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Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500
By Daniel Wakelin. 2022
Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some…
of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905-1985),…
who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice
By Anne Caldwell. 2022
Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that…
is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well-known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry’s distinctive features and explore how this “outsider” form can off er a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice off ers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.Don DeLillo in Context (Literature in Context)
By Jesse Kavadlo. 2022
Don DeLillo is one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Yet despite DeLillo's…
prolific output and scholarly recognition, much of the attention has gone to his works individually, rather than collectively or thematically. This volume provides separate entries into the wide variety and categories of contexts that surround and help illuminate DeLillo's writings. Don DeLillo in Context examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.This book analyzes what many critics consider to be the three best examples of modern American political fiction—Robert Penn Warren’s…
All the King’s Men, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place—to address a specific problem in American governance: how the intense competition for power among elite factions often results in their ignoring major groups of their constituents, thereby providing political bosses with a rationale to seize authoritarian control of the government in the name of constituent groups who feel ignored or neglected, promising them more democratic rule, but in the process, excluding other groups, so that the bosses themselves become elitist, ruling only for the sake of some constituents and not others.The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined…
by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits
By Jed Esty. 2022
As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate…
over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media experts ask how fast we will fall and how much we will lose, but generally ignore the fundamental question: What does decline mean? What is the significance, in experiential and everyday terms, in feelings and fantasies, of living in a country past its prime? Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at 2020s America, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum. As Esty argues, it resonates so widely in mainstream media because Americans have lost access to a language of national purpose beyond global supremacy. It is time to shelve the shopworn fables of endless US dominance, to face the multipolar world of the future, and to tell new American stories. The Future of Decline is a guide to finding them.Badiou by Badiou (Cultural Memory in the Present)
By Alain Badiou. 2022
An accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers…
with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.Tales from the Heart: True Stories From My Childhood
By Maryse Condé. 2001
In this collection of autobiographical essays, Maryse Conde vividly evokes the relationships and events that gave her childhood meaning: discovering…
her parents' feelings of alienation; her first crush; a falling out with her best friend; the death of her beloved grandmother; her first encounter with racism. These gemlike vignettes capture the spirit of Conde's fiction: haunting, powerful, poignant, and leavened with a streak of humor. Maryse Conde's previous work includes the novels "Windward Heights "and "Desirada," both available from Soho Press.Norton Introduction to Literature (Fourteenth High School Edition)
By Kelly J. Mays. 2021
The most vibrant and flexible package for the AP® Literature course The Fourteenth High School Edition of The Norton Introduction…
to Literature offers an exciting mix of contemporary and classic stories, poems, and plays that instructors love to teach. Organized by genre and theme, the book provides a flexible approach as well as tools that help foster close-reading skills and develop writing skills. An accompanying guide for students, The Norton Guide to AP® Literature: Writing & Skills, unpacks and demystifies the skills central to the course. The new edition of the anthology, the AP® guide, and the online tools that accompany the package, including adaptive InQuizitive learning modules, provide AP® Literature students and teachers with the most powerful instruction and support for the course. AP® is a trademark registered by the College Board, which is not affiliated with, and does not endorse, this product/site. This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750
By Catherine Ingrassia. 2022
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of…
power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England’s systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period.This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Disqualification
By Analola Santana, Michael Chemers. 2022
Monsters in Performance boasts an impressive range of contemporary essays that delve into topical themes such as race, gender, and…
disability, to explore what constitutes monstrosity within the performing arts. These fascinating essays from leading and emerging scholars explore representation in performance, specifically concerning themselves with attempts at social disqualification of "undesirables." Throughout, the writers employ the concept of "monstrosity" to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant. The editors take a range of previously isolated critical inquiries – including bioethics, critical race studies, queer studies, and televisual studies - and merge them to create an accessible and dynamic platform which unifies these ranges of representations. The global scope and interdisciplinary nature of Monsters in Performance renders it an essential book for Theatre and Performance students of all levels as well as scholars; it will also be an enlightening text for those interested in monstrosity and Cultural Studies more broadly.The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (Postwestern Horizons)
By Christopher Conway, Antoinette Sol. 2022
One of the greatest untold stories about the globalization of the Western is the key role of comics. Few American…
