in an era when poetry was a top-selling genre and even available for sale at newsstands), she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society--poverty, racism, labor inequality, unequal wealth distribution, and the appalling conditions in which the immigrant population was forced to live in the tenements of New York and elsewhere--subjects deemed ill-suited for a femaie poet. Moreover,her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant and other socialists and radicals, and her public outcry in the wake of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory Fire and the executions of Sacco & Vanzetti put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic. With this lively portrait of the artistic and socially active world (100 years before “occupy Wall Street) Svoboda gives us a veritable who’s who of all the key players in the arts, literature and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center, a traialblazer for women, poetry and human rights far ahead of her time. But as Svoboda argues, she was sadly marginalized in later years along with many pioneering and primarily female poets of her day such as Marianne Moore, H.D., and Amy Lowell, who have only recently been recognized for their major contribution to our literature. With spirited prose, impeccable research, insight and wit, Svoboda has restored this vastly undervalued and overlooked author to her rightful place in this country’s literary and social history.By Martin Willis. 2016
This book considers scientific performances across two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Performances include demonstrations…
of technologies, experiments that look like theatre, theatre that looks like science, tourist representations and natural history film-making. Its key aim is to open debate on how scientific activity, both historical and contemporary, might be understood in the context of performance studies and the imaginative acts required to stage engaging performances. Scientific performances have become increasingly of interest to historians of science, literature and science scholars, and in the field of science studies. As yet, however, no work has sought to examine a range of scientific performances with the aim of interrogating and illuminating the kinds of critical and theoretical practices that might be employed to engage with them. With scientific performance likely to become ever more central to scholarly study in the next few years this volume offer a timely, and early, intervention in the existing debates, and aims, too, to be a touchstone for future work.By Douglas Wolk. 2007
Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and…
images of the rest of contemporary culture. In Reading Comics, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why and how. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics-from Alan Moore to Alison Bechdel to Chris Ware-and explains their roots, influences, and where they fit into the pantheon of art. As accessible to the hardcore fan as to the curious newcomer, Reading Comics is the first book for people who want to know not just which comics are worth reading, but ways to think and talk and argue about them.By Theodore Dreiser. 1940
Theodore Dreiser staked his reputation on fearless expression in his fiction, but he never was more outspoken than when writing…
about American politics. Spanning a period in American history from the Progressive Era to the advent of the Cold War, this generous volume collects Dreiser's most important political writings from his journalism, broadsides, speeches, private papers, and long out-of-print nonfiction books. Touching on the Great Depression, the New Deal, and both World Wars as well as Soviet Russia and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, these writings exemplify Dreiser's candor and his penchant for championing the defenseless and railing against corruption. The works also navigate historical terrain with prescient observations on topics such as religion, civil rights, national responsibility, individual ethics, global relations, and censorship that remain relevant to a contemporary audience.By Thomas Gould. 2018
This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of…
Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.By Rachel Teubner. 2017
The essay for which The Sacred Wood is primarily remembered is one of the most famous pieces of criticism in…
English: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” helped to re-orientate arguments about the study of literature and its production by redefining the nature of tradition and the artist's relation to it.At a time when the word “traditional” had become a way of damning with faint praise by reference to the past, Eliot reinterpreted the term to mean something entirely different. It is not, he argues, something just “handed down,” but, instead, a prize to be obtained “by great labour,” not least in the making of a huge effort of understanding how the past fits together. Seen thus, Eliot suggests, a literary and artistic tradition “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” – and it is not just past, but present as well. For Eliot, “art never improves,” but only changes, and each part of the tradition is constantly being reinterpreted in light of what is added to the whole. The role of the poet, in Eliot's view, is to subjugate their own personality, and become “a receptacle,” in which “numberless feelings, phrases, images… can unite to form a new compound.” Redefining the issue of poets' relations to the past in this new way is a fine example of creative thinking, and Eliot’s ability to connect existing concepts in new ways was what gave weight to the argument that he advanced: that poets cannot succeed without understanding that they are taking their place on a continuum that stretches back to all their predecessors, and incorporate the ideas, strengths and failings of the entire body of work that those poets represented.By Koen Vermeir, Michael Funk Deckard. 2011
