Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”
Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies.
Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Style is the material body of lyric poetry, Helen Vendler suggests. To cast off an earlier style is to do an act of violence to the self. Why might a poet do this, adopting a sharply different form? In this exploration of three kinds of break in poetic style, Vendler clarifies the essential connection between style and substance in poetry. Opening fresh perspectives on the work of three very different poets, her masterful study of changes in style yields a new view of the interplay of moral, emotional, and intellectual forces in a poet’s work.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’ invention of sprung rhythm marks a dramatic break with his early style. Rhythm, Vendler shows us, is at the heart of Hopkins’ aesthetic, and sprung rhythm is his symbol for danger, difference, and the shock of the beautiful. In Seamus Heaney’s work, she identifies clear shifts in grammatical “atmosphere” from one poem to the next—from “nounness” to the “betweenness” of an adverbial style—shifts whose moral and political implications come under scrutiny here. And finally Vendler looks at Jorie Graham’s departure from short lines to numbered lines to squared long lines of sentences, marking a move from deliberation to cinematic “freeze-framing to coverage, each with its own meaning in this poet’s career.
Throughout, Vendler reminds us that what distinguishes successful poetry is a mastery of language at all levels—including the rhythmic, the grammatical, and the graphic. A fine study of three poets and a superb exposition of the craft of poetry, The Breaking of Style revives our lapsed sense of what style means.
Like our own, early modern beliefs about race depended on metaphorical, selective, and contradictory understandings of how membership in groups is determined. Although race took distinctive forms in the past, the fallacies that underlie early modern racial experience generally are precisely-and surprisingly-the same as those in contemporary culture.
Exploring the similar underpinnings of early modern and contemporary ideas of difference, Barbarous Play examines English Renaissance understandings of race as depicted in drama. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton, Bovilsky offers case studies of how racial meanings are generated by narratives of boundary crossing-especially miscegenation, religious conversion, class transgression, and moral and physical degeneracy. In the process, she reveals deep parallels between the period’s conceptions of race and gender.
Barbarous Play contests the widely held view that race and racism depend on modern science for their existence and argues that understanding just what is false and figurative in past depictions of race, such as those found in Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The White Devil, and The Changeling, can clarify the illogic of present-day racism.
Lara Bovilsky is assistant professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
In the last two decades, biographies have grown in popularity, often eclipsing the novel in sales and accessibility to specialists and the general public alike. Widely regarded as a distinctly modern form, today's biographies are marked by their willingness to "tell all" or to pursue overt political aims. But how new, how unprecedented, are today's biographies? Biographical Passages addresses this important question by juxtaposing Victorian and Modernist biography from diverse perspectives.
Challenging the view that modern biographies are radically different from the straitlaced and ponderous Victorian tomes, Joe Law and Linda K. Hughes illustrate that continuities in biographical practice do exist, proving, for example, that the "tell-all" biography is not the exclusive preserve of the twentieth century. Enlisting the talents of such acclaimed biographers and scholars as P. N. Furbank and Michael Holroyd, Biographical Passages is a true exploration of the art and craft of biography. Essays on the usefulness of biography in approaching late Victorian artists provide a detailed scrutiny of modern biography across disciplines and from a rich array of vantage points. Additional essays on E. M. Forster and the relations between England and India analyze the role of cultural difference in biography.
Law and Hughes conclude Biographical Passages with an epilogue in tribute to a scholar whose work is closely connected to all the essays in this collection—Mary Lago. Widely known for her important contributions to studies of late Victorian and Edwardian literature, art, music, and Anglo-Indian relations, Lago is the author of biographies of Christina Herringham and E. M. Forster.
Between Self and Society explores the psychosocial dramas that galvanize six major British novels written between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The book challenges an influential misconception that has for too long hindered appreciation of the psychological novel. John Rodden argues that there should be no simplifying antithesis between psychological, “inner” conflicts (within the mind or “soul”) and institutional, “outer” conflicts (within family, class, community). Instead, it is the overarching, dramatic—yet often tortuous—relations between self and society that demand our attention. Rodden presents fresh interpretations of an eclectic group of prose fiction classics, including Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.
Far from being merely admirable experiments, let alone daring though interesting failures, these fictions are shown to possess aesthetic unity, stylistic consistency, and psychic force. Between Self and Society thus impels our careful reconsideration of novels that represent major artistic achievements, yet have been either unjustly neglected or appreciated in limiting ways that do injustice to their psychological aspects. Rodden’s vibrant discussion invites an upward revaluation of these works and encourages the full recognition of their value and significance in British literary history.
British women in the second half of the 20th century have produced a body of work that is as diverse as it is entertaining. This book offers an informal, jargon-free introduction to the fiction of sixteen contemporary writers either brought up or now living in England, from Muriel Spark to Jeanette Winterson.
British Women Writing Fiction presents a balanced view comprising women writing since the 1950s and 1960s, those who attracted critical attention during the 1970s and 1980s, and those who have burst upon the literary scene more recently, including African-Caribbean and African women. The essays show how all of these writers treat British subjects and themes, sometimes from radically different perspectives, and how those who are daughters of immigrants see themselves as women writing on the margins of society.
