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Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls investigates the creation of "obscene writings and images" as a category of print in nineteenth-century…
Germany. Sarah L. Leonard charts the process through which texts of many kinds—from popular medical works to stereoscope cards—were deemed dangerous to the intellectual and emotional lives of vulnerable consumers. She shows that these definitions often hinged as much on the content of texts as on their perceived capacity to distort the intellect and inflame the imagination.Leonard tracks the legal and mercantile channels through which sexually explicit material traveled as Prussian expansion opened new routes for the movement of culture and ideas. Official conceptions of obscenity were forged through a heterogeneous body of laws, police ordinances, and expert commentary. Many texts acquired the stigma of immorality because they served nonelite readers and passed through suspect spaces; books and pamphlets sold by peddlers or borrowed from fly-by-night lending libraries were deemed particularly dangerous. Early on, teachers and theologians warned against the effects of these materials on the mind and soul; in the latter half of the century, as the study of inner life was increasingly medicalized, physicians became the leading experts on the detrimental side effects of the obscene. In Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls, Leonard shows how distinctly German legal and medical traditions of theorizing obscenity gave rise to a new understanding about the mind and soul that endured into the next century.In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors…
from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.London and the Making of Provincial Literature tells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850
By Siobhan Carroll. 2015
Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable,…
or inaccessible, these blank spaces—what Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"—existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion.Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century.What to Read and Why
By Francine Prose. 2018
In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary…
critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño.In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus.Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story."Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.Love Beyond Body, Space, And Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology
By David Robertson, Hope Nicholson, Cherie Dimaline, Gwen Benaway, Richard Camp, Jeffrey Veregge, Nathan Adler, Daniel Justice, Cleo Keahna, Mari Kurisato, Darcie Badger. 2016
Puppies in space! Cyborg escapes! Rockabilly girls with spider-magic! Benevolent aliens! Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a…
collection of Indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and Two-Spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love. Featuring Governor General award-winning authors David Alexander Robertson and Cherie Dimaline.Multilingualism and the Twentieth-Century Novel: Polyglot Passages (New Comparisons in World Literature)
By James Reay Williams. 2019
This book argues that the Anglophone novel in the twentieth century is, in fact, always multilingual. Rooting its analysis in…
modern Europe and the Caribbean, it recognises that monolingualism, not multilingualism, is a historical and global rarity, and argues that this fact must inform our study of the novel, even when it remains notionally Anglophone. Drawing principally upon four authors – Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot Díaz – this study argues that a close engagement with the novel reveals a series of ways to apprehend, depict and theorise various kinds of language diversity. In so doing, it reveals the presence of the multilingual as a powerful shaping force for the direction of the novel from 1900 to the present day which cuts across and complicates current understandings of modernist, postcolonial and global literatures.The Trauma Graphic Novel (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
By Andrés Romero-Jódar. 2017
The end of the twentieth century and the turn of the new millennium witnessed an unprecedented flood of traumatic narratives…
and testimonies of suffering in literature and the arts. Graphic novels, free at last from long decades of stern censorship, helped explore these topics by developing a new subgenre: the trauma graphic novel. This book seeks to analyze this trend through the consideration of five influential graphic novels in English. Works by Paul Hornschemeier, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons will be considered as illustrative examples of the representation of individual, collective, and political traumas. This book provides a link between the contemporary criticism of Trauma Studies and the increasingly important world of comic books and graphic novels.This book analyzes the distinguished modern Muslim scholar Bediuzzaman Said Nursi and the methodology of Qur’anic exegesis in his Risale-i…
Nur Collection, with special reference to the views of the early Muslim modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad ‘Abduh. It seeks to locate Nursi within modern Qur’anic scholarship, exploring the difference between Nursi’s reading of the Qur’an and that of his counterparts, and examines how Nursi relates the Qur’anic text to concerns of the modern period.An African Philosophy of Personhood, Morality, and Politics