Attracting philosophers, politicians, artists as well as the educated reader, Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, first published in 1757, was a…
milestone in western thinking. This edited volume will take the 250th anniversary of the Philosophical Enquiry as an occasion to reassess Burke's prominence in the history of ideas. Situated on the threshold between early modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, Burke's oeuvre combines reflections on aesthetics, politics and the sciences. This collection is the first book length work devoted primarily to Burke's Philosophical Enquiry in both its historical context and for its contemporary relevance. It will establish the fact that the Enquiry is an important philosophical and literary work in its own right.By Edna Edith Sayers, Diana Moore. 2013
Lydia Huntley was born in 1791 in Norwich, CT, the only child of a poor Revolutionary war veteran. But her…
father's employer, a wealthy widow, gave young Lydia the run of her library and later sent her for visits to Hartford, CT. After teaching at her own school for several years in Norwich, Lydia returned to Hartford to head a class of 15 girls from the best families. Among her students was Alice Cogswell, a deaf girl soon to be famous as a student of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. Lydia's inspiration came from a deep commitment to the education of girls and also for African American, Indian, and deaf children. She left teaching to marry Charles Sigourney, then turned to writing to support her family, publishing 56 books, 2,000 magazine articles, and popular poetry. Lydia Sigourney never abandoned her passion for deaf education, remaining a supporter of Gallaudet's school for the deaf until her death. Yet, her contributions to deaf education and her writing have been forgotten until now. All of Lydia Sigourney's of Lydia Sigourney's work on the nascent Deaf community is presented in this new volume. Her writing intertwines her mastery of the sentimentalism form popular in her day with her sharp insights on the best ways to educate deaf children. In the process, Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford reestablishes her rightful place in history.By Adam Perchard, Karina Jakubowicz. 2017
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a seminal piece of literary criticism, and a…
masterclass in the critical thinking skill of interpretation. Interpretation plays a vital role in critical thinking: it focuses on interrogating accepted meanings and laying down clear definitions on which a strong argument can be built. Both history and literary history in the US have frequently revolved around understanding how Americans define themselves and each other, and Morrison’s work seeks to investigate, question, and redefine one of the central concepts in American history and American literary history: color.. Morrison turned to the classics of American literature to ask how authors had chosen to define the terms ‘black’ and ‘white.’ Instead of accepting traditional interpretations of these works, Morrison examined the way in which ‘whiteness’ defines itself through ‘blackness,’ and vice versa. Black bondage and the myths of black inferiority and savagery, she showed, allowed white America to indulge its own defining myths – viewing itself as free, civilized, and innocent. A classic of subtle and incisive interpretation, Playing in the Dark shows just how crucial and how complex simple-looking definitions can be.By Alice Walker. 1996
In the early eighties, three extraordinary events interrupted Alice Walker's peaceful, reclusive life--the publication of the bestselling novel The Color…
Purple, the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Spielberg to make her novel into a film. This book chronicles that period of transition from recluse to public figure, and invites us to contemplate, along with her, the true significance of unanticipated gifts.By John Gomez. 2017
Mythologies is a masterpiece of analysis and interpretation. At its heart, Barthes’s collection of essays about the “mythologies” of modern…
life treats everyday objects and ideas – from professional wrestling, to the Tour de France, to Greta Garbo’s face – as though they are silently putting forward arguments. Those arguments are for modernity itself, the way the world is, from its class structures, to its ideologies, to its customs. In Barthes’s view, the mythologies of the modern world all tend towards one aim: making us think that the way things are, the status quo, is how they should naturally be. For Barthes, this should not be taken for granted; instead, he suggests, it is a kind of mystification, preventing us from seeing things differently or believing they might be otherwise. His analyses do what all good analytical thinking does: he unpicks the features of the arguments silently presented by his subjects, reveals their (and our) implicit assumptions, and shows how they point us towards certain ideas and conclusions. Indeed, understanding Barthes’ methods of analysis means you might never see the world in the same way again. Six skills combine to make up our ability to think critically. Mythologies is an especially fine example of a work that uses the skills of analysis and creative thinking.