Abby Werlock's introduction explores the historical and aesthetic factors that have contributed to the genre, showing how even those writers who began in a traditional vein have created experimental work. The contributors provide complete bibliographies of each writer's works and selected bibliographies of criticism. Exceptional both in its breadth of subjects covered and critical approaches taken, this book provides essential background that will enable readers to appreciate the singular merits of each writer. It offers an approach toward better understanding favorite authors and provides a way to become acquainted with new ones.
The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat “private” family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.
Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.
Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.
The name "Beowulf" lingers in our collective memory, although today fewer people have heard the tale of the Germanic hero's fight with Grendel, the dreadful Monster of the Mere, as recounted in this Anglo-Saxon epic.
This edition of Beowulf makes the poem more accessible than ever before. Ruth Lehmann's imitative translation is the only one available that preserves both the story line of the poem and the alliterative versification of the Anglo-Saxon original. The characteristic features of Anglo-Saxon poetry— alliterative verse with first-syllable stress, flexible word order, and inflectional endings—have largely disappeared in Modern English, creating special problems for the translator. Indeed, many other translations of Beowulf currently available are either in prose or in some modern poetic form. Dr. Lehmann's translation alone conveys the "feel" of the original, its rhythm and sound, the powerful directness of the Germanic vocabulary.
In her introduction, Dr. Lehmann gives a succinct summary of the poem's plot, touching on the important themes of obligation and loyalty, of family feuds, unforgivable crimes, the necessity of revenge, and the internal and external struggles of the Scandinavian tribes. She also describes the translation process in some detail, stating the guiding principles she used and the inevitable compromises that were sometimes necessary.
In Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.
Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings.
Given the poet’s compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.
Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative.
Beowulf and the Grendel-Kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period.
Medieval Studies/Literary Theory
An intriguing evaluation of the concept of beginnings in the medieval period. In the first book to examine one of the most peculiar features of one of the greatest and most perplexing poems of England’s late Middle Ages-the successive attempts of Piers Plowman to begin, and to keep beginning-D. Vance Smith compels us to rethink beginning, as concept and practice, in both medieval and contemporary terms.The problem of beginning was invested with increasing urgency in the fourteenth century, imagined and grappled with in the courts, the churches, the universities, the workshops, the fields, and the streets of England. The Book of the Incipit reveals how Langland’s poem exemplifies a widespread interest in beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an interest that appears in such divergent fields as the physics of motion, the measurement of time, logic, grammar, rhetoric, theology, book production, and insurrection. Smith offers a theoretical understanding of beginning that departs from the structuralisms of Edward Said and the traditional formalisms of A. D. Nuttall and most medievalist and modernist treatments of closure. Instead, he conceives a work’s beginning as a figure of the beginning of the work itself, the inception of language as the problem of beginning to which we continue to return.ISBN 0-8166-3760-1 Cloth/jacket £24.50 $34.95x296 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 MayMedieval Cultures Series, volume 28Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota PressBen Jonson's contemporaries admired him above all other playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. He was the “great refiner” who alchemized the bleakest aspects of everyday life into brilliant images of folly and deceit. He was also a celebrated reprobate and an ambitious entrepreneur. David Riggs illuminates every facet of this extraordinary career, giving us the first major biography of Jonson in over sixty years.
The story of Jonson's life provides a broad view of the literary procession in early modern England and the milieu in which Elizabethan drama was produced. Beginning as a journeyman actor, Jonson was soon a novice playwright; his first important play was staged in 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast. He was by turns the self-styled leader of a literary elite, a writer of court masques, the first dramatist to publish his own Works, a royal pensioner, and a genteel poet. As Jonson transformed himself from an artisan into a gentleman, his need to transcend his class origins led him to murder, to his notorious quarrels with Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Inigo Jones, and to his lifelong rivalry with Shakespeare. Riggs traces the roots of Jonson's aggressiveness back to the turmoil of his childhood and adolescence. He offers new and convincing accounts of Jonson's latent hostility toward his bricklayer stepfather, his reckless marriage to Anne Lewis, and his conflicted relationships with his children.
This vivid portrait synthesizes six decades of scholarship and new historical evidence. Sixty halftones beautifully illustrate the story and capture the spirit of the age. With Riggs' original interpretations of Jonson's masterpieces and lesser known works, Ben Jonson: A Life will prove the standard account of this complex man's life and works for many years to come.
This provocative study provides a radically new perspective on Ben Jonson's comedies. Robert Watson's theory of the “parodic strategy” offers a solution to many of the most perplexing cruxes of Jonson criticism. By betraying the expectations of his characters and his audience, Jonson subsumes and chastises his rival playwrights, and seizes territory within the dramatic genre for his special form of satiric city-comedy.
He builds his complex plots out of the wreckage of more conventional works, in a way that allows him to criticize and combat not only his literary competitors, but also the histrionic tendencies of Renaissance English society. This view of Jonson's notorious borrowings has broad implications for the staging and editing of the comedies, as well as for scholarly criticism. It reveals a Jonson who is more coherent, more consistently funny, and more modernistically aware of the conventions and paradoxes of his medium than has generally been supposed. Watson's approach allows him to reorient major comedies such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, and to rehabilitate the later works that have commonly been dismissed as “dotages.” Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy thus provides fresh and vivid insights into Jonson's changing attitudes toward popular culture and toward his own censorious critical persona.
Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street—already a synonym for impoverished hack writers—before he became one of literary London’s most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing, when writers’ livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not aristocratic patrons. Clarke examines a network of writers radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous and celebrated authors of Dr. Johnson’s “Club” and those far less fortunate “brothers of the quill” trapped in Grub Street.
Clarke emphasizes Goldsmith’s sense of himself as an Irishman, showing that many of his early literary acquaintances were Irish émigrés: Samuel Derrick, John Pilkington, Paul Hiffernan, and Edward Purdon. These writers tutored Goldsmith in the ways of Grub Street, and their influence on his development has not previously been explored. Also Irish was the patron he acquired after 1764, Robert Nugent, Lord Clare. Clarke places Goldsmith in the tradition of Anglo-Irish satirists beginning with Jonathan Swift. He transmuted troubling truths about the British Empire into forms of fable and nostalgia whose undertow of Irish indignation remains perceptible, if just barely, beneath an equanimous English surface.
To read Brothers of the Quill is to be taken by the hand into the darker corners of eighteenth-century Grub Street, and to laugh and cry at the absurdities of the writing life.
William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal. Instead, as Julia Wright argues in her award-winning study Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation, Blake’s concern lies with the kind of community that is being established. Moreover, writing at the moment of the emergence of modern nationalism, Blake reveals a concern with the national community in particular.
Beginning with a discussion of the priority of national narrative in late-eighteenth-century art theory and antiquarianism, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation traces its relevance in Blake’s printed works, from The Poetical Sketches and the Lambeth Prophecies to The Laocoön. Professor Wright then turns to Europe, America, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, focusing on Blake’s portrayals of particular characters’ alienation from the groups and ideologies represented in the texts. The book closes by arguing that Blake’s major printed works, Milton and Jerusalem, are explicit and extensive engagements with the question of nation—and empire.
Although nationalism existed in various forms during the Romantic period, Blake’s contemporaries generally assumed that nations should progress continuously, producing a clear narrative line from an auspicious origin to the perfect fulfillment of that promise. Wright argues that these mutually determining constructs of national character and national narrative inform Blake’s handling of the problem of the individual-within-a-community.
This will stand as the definitive account of Robert Browning's development to maturity as a man and poet. Drawing on all available material, including important new manuscript findings, John Maynard reconstructs the circumstances of Browning's youth—his ancestry, his attractive and eccentric family, life in the new suburban London, his early understanding of himself and the world around him, his rich cultural education at home and with his teachers and friends and gives us a warm and convincing picture of Browning's boyhood and growth. Maynard traces Browning's early efforts to define his role as a poet, providing a full critical interpretation of his relation to the Romantics, especially the peculiarly powerful influence Shelley exerted on his early work.
The development of Browning's mind is examined in his response to his early schooling and private tutoring at home, his year at the new London University, and his decision to drop out of the university and all conventional career plans. The history concludes with a survey of Browning's reading in the period of self-education that initiated his mature work as a major poet of our modern era. Maynard's intention throughout is not to provide a day-to-day account of a boy and young man's life, but to flesh out the larger epic of a gifted child's formation in his environment, and the emergence of his own direction out of the context of his family, society, and literary culture. In so doing he has achieved a model case study of the development of a young man's mind and of a young poet's sense of identity as a creative artist. And he has recaptured the social, physical, and cultural ambiance of middle-class London in the early nineteenth century. It is a story told with grace and critical good sense.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
The first volume of Byron’s letters and journals covers his early years and includes his first pilgrimage to Greece and to the East, ending with his last letter from Constantinople on July 4, 1810, before his departure for Athens. Here is the direct record of his rapid development from the serious schoolboy to the facetious youth with ambivalent reactions to his perplexed mother, and the maturing man of extraordinary perceptions and sympathies and friendships. By the end of this volume he has already written English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (in part a spirited reaction to the reception of his earliest published work) and the first two Cantos of Childe Harold (published in 1812), which was to make him famous.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
Byron’s brilliant epistolary saga approaches its end in this last full volume of his letters, from early October 1822 to his fateful departure for Greece in July 1823. During these months he was living in Genoa, with Teresa and her father and brother occupying an apartment in his house. Mary Shelley was staying with the Hunts in a house some distance away.
Byron enlarged his circle of English acquaintances, but his liveliest correspondence was still with John Murray, Kinnaird, Hobhouse, and Moore. Of special interest are his frank letters, half flirtatious, to Lady Hardy, those to Trelawny and Mary Shelley, and a growing number to Leigh Hunt and his brother John (publisher of The Liberal and of Byron’s poems after his break with Murray), discussing inter alia his thoughts about the continuation of Don Juan.
