Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers.
The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.
Hayden White borrows the title for The Practical Past from philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who used the term to describe the accessible material and literary-artistic artifacts that individuals and institutions draw on for guidance in quotidian affairs. The Practical Past, then, forms both a summa of White’s work to be drawn upon and a new direction in his thinking about the writing of history.
White’s monumental Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) challenged many of the commonplaces of professional historical writing and wider assumptions about the ontology of history itself. It formed the basis of his argument that we can never recover “what actually happened”in the past and cannot really access even material culture in context. Forty years on, White sees “professional history" as falling prey to narrow specialization, and he calls upon historians to take seriously the practical past of explicitly “artistic” works, such as novels and dramas, and literary theorists likewise to engage historians.
A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.
Noting in detail the practical and physical limitations the Bard faced as he worked out the logistics of his plays, Colin Butler demonstrates how Shakespeare incorporated those limitations and turned them to his advantage: his management of entrances and exits; his characterization techniques; his handling of scenes off-stage; his control of audience responses; his organization of major scenes; and his use of prologues and choruses. A different aspect of the plays is covered in each chapter.
Butler draws most of his examples from mainstream plays, such as Macbeth, Othello, and Much Ado about Nothing. He brings special focus to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is treated as one of Shakespeare’s most important plays. Butler supports his major points with quotations, so readers can understand an issue even if they are unfamiliar with the particular play being discussed. The author also cross-references the use of dramatic devices in the plays, increasing the reader’s enjoyment and understanding of Shakespeare’s achievements.
Clear, jargon-free, easy-to-use, and comprehensive, The Practical Shakespeare looks at stagecraft and playwriting as conduits for students, teachers, and general audiences to engage with, understand, and appreciate the genius of Shakespeare.
A pathbreaking work of scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices: the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances.
Edwards elucidates the workings of diaspora by tracking the wealth of black transnational print culture between the world wars, exploring the connections and exchanges among New York–based publications (such as Opportunity, The Negro World, and The Crisis) and newspapers in Paris (such as Les Continents, La Voix des Nègres, and L'Etudiant noir). In reading a remarkably diverse archive--the works of writers and editors from Langston Hughes, René Maran, and Claude McKay to Paulette Nardal, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté--The Practice of Diaspora takes account of the highly divergent ways of imagining race beyond the barriers of nation and language. In doing so, it reveals the importance of translation, arguing that the politics of diaspora are legible above all in efforts at negotiating difference among populations of African descent throughout the world.
The history of the book in nineteenth-century Japan follows an uneven course that resists the simple chronology often used to mark the divide between premodern and modern literary history.
By examining the obscured histories of publication, circulation, and reception of widely consumed literary works from late Edo to the early Meiji period, Jonathan Zwicker traces a genealogy of the literary field across a long nineteenth century: one that stresses continuities between the generic conventions of early modern fiction and the modern novel. In the literature of sentiment Zwicker locates a tear-streaked lens through which to view literary practices and readerly expectations that evolved across the century.
Practices of the Sentimental Imagination emphasizes both qualitative and quantitative aspects of literary production and consumption, balancing close readings of canonical and noncanonical texts, sophisticated applications of critical theory, and careful archival research into the holdings of nineteenth-century lending libraries and private collections. By exploring the relationships between and among Japanese literary works and texts from late imperial China, Europe, and America, Zwicker also situates the Japanese novel within a larger literary history of the novel across the global nineteenth century.
In this surprisingly timely book, Stephen Mack examines Whitman’s particular and fascinating brand of patriotism: his far-reaching vision of democracy. For Whitman, loyalty to America was loyalty to democracy. Since the idea that democracy is not just a political process but a social and cultural process as well is associated with American pragmatism, Mack relies on the pragmatic tradition of Emerson, James, Dewey, Mead, and Rorty to demonstrate the ways in which Whitman resides in this tradition.