cultural exports have been as successful globally as the Western, a phenomenon commonly attributed to the widespread circulation of fiction, film, and television. The Comic Book Western centers comics in the Western&’s international success. Even as readers consumed translations of American comic book Westerns, they fell in love with local ones that became national or international sensations. These essays reveal the unexpected cross-pollinations that allowed the Western to emerge from and speak to a wide range of historical and cultural contexts, including Spanish and Italian fascism, Polish historical memory, the ideology of shōjo manga from Japan, British post-apocalypticism and the gothic, race and identity in Canada, Mexican gender politics, French critiques of manifest destiny, and gaucho nationalism in Argentina. The vibrant themes uncovered in The Comic Book Western teach us that international comic book Westerns are not hollow imitations but complex and aesthetically powerful statements about identity, culture, and politics.At a moment when France was coming to new prominence in the production of furniture and fashion, the fairy tales…
of Marie-Catherine d&’Aulnoy (1652–1705) and Henriette-Julie de Murat (1670–1716) gave pride of place to richly detailed descriptions of palaces, gardens, clothing, and toys. Through close readings of these authors&’ descriptive prose, Rori Bloom shows how these practitioners of a supposedly minor genre made a major contribution as chroniclers and critics of the decorative arts in Old Regime France. Identifying these authors&’ embrace of the pretty and the playful as a response to a frequent critique of fairy tales as childish and feminine, Making the Marvelous demonstrates their integration of artisan&’s work, child&’s play, and the lady&’s toilette into a complex vision of creativity. D&’Aulnoy and Murat changed the stakes of the fairy tale, Bloom argues: instead of inviting their readers to marvel at the magic that changes rags to riches, they enjoined them to acknowledge the skill that transforms raw materials into beautiful works of art.Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic
By Bruce Burgett. 1999
Sentimentalism, sex, the construction of the modern body, and the origins of American liberalism all come under scrutiny in this…
rich discussion of political life in the early republic. Here Bruce Burgett enters into debates over the "public sphere," a concept introduced by Jurgen Habermas that has led theorists to grapple with such polarities as public and private, polity and personality, citizenship and subjection. With the literary public sphere as his primary focus, Burgett sets out to challenge the Enlightenment opposition of reason and sentiment as the fundamental grid for understanding American political culture. Drawing on texts ranging from George Washington's "Farewell Address" and Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard to Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Burgett shows that the sentimental literary culture of the period relied on readers' affective, passionate, and embodied responses to fictive characters and situations in order to produce political effects. As such, sentimentalism located readers' bodies both as prepolitical sources of personal authenticity and as public sites of political contestation. Going beyond an account of the public sphere as a realm to which only some have full access, Burgett reveals that the formation of the body and sexual subjectivity is crucial to the very construction of that sphere. By exploring and destabilizing the longstanding distinction between public and private life, this book raises questions central to any democratic political culture.The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings
By Fleming Rutledge. 2004
J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has long been acknowledged as the gold standard for fantasy fiction, and the recent…
Oscar-winning movie trilogy has brought forth a whole new generation of fans. Many Tolkien enthusiasts, however, are not aware of the profoundly religious dimension of the great Ring saga. In The Battle for Middle-earth Fleming Rutledge employs a distinctive technique to uncover the theological currents that lie just under the surface of Tolkien's epic tale. Rutledge believes that the best way to understand this powerful "deep narrative" is to examine the story as it unfolds, preserving some of its original dramatic tension. This deep narrative has not previously been sufficiently analyzed or celebrated. Writing as an enthusiastic but careful reader, Rutledge draws on Tolkien's extensive correspondence to show how biblical and liturgical motifs shape the action. At the heart of the plot lies a rare glimpse of what human freedom really means within the Divine Plan of God. The Battle for Middle-earth surely will, as Rutledge hopes, "give pleasure to those who may already have detected the presence of the sub-narrative, and insight to those who may have missed it on first reading."The Letters of Thom Gunn
By Thom Gunn. 2021
The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick…
figure in the history of British and American poetry. "I write about love, I write about friendship," remarked Thom Gunn: "I find that they are absolutely intertwined." These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and shed new light on "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century" (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement).The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).Critical Inquiry, volume 48 number 4 (Summer 2022)
By Critical Inquiry. 2022
This is volume 48 issue 4 of Critical Inquiry. Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal devoted to the best…
critical thought in the arts and humanities. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics, and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices.Signs and Society, volume 10 number 2 (Spring 2022)
By Signs and Society. 2022
This is volume 10 issue 2 of Signs and Society. Signs and Society is an open-access, multidisciplinary journal in the…
humanities and social sciences focusing on research that examines the role of sign processes (or semiosis) in social interaction, cognition, and cultural formations. Focusing directly on semiosis in its multiple dimensions, the journal aims to promote collaborative translation across analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in anthropology, linguistics, semiotics, and related disciplines, and to uncover unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse empirical domains.Time in Romantic Theatre
By Frederick Burwick. 2022
The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the…
playwright was liberated from the old imperative of “Unity of Time” and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.