There is irony in Byron’s advice for a reconciliation between Webster and his wife Frances, whose matrimonial virtue Byron was proud to have spared in England. And there is pathos in his letters to his half-sister urging her and her children to join him in Italy, unaware that his missives to Augusta and her replies were scrutinized by Lady Byron. From April on, the letters are full of concern for support of the Greek forces and preparations for his departure.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
An enchanting epistolary saga ends with the publication of this volume. Volume XI: ‘For freedom’s battle’ contains the letters Byron wrote from Greece between August 1823 and April 9, 1824, ten days before his death. Also included are over fifty letters dating from 1807 to 1820 that have come to light since Leslie A. Marchand began this project ten years ago.
In the letters from Greece a new set of correspondents appears, and a new tone is apparent. Although occasionally playful, Byron is preoccupied with the revolution and his efforts to unite the Greeks in a common cause despite their discord. His chief correspondents are his business agents in the islands and his banker friend in Genoa, Charles Barry, to whom he writes frank accounts of daily affairs. His letters to Hobhouse and to John Bowring attempt to give a realistic picture of the Greek struggle. To Teresa Guiccioli he writes only short, dutiful postscripts in English to the longer letters addressed to her brother.
Among the additional letters that became available too late to take their chronological place in the earlier volumes are those discovered in 1976, locked in a trunk at Barclays Bank; all but one of these fourteen letters were written to Scrope Davies, Byron’s witty friend and drinking companion.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
The third volume starts with Byron at the first crest of his fame following the publication of Childe Harold. It includes his literary letters to Tom Moore, frank and intimate ones to Hobhouse, pungent ones to Hanson and Murray, and his lively and amusing missives to Lady Melbourne, his confidante through all his love affairs. To her he describes the backwash of his tempestuous affair with Caroline Lamb, his emotional crises with Lady Oxford, the beginning of his liaison with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and his flirtation with Lady Frances Webster. The volume contains the letters of 1813 and the journal of 1813–1814, the first of his five incomparable journals.
The letters display, as Martin Fagg puts it, a “bewitching amalgam of the picturesque and the earthy, of arrogance and modesty, of vituperation and tenderness, of soulfulness and sheer irresistible high spirits.” They confirm Max Beerbohm’s opinion, “Byron’s letters are, I think, the best ever written—the fullest and most spontaneous.”
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
The ninth volume in Leslie Marchand’s highly acclaimed, unexpurgated edition of Byron’s letters finds the poet in Pisa with Teresa Guiccioli. His unique journal, “Detached Thoughts,” is finished shortly after his arrival in November 1821, and he is drawn into Shelley’s circle (including Edward Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe, and later Trelawny). His letters to Mary Shelley, the Hunts, and Trelawny after the death of Shelley are especially moving. Another tragedy, the death of his daughter Allegra, leaves him deeply affected, and he refers to it time and time again.
Money problems continue to plague him, as do suspicions surrounding his political activities. Following a fracas with a half-drunken dragoon and the imprisonment of two of his servants because of it, Byron is forced to leave Pisa and install himself and Teresa in a villa near Leghorn. His correspondence with his publisher reveals increasing displeasure with Murray’s delays, indecision, and anxiety over Don Juan, and Byron finally breaks off the relationship. But his output of verse is in no way lessened, and by the end of this volume in 1822, he has finished six more cantos for Don Juan as well as other poems.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
The final volume of this splendid edition contains a comprehensive index to the contents of the preceding volumes—the several thousand letters, the journals, the notes and biographical sketches. The index is prefaced by a generous selection of Byron’s aphorisms, bons mots, and memorable statements, culled by Leslie Marchand from the letters and journals and arranged under subject headings.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
The second volume of Byron’s letters embraces his second year in Greece, his revealing accounts to Hobhouse and others of his life in Athens, his visit to Veli Pasha, and his return by Malta to England. It covers the period of the loss of his mother and of several of his closest friends, of his first acquaintance with Moore and Rogers, his maiden speech in the House of Lords, the publication of Childe Harold, and the resulting fame that brought him into Whig society. It marks the beginning of his correspondence with Lady Melbourne, who became the confidante of his liaisons with Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford, and who forwarded his first (rejected) proposal to Annabella Milbanke.
Leslie A. Marchand, the author of critical studies and of the definitive biography of Byron, has brought a lifetime of study to the major task of editing these letters. He has done it with a restraint and objectivity that allows Byron to come through to us with unimpeded clarity.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
In this volume, Byron corresponds with writers such as Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and “Monk” Lewis; with John Murray about the publication of The Corsair, Lara, and The Hebrew Melodies; and with many personal friends. A new interest is his association with the Drury Lane Theater. The crucial events of his private life at this time are his engagement to Anabella Milbanke and their marriage early in 1815—a marriage that was to last little more than a year. Especially revelatory are his letters to his fiancée and those to his long-time confidante, Lady Melbourne.
Volume IV includes all the letters from the beginning of 1814 to the end of 1815.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
In the fifth installment of this marvelous serial story, we read about Byron’s separation from his wife. Besides his pleading letters to Annabella asking her to reconsider, there are level-headed letters to Murray and Hobhouse and Hunt and Rogers—all written during the tempestuous time before his final departure from England. The accounts written during the ensuing summer, of Waterloo and the Rhine and Switzerland, reveal new depths of Byron’s maturing mind. But the very best letters here are the ones from Italy: freed from the inhibitions of English society, Byron’s spirit seems to expand and his letters reflect the joie de vivre that, despite his melancholy, was an inherent part of his character.