By Motsamai Molefe. 2019
This book explores the salient ethical idea of personhood in African philosophy. It is a philosophical exposition that pursues the…
ethical and political consequences of the normative idea of personhood as a robust or even foundational ethical category. Personhood refers to the moral achievements of the moral agent usually captured in terms of a virtuous character, which have consequences for both morality and politics. The aim is not to argue for the plausibility of the ethical and political consequences of the idea of personhood. Rather, the book showcases some of the moral-political content and consequences of the account it presents.This book considers major male writers from the last three centuries whose relation to a strong, often distant woman—one sometimes…
modeled on their own mother—forms the romantic core of their greatest narratives. Myron Tuman explores the theory that there is an underlying psychological type, the sensitive son, connecting these otherwise diverse writers. The volume starts and ends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions provides an early portrait of one such son. There are chapters on other adoring sons, Stendhal, Sacher-Masoch, Scott Fitzgerald, and Turgenev, as well as on sons like Bernard Shaw and D.H. Lawrence with a different, less affectionate psychological disposition toward women. This book demonstrates how, despite many differences, the best works of all these sensitive sons reflect the deep, contorted nature of their desire, a longing that often seems less for an actual woman than for an elusive feminine ideal.Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (New Directions in Book History)
By Porscha Fermanis, Sarah Comyn, Lara Atkin, Nathan Garvey. 2019
This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa,…
and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.Plurality and the Poetics of Self
By Bruce Bond. 2019
Plurality and the Poetics of Self investigates the words “I” and “self” as suggestive of eight territories of meaning. Via…
poetry’s lens into language and its limits, Bruce Bond explores the notion of self as identity, volitional agent, ego, existential monad, subjectivity, ontological origin, soul, and transpersonal psyche. Taking poetic meaning as our common currency, the book emphasizes the critical role of the un-representable and how embattled and confused assumptions threaten ever deeper alienation from one another and ourselves.Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 is a history of the emotional, ideological, informational,…
and technical power and meaning of books and libraries in the aftermath of World War II, examined through the cultural reconstruction activities undertaken by the Libraries Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The book focuses on the key actors and on-the-ground work of the Libraries Section in four central areas: empowering libraries around the world to acquire the books they wanted and needed; facilitating expanded global production of quality translations and affordable books; participating in debates over the contested fate of confiscated books and displaced libraries; and formulating notions of cultural rights as human rights. Through examples from France, Poland, and surviving Jewish Europe, this book provides new insight into the complexities and specificities of UNESCO’s role in the realm of books, libraries, and networks of information exchange during the early postwar, post-Holocaust, Cold War years.Gender and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Spanish America, 1850–1910
By Lee Skinner. 2016
This ambitious volume shows how nineteenth-century Spanish American writers used the discourses of modernity to envision the place of women…
at all levels of social and even political life in the modern, utopian nation. Looking at texts ranging from novels and essays to newspaper articles and advertisements, and with special attention to public and private space, domesticity, education, technology, and work, Skinner identifies gender as a central concern at every level of society.Ogling Ladies: Scopophilia in Medieval German Literature
By Sandra Lindemann Summers. 2013
In the European Middle Ages, the harm a person’s gaze could cause was greatly feared. A stare was considered an…
act of aggression; intense gazing was believed to exert immense power over the individual observed. The love of looking, or scopophilia, is a common motif among female figures in medieval art and literature where it is usually expressed as a motherly or sexually interested gaze--one sanctioned, the other forbidden. Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors. Setting the motif against the period’s dominant patriarchal ethos and its almost exclusive pattern of male authorship, Summers argues that the maternal gaze was endorsed as a stabilizing influence while the erotic gaze was condemned as a threat to medieval order. Summers examines whether medieval artists and writers invented the idea of “ogling,” or whether they were simply recording a behavioral practice common at the time. She investigates how the act of ogling altered the narrative trajectory of female characters, and she also considers how it may have affected the regulation and restriction of women during Europe’s Middle Ages. Drawing upon contemporary gender studies, women’s studies, film studies, and psychology, Summers argues that the female gaze ultimately governs social formation. The exploration of the female gaze in period literature transcends medieval scholarship and impacts our understanding of the broader problem of gender perceptions and social structuring in Western civilization.Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book