George Gordon Byron was a superb letter-writer: almost all his letters, whatever the subject or whoever the recipient, are enlivened by his wit, his irony, his honesty, and the sharpness of his observation of people. They provide a vivid self-portrait of the man who, of all his contemporaries, seems to express attitudes and feelings most in tune with the twentieth century. In addition, they offer a mirror of his own time. This first collected edition of all Byron’s known letters supersedes Prothero’s incomplete edition at the turn of the century. It includes a considerable number of hitherto unpublished letters and the complete text of many that were bowdlerized by former editors for a variety of reasons. Prothero’s edition included 1,198 letters. This edition has more than 3,000, over 80 percent of them transcribed entirely from the original manuscripts.
Born for Opposition opens with Byron in Ravenna, in 1821. His passion for the Countess Guiccioli is subsiding into playful fondness, and he confesses to his sister Augusta that he is not “so furiously in love as at first.” Italy, meanwhile, is afire with the revolutionary activities of the Carbonari, which Byron sees as “the very poetry of politics.” His journal, written while the insurrection grew, is a remarkable record of his reading and reflections while awaiting the sounds of gunfire. In spite of the turmoil, Byron stuck fast to his work. By the end of this volume, in October 1821, he is established in Pisa, having written Sardanapalus, Cain, and The Vision of Judgement.
Becoming Dickens tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. In following the twists and turns of Charles Dickens’s early career, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst examines a remarkable double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel. It was a high-stakes gamble, and Dickens never forgot how differently things could have turned out. Like the hero of Dombey and Son, he remained haunted by “what might have been, and what was not.”
In his own lifetime, Dickens was without rivals. He styled himself simply “The Inimitable.” But he was not always confident about his standing in the world. From his traumatized childhood to the suicide of his first collaborator and the sudden death of the woman who had a good claim to being the love of his life, Dickens faced powerful obstacles. Before settling on the profession of novelist, he tried his hand at the law and journalism, considered a career in acting, and even contemplated emigrating to the West Indies. Yet with The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and a groundbreaking series of plays, sketches, and articles, he succeeded in turning every potential breakdown into a breakthrough.
Douglas-Fairhurst’s provocative new biography, focused on the 1830s, portrays a restless and uncertain Dickens who could not decide on the career path he should take and would never feel secure in his considerable achievements.
W. S. Gilbert, renowned author of the Savoy Operas, was also the creator of the Bab Ballads--"possibly the best comic verse--and surely the best illustrated--in the English language," according to James Ellis. Gilbert published these poems, together with his own, grotesque drawings signed "Bab," a childhood nickname, in Fun and other magazines in the late nineteenth century.
In 1898, the older and by then distinguished Gilbert substituted pallid and inoffensive drawings for the originals, which he had come to believe "erred gravely in the direction of unnecessary extravagance." Since then the ballads have been collected and published in various editions, most of which have featured the revised drawings and only a selection of the poems.
This is the only book to offer the complete collection of ballads with all original illustrations, a tribute to the comic genius of a writer known as "the most original dramatist of his generation." This collection will delight readers with its irreverence and wit.
Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean?
In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom.
Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.
Among the best-represented authors in Samuel Beckett’s library was Ludwig Wittgenstein, yet the philosopher’s relevance to the Nobel laureate’s work is scarcely acknowledged and seldom elucidated. Beckett after Wittgenstein is the first book to examine Beckett’s formative encounters with, and profound affinities to, Wittgenstein’s thought, style, and character.
While a number of influential critics, including the philosopher Alain Badiou, have discerned a transition in Beckett’s work beginning in the late 1950s, Furlani is the first to identify and clarify how this change occurs in conjunction with the writer’s sustained engagement with Wittgenstein’s thought on, for example, language, cognition, subjectivity, alterity, temporality, belief, hermeneutics, logic, and perception. Drawing on a wealth of Beckett’s archival materials, much of it unpublished, Furlani’s study reveals the extent to which Wittgenstein fostered Beckett’s views and emboldened his purposes.
Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman) is perhaps best known today as the lifelong partner of the poet H.D. She was, however, a central figure in modernist and avant-garde cultural experimentation in the early twentieth century; a prolific producer of poetry, novels, autobiography, and criticism; and an intimate and patron of such modernist artists as Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Dorothy Richardson. Bryher’s own path-breaking writing has remained largely neglected, long out of print, and inaccessible to those interested in her oeuvre. Now, for the first time since their original publication in the early 1920s, two of Bryher's pioneering works of fictionalized autobiography, titled Development and Two Selves, are reprinted in one volume for a new audience of readers, scholars, and critics.
Blending poetry, prose, and autobiographical details, Development and Two Selves together constitute a compelling bildungsroman that is among the first ever to follow a young woman's process of coming out. Through the fictionalized character Nancy, the novels trace Bryher’s life through her childhood and young adulthood, giving the reader an account of the development of a unique lesbian, feminist, and modernist consciousness. Development and Two Selves recover significant work by one of the first experimenters of the modernist movement and are a welcome reintroduction of the enigmatic Bryher.
Spanning three decades and a host of subjects, E. M. Forster’s radio broadcasts for the BBC were a major contribution to British cultural history, yet today they are rarely acknowledged by scholars of his life and work. But in their day they reached a larger audience than his fiction and established him as a household figure not only in Britain but also in the farthest reaches of its Empire.
As a frequent contributor to the BBC, Forster generally adhered to literary topics but did not shy away from social commentary. This book offers a new appreciation of his vitality and public importance through seventy annotated broadcasts that present him not only as a literary critic but also as a political activist, an advocate for India, and a wary yet cooperative ally of a colonialist government during World War II.
Gathering material either not in print or, if recast as essays, widely scattered, The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster reveals aspects of Forster’s intellect that have been given short shrift in previous studies. Nearly half the scripts date from 1941 to 1945 and provide an eyewitness account of war from a distinguished perspective. Forster comments on how the arts gallantly survived the blitz—even taking his listeners to the theater as bombing threats loom—and in other cases protests government interference in private life or the limits on free expression caused by the wartime paper shortage.
In these scripts, Forster casts a cosmopolitan eye on contemporary literature from James Joyce to John Steinbeck and provides early exposure for young writers and composers. He also enlarges the scope of European art by pairing Jane Austen or C. S. Lewis with Indian writers and offers pointed comments on contemporary literati such as Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot. Annotations to each piece identify Forster’s references and trace his revisions from script to broadcast, while the book’s introduction places his emergence as a distinctive radio voice within the historical, creative, and institutional contexts of broadcasting in his day.
This significant body of writing, too long overlooked, traces Forster’s evolution from novelist to adroit cultural critic and shows how a man who was never comfortable with machines played an important role in shaping a new medium. The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster situates Forster as one of the most poignant voices of the twentieth century as it offers new insight into a nation transfigured by war.
This magical account of King Arthur’s last night on earth, rediscovered in a collection of T. H. White’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication in 1977. While preparing for his final, fatal battle with his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur returns to the Animal Council with Merlyn, where the deliberations center on ways to abolish war. More self-revealing than any other of White’s books, Merlyn shows his mind at work as he agonized over whether to join the fight against Nazi Germany while penning the epic that would become The Once and Future King. The Book of Merlyn has been cited as a major influence by such illustrious writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Helen Macdonald, Neil Gaiman, and Lev Grossman.
“Arriving from beyond the curve of time and apparently from the grave, The Book of Merlyn stirs its own pages, saying, wait: you didn’t get the whole story. . . . It gives us a final glimpse of those two immortal characters, Wart and Merlyn, up close, slo-mo, with a considered and affectionate scrutiny. The book is an elegiac posting from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. Its reissue in our next century is just as welcome as when it first arrived forty years ago. . . . Certainly the moral questions about the military use of force perplex the world still. . . . The efficacy of treaties, the trading of insults among the potentates of the day, the testing of weapons, the weaponizing of trade—these strategies are still front and center. Rather terrifyingly so. We do well to revisit what that old schoolteacher of children, Merlyn, has been trying to point out to us about power and responsibility.”
—Gregory Maguire, from the foreword
Paul Kincaid explores the many contradictions that underlay the distinctive qualities of Aldiss’s writing. Wartime experiences in Asia and the alienation that arose upon his return to the cold austerity of postwar Britain inspired themes and imagery that Aldiss drew upon throughout his career. He wrote of prolific nature overwhelming humanity, believed war was madness even though it provided him with the happiest period of his life, and found parallels in the static lives of Indian peasants and hidebound English society. As Kincaid shows, contradictions created tensions that fueled the metaphorical underpinnings of Aldiss's work and shaped not only his long career but the evolution of postwar British science fiction.
There are worlds within our own in which even the smallest victories are hard won, the tender moment is almost unbearable, and the understated rings like a bell. Belonging, a new collection by British poet Dick Davis, is an extended visit to these worlds.
Deepened by his dry wit and the formal rigor of his verse, the poems of Belonging negotiate their way among personal and political divides—generations in a family, man and woman, and the tentative present and our inherited pasts.
But behind much of the writing there is also a desire for a kind of idealized belonging—to a clerisy of civilized and humane decency which can be found intermittently in all cultures and is the monopoly of none. Davis’s own cosmopolitan background provides the context for many of the poems, yet he is concerned always to find the humanly universal within the local and anecdotal—a hope realized in these careful and incandescent poems.
From the ancient Egyptian inventors of the love lyric to contemporary poets, Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry gathers together both written and sung love poetry from Africa.
This anthology is a work of literary archaeology that lays bare a genre of African poetry that has been overshadowed by political poetry. Frank Chipasula has assembled a historically and geographically comprehensive wealth of African love poetry that spans more than three thousand years. By collecting a continent’s celebrations and explorations of the nature of love, he expands African literature into the sublime territory of the heart.