By Catherine J. Golden. 2017
The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the long nineteenth century. While existing scholarship on Victorian…
illustrators largely centers on the realist artists of the "Sixties," this volume examines the entire lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant genre, arguing that it arose from and continually built on the creative vision of the caricature-style illustrators of the 1830s. She surveys the fluidity of illustration styles across serial installments, British and American periodicals, adult and children’s literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Serials to Graphic Novels examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit, and Trilby. Golden explores factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book—the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies—and that ultimately created a mass market for illustrated fiction. Golden identifies present-day visual adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope as well as original Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Victorian-themed novels like Batman: Noël as the heirs to the Victorian illustrated book. With these adaptations and additions, the Victorian canon has been refashioned and repurposed visually for new generations of readers.Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off (Florida Bernard Shaw)
By D. A. Hadfield, Jean Reynolds. 2016
“A worthy successor to Fabian Feminist. Shaw’s influence on the self-image and public standing of women has been immense, both…
in his time and in our own, yet Shaw has also been widely and sometimes appallingly misunderstood. This book should help clarify the complexities of the issue and provoke continued reflection and debate.”—Julie A. Sparks, San Jose State University“This collection suggests that Shaw’s views of women are still relevant and provocative and that the dialogue with Shaw is far from over.”—Sally Peters, author of Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman When offstage actions contradict a playwright’s onstage message, literary study gets messy. In his personal relationships, George Bernard Shaw was often ambivalent toward liberated women—surprisingly so, considering his reputation as one of the first champions of women’s rights. His private attitudes sit uncomfortably beside his public philosophies that were so foundational to first-wave feminism. Here, Shaw’s long-recognized influence on feminism is reexamined through the lens of twenty-first-century feminist thought as well as previously unpublished primary sources. New links appear between Shaw’s writings and his gendered notions of physicality, pain, performance, nationalism, authorship, and politics. The book’s archival material includes previously unpublished Shaw correspondence and excerpts from the works of his feminist playwright contemporaries. Shaw and Feminisms explores Shaw’s strong female characters, his real-life involvement with women, and his continuing impact on theater and politics today. A volume in the Florida Bernard Shaw Series, edited by R. F. DietrichContributors: Tracy J. R. Collins | Leonard W. Conolly | Virginia Costello | D. A. Hadfield | Brad Kent | Kay Li | Jackie Maxwell | John M. McInerney | Michel Pharand | Jean Reynolds | Margaret D. Stetz | Lawrence Switzky | Rodelle Weintraub | Ann WilsonDonald J. Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book "Pearson is convincing in arguing that Irish writers often straddle the…
space between national identity and a sense of belonging to a larger, more cosmopolitan environment."--Choice "Demonstrat[es]. . .just what it is that makes comparative readings of history, politics, literature, theory, and culture indispensable to the work that defines what is best and most relevant about scholarship in the humanities today."--Modern Fiction Studies "[An] admirable book . . . Repositions the artistic subject as something different from the biographical Joyce, Bowen, or Beckett, cohering as a series of particular aesthetic responses to the dilemma of belonging in an Irish context."--James Joyce Broadsheet "A smart and compelling approach to Irish expatriate modernism. . . . An important new book that will have a lasting impact on postcolonial Irish studies."--Breac "Clearly written, convincingly argued, and transformative."--Nicholas Allen, author of Modernism, Ireland and Civil War "Goes beyond 'statism' and postnationalism toward a cosmopolitics of Irish transnationalism in which national belonging and national identity are permanently in transition."--Gregory Castle, author of The Literary Theory Handbook "Shows how three important Irish writers crafted forms of cosmopolitan thinking that spring from, and illuminate, the painful realities of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle."--Marjorie Howes, author of Colonial Crossings: Figures in Irish Literary History "Asserting the simultaneity of national and global frames of reference, this illuminating book is a fascinating and timely contribution to Irish Modernist Studies."--Geraldine Higgins, author of Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats Looking at the writing of three significant Irish expatriates, Nels Pearson challenges conventional critical trends that view their work as either affirming Irish anti-colonial sentiment or embracing international identity. In reality, he argues, these writers constantly work back and forth between a sense of national belonging that remains incomplete and ideas of human universality tied to their new global environments. For these and many other Irish writers, national and international concerns do not conflict, but overlap--and the interplay between them motivates Irish modernism. According to Pearson, Joyce 's Ulysses strives to articulate the interdependence of an Irish identity and a universal perspective; Bowen's exiled, unrooted characters are never firmly rooted in the first place; and in Beckett, the unsettled origin is felt most keenly when it is abandoned for exile. These writers demonstrate the displacement felt by many Irish citizens in an ever-changing homeland unsteadied by long and turbulent decolonization. Searching for a sense of place between national and global abstractions, their work displays a twofold struggle to pinpoint national identity while adapting to a fluid cosmopolitan world.Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (Florida James Joyce)
By Agata Szczeszak-Brewer. 2010
"Original and significant. This book shows us how Conrad and Joyce manipulate representations of imperialist belief in the sacred to…
indict Western culture for its racist colonization. This striking reading of modernism emphasizes Conrad's and Joyce's use of chaos in general and pilgrimage in particular in terms of mapmaking, racial denigration, and strategies of power. Szczeszak-Brewer makes spectacular connections between sacred language, nation building, and literary representation."--Georgia Johnston, author of The Formation of Twentieth-Century Queer Autobiography Though they were born a generation apart, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce shared similar life experiences and similar literary preoccupations. Both left their home countries at a relatively young age and remained lifelong expatriates. Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce offers a fresh look at these two modernist writers, revealing how their rejection of organized religion and the colonial presence in their native countries allowed them to destabilize traditional notions of power, colonialism, and individual freedom in their texts. Throughout, Agata Szczeszak-Brewer ably demonstrates the ways in which these authors grapple with the same issues--the grand narrative, paralysis, hegemonic practices, the individual's pilgrimage toward unencumbered self-definition--within the rigid bounds of imperial ideologies and myths. The result is an engaging and enlightening investigation of the writings of Conrad and Joyce and of the larger literary movement to which they belonged.Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography
By Emily A. Maguire. 2018
“An important contribution to U.S.-Caribbean dialogues in the field of Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures.”—Jossianna Arroyo, author of Travestismos culturales: literature…
y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil“Maguire’s close readings of women ethnographers like Lydia Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston result in a very original approach to dealing with the topic of race and how it overlaps with the categories of gender. Outstanding work!”—James Pancrazio, author of The Logic of Fetishism: Alejo Carpentier and the Cuban Tradition"Ingeniously tells the story of the tensions between artist and ethnographer that inform the Cuban national narrative of the twentieth century. Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography is essential reading for a large audience of students and scholars alike within Caribbean, American, and African Diaspora studies."--Jaqueline Loss, author of Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America In the wake of independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba’s intellectual avant-garde struggled to cast their country as a modern nation. They grappled with the challenges presented by the postcolonial situation in general and with the location of blackness within a narrative of Cuban-ness in particular. In this breakthrough study, Emily Maguire examines how a cadre of writers reimagined the nation and re-valorized Afro-Cuban culture through a textual production that incorporated elements of the ethnographic with the literary. Singling out the work of Lydia Cabrera as emblematic of the experimentation with genre that characterized the age, Maguire constructs a series of counterpoints that place Cabrera’s work in dialogue with that of her Cuban contemporaries—including Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, and Alejo Carpentier. An illuminating final chapter on Cabrera and Zora Neale Hurston widens the scope to contextualize Cuban texts within a hemispheric movement to represent black culture. Emily A. Maguire is associate professor of Spanish at Northwestern University.