Bending the Bow traces the development of African love poetry from antiquity to modernity while establishing a cross-millennial dialogue. The anonymously written love poems fromPharaonic Egypt that open the anthology both predate Biblical love poetry and reveal the longevity of written love poetry in Africa. The middle section is devoted to sung love poetry from all regions of the continent. These great works serve as the foundation for modern poetry and testify to love poetry’s omnipresence in Africa. The final section, showcasing forty-eight modern African poets, celebrates the genre’s continuing vitality. Among those represented are Muyaka bin Hajji and Shaaban Robert,two major Swahili poets; Gabriel Okara, the innovative though underrated Nigerian poet; Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal and a founder of the Negritude Movement in francophone African literature; Rashidah Ismaili from Benin; Flavien Ranaivo from Madagascar; and Gabeba Baderoon from South Africa.
Ranging from the subtly suggestive to the openly erotic, this collection highlights love’s endurance in a world too often riven by contention. Bending the Bow bears testimony to poetry’s role as conciliator while opening up a new area of study for scholars and students.
With their intense lyricism, Meena Alexander’s poems convey the fragmented experience of the traveler, for whom home is both nowhere and everywhere. The landscapes she evokes, whether reading Bashō in the Himalayas, or walking a city street, hold echoes of otherness. Place becomes a palimpsest, composed of layer upon layer of memory, dream, and desire. There are poems of love and poems of war—we see the rippling effects of violence and dislocation, of love and its aftermath. The poems in Birthplace with Buried Stones range widely over time and place, from Alexander’s native India to New York City. We see traces of mythology, ritual, and other languages. Uniquely attuned to life in a globalized world, Alexander’s poetry is an apt guide, bringing us face to face with the power of a single moment and its capacity to evoke the unseen and unheard.
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., a long-respected scholar and teacher of Emerson and Melville, has written, "I shall never tire of such writers, nor absorb all that they have to teach." This new collection of Sealts's essays reflects his many years of classroom experience and ongoing scholarship since his retirement in 1982. Most of these essays were originally delivered as public lectures before diverse audiences beyond the classroom; others first appeared in study pamphlets and as chapters of books.
These lucid essays, though varied in subject, have the commonality of an emphasis on teaching. The first essay, entitled "Emerson as Teacher," demonstrates how Emerson "provoked and inspired and educated his students--and his students' students."
In the most recently written essays Sealts deals with four of Emerson's contemporaries--Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville--who responded variously to Emerson's teachings. A common thread among these four essays is each author's distinctive use of first-person narration.
Teachers of literature at every level will greatly benefit from these highly readable discussions, which illustrate practical strategies for reading and teaching literary works. Included in the appendixes are questions for the study of Melville's Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor, which are also treated in individual essays.
Agents or victims, liberated or oppressed, "bad girls" or "good girls." What do these labels mean and do they further or hinder women's progress? How are today's visions of female sexuality and power like or unlike those of the past? How do younger women define feminism? Isn't the personal still political?
Dismayed by the media's tendency to reduce the feminist enterprise to labels and superstars, Donna Perry and Nan Bauer Maglin decided to find out what a diverse group of feminists think about women, sex, and power in the nineties. The result is a provocative and varied collection of twenty-four essays by second- and third-wave feminists; artists and activists; professors and graduate students; professional journalists and just-published writers; mothers and daughters. By focusing on society's construction, containment, and exploitation of female sexuality, in particular, these essays offer fresh perspectives on women's agency or lack of it.
The contributors focus on the oversimplifications and false dichotomies in current discussions of female sexuality, as well as the privileged perspective and individualism that currently dominate the popularized feminist message. Individual writers--including Emma Amos, bell hooks, Ann Jones, Lisa Jones, Paula Kamen, Matuschka, Marge Piercy, Katha Pollitt, Anna Quindlen, Elayne Rapping, Lillian S. Robinson, and Ellen Willis--reexamine women's empowerment in the light of issues like AIDS, battering, acquaintance rape, narratives of childhood sexual abuse, and pornography. Several draw political conclusions from their personal struggles, while others read stories and texts--from history, the art world, the media, popular culture, and social science research--in new and controversial ways.
These lively essays reveal the generational continuum of women's regional literature, which has always offered a voice to women and their concerns. By exploring the multiplicity of connections between women and regional writing and the subversive potential of regional writing to put forth social criticisms and correctives, Breaking Boundaries charts some of the major ways in which this literary genre is of particular importance to today's writers.
This book explores key texts of the black gay culture of the 1980s and ’90s. Starting with an analysis of the political discourse in anthologies such as In the Life and Brother to Brother, it identifies the references to the Harlem Renaissance and the Protest Era as common elements of black gay discourse. This connection to African American cultural and political traditions legitimizes black gay identity and criticizes the construction of gay identity as white. Readings of Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, Samuel R. Delany’s “Atlantis: Model 1924” and The Motion of Light in Water, Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and Steven Corbin’s No Easy Place to Be demonstrate how these strategies of signifying are used in affirmative, humorous, and ironic ways.
From the marginalia of their readers to the social and cultural means of their production, books bear the imprint of our humanity. Embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, Indigenous books are contested spaces. A constellation of nontextual components surrounded Native American–authored publications of the long nineteenth century, shaping how these books were read and understood—including illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more.
Centering Indigenous writers, Book Anatomy explores works from John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Pretty Shield, and D’Arcy McNickle published between 1854 and 1936. In examining critical moments of junction between Indigenous books and a mainstream literary marketplace, Amy Gore argues that the reprints, editions, and paratextual elements of Indigenous books matter: they embody a frontline of colonization in which Native authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous books, negotiate representations of Indigenous bodies, and fight for authority and ownership over their literary work.
Common conceptions permeating U.S. ethnic queer theory tend to confuse aesthetics with real-world acts and politics. Often Chicano/a representations of gay and lesbian experiences in literature and film are analyzed simply as propaganda. The cognitive, emotional, and narrational ingredients (that is, the subject matter and the formal traits) of those representations are frequently reduced to a priori agendas that emphasize a politics of difference.
In this book, Frederick Luis Aldama follows an entirely different approach. He investigates the ways in which race and gay/lesbian sexuality intersect and operate in Chicano/a literature and film while taking into full account their imaginative nature and therefore the specific kind of work invested in them. Also, Aldama frames his analyses within today's larger (globalized) context of postcolonial literary and filmic canons that seek to normalize heterosexual identity and experience. Throughout the book, Aldama applies his innovative approach to throw new light on the work of authors Arturo Islas, Richard Rodriguez, John Rechy, Ana Castillo, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor, as well as that of film director Edward James Olmos. In doing so, Aldama aims to integrate and deepen Chicano literary and filmic studies within a comparative perspective. Aldama's unusual juxtapositions of narrative materials and cultural personae, and his premise that literature and film produce fictional examples of a social and historical reality concerned with ethnic and sexual issues largely unresolved, make this book relevant to a wide range of readers.
This volume reassesses the field of Chicana/o literary studies in light of the rise of Latina/o studies, the recovery of a large body of early literature by Mexican Americans, and the “transnational turn” in American studies. The chapters reveal how “Chicano” defines a literary critical sensibility as well as a political one and show how this view can yield new insights about the status of Mexican Americans, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing prospects for social justice.
Chicana/o literary representations emerge as significant examples of the local that interrogate globalization’s attempts to erase difference. They also highlight how Chicana/o literary studies’ interests in racial justice and the minority experience have produced important intersections with new disciplines while also retaining a distinctive character. The recalibration of Chicana/o literary studies in light of these shifts raises important methodological and disciplinary questions, which these chapters address as they introduce the new tools required for the study of Chicana/o literature at this critical juncture.
The first study to foreground writing by women who live at the U.S.-Mexico Border.
It is a peculiar fact that U.S.-Mexico border theory is dominated by those who write about, not from, the border. By looking at the work of women writers from both sides of the border, Debra A. Castillo and María-Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba open border studies to a truly transnational analysis while bringing questions of gender to the fore.
Border Women rethinks border theory by emphasizing women writers whose work—in Spanish, English, or a mixture of the two languages—calls into question accepted notions of border identities. These writers include those who are already well recognized internationally (Helena María Viramontes, Sheila and Sandra Ortiz Taylor, and María Novaro); those who have become part of the Chicano canon (Norma Cantú, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Demetria Martínez); along with some of the lesser-known, yet most exciting, women’s voices from the Mexican border (Rosario Sanmiguel, Rosina Conde, and Regina Swain).2009 — Runner-up, Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies
Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature examines a broad array of texts that have contributed to the formation of an indigenous strand of Chicano cultural politics. In particular, this book exposes the ethnographic and poetic discourses that shaped the aesthetics and stylistics of Chicano nationalism and Chicana feminism. Contreras offers original perspectives on writers ranging from Alurista and Gloria Anzaldúa to Lorna Dee Cervantes and Alma Luz Villanueva, effectively marking the invocation of a Chicano indigeneity whose foundations and formulations can be linked to U.S. and British modernist writing.
By highlighting intertextualities such as those between Anzaldúa and D. H. Lawrence, Contreras critiques the resilience of primitivism in the Mexican borderlands. She questions established cultural perspectives on "the native," which paradoxically challenge and reaffirm racialized representations of Indians in the Americas. In doing so, Blood Lines brings a new understanding to the contradictory and richly textured literary relationship that links the projects of European modernism and Anglo-American authors, on the one hand, and the imaginary of the post-revolutionary Mexican state and Chicano/a writers, on the other hand.
The Texas Centennial of 1936, commemorated by statewide celebrations of independence from Mexico, proved to be a powerful catalyst for the formation of a distinctly Mexican American identity. Confronted by a media frenzy that vilified "Meskins" as the antithesis of Texan liberty, Mexican Americans created literary responses that critiqued these racialized representations while forging a new bilingual, bicultural community within the United States. The development of a modern Tejana identity, controversies surrounding bicultural nationalism, and other conflictual aspects of the transformation from mexicano to Mexican American are explored in this study. Capturing this fascinating aesthetic and political rebirth, Border Renaissance presents innovative readings of important novels by María Elena Zamora O'Shea, Américo Paredes, and Jovita González. In addition, the previously overlooked literary texts by members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) are given their first detailed consideration in this compelling work of intellectual and literary history.
Drawing on extensive archival research in the English and Spanish languages, John Morán González revisits the 1930s as a crucial decade for the vibrant Mexican American reclamation of Texas history. Border Renaissance pays tribute to this vital turning point in the Mexican American struggle for civil rights.
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