Mack analyzes Whitman's democratic vision both in its parts and as a whole; he also describes the ways in which Whitman's vision evolved throughout his career. He argues that Whitman initially viewed democratic values such as individual liberty and democratic processes such as collective decision-making as fundamental, organic principles, free and unregulated. But throughout the 1860s and 1870s Whitman came to realize that democracy entailed processes of human agency that are more deliberate and less natural—that human destiny is largely the product of human effort, and a truly humane society can be shaped only by intelligent human efforts to govern the forces that would otherwise govern us.
Mack describes the foundation of Whitman’s democracy as found in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, examines the ways in which Whitman’s 1859 sexual crisis and the Civil War transformed his democratic poetics in “Sea-Drift,” “Calamus,” Drum-Taps,and Sequel to Drum-Taps, and explores Whitman’s mature vision in Democratic Vistas, concluding with observations on its moral and political implications today. Throughout, he illuminates Whitman's great achievement—learning that a full appreciation for the complexities of human life meant understanding that liberty can take many different and conflicting forms—and allows us to contemplate the relevance of that achievement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.
Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.
The Prague Linguistic Circle came into being on the afternoon of October 6, 1926, when five Czech and Russian linguists gathered to hear a lecture by a German colleague. From this international beginning, the interests of the group grew to first encompass language in all its functional heterogeneity and then finally all of culture, which the Circle conceived of as a structure of sign systems. Semiotics was thus the overarching discipline for the Prague School, serving to organize all phenomena shared and exchanged by a cultural community.
In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the importance of the Prague School, but writing about it has frequently been marred by misconceptions. The central aim of this volume is to correct those misconceptions and to present the diversity of interests within the Prague School—literary criticism, linguistics, theory of theater, folklore, and philosophy. These essays by Bogatyrëv, Jakobson, Karcevskij, Mukařovský, Rieger, Vodička, and Honzl are here translated into English for the first time. Some have a special historical value in illuminating critical stages of structuralist thinking; others reveal the timeliness of the School's contributions for the theoretical conflicts of our day. Each essay is accompanied by an informative introductory note, and the whole is followed by the editor's "Postscript," tracing the roots of structuralist aesthetics.
During his brief and sorrowful career William Collins wrote a handful of enduring poems, the most powerful and innovative verse of the Age of Sensibility. This study traces Collins' struggle to assimilate or transcend rather than to be overwhelmed by the influence of his Sublime precursor Milton. Collins' achievement is remarkably diverse, his restless experimentation a manifestation of the quest for imaginative autonomy which is the dominant impulse of all his writing. Authoritatively and eloquently, Sherwin interprets Collins' major works including the "Ode to Evening," the poem in which Milton's presence is most enriching, the "Ode on the Poetical Character," "The Passions," "Popular Superstitions Ode," and the "Ode to Fear," Collins' most haunting and painfully burdened poem.
Although Harold Bloom and other prominent theorists of literary influence have recognized that Milton is the chief "daemonic" precursor of the Sensibility poets and the Romantics, Precious Bane represents the first extensive analysis of Milton's power both to daunt and emancipate an aspirant to the Sublime tradition. Bloom writes:
"Paul Sherwin's Precious Bane is at once the definitive study of the poetry of William Collins and also the best informed, most critically acute book yet written upon the Miltonic influence on subsequent poetry. Sherwin's deep learning and original insights illuminate Milton and Keats quite as much as they do Collins and the other tragic poets of Sensibility.
"Readers who seek rich speculation and advanced knowledge on such associated critical and historical problems as Romanticism, the Sublime mode, the agonies of poetic incarnation, and the relation of psychoanalysis to literature, will find abundant recompense in Sherwin's pages. No one in the future will teach, read or write about Collins, or the burdens of Miltonic influence, without starting from Sherwin's achievement."
“Precious volumes,” or pao-chüan, were produced by popular sects in the Ming and early Qing dynasties. These scriptures were believed to have been divinely revealed to sect leaders and contain teachings and ritual instructions that provide valuable information about a lively and widespread religious tradition outside mainstream Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Largely neglected until now, they testify to the imagination and devotion of popular religious leaders.
This book, the most detailed and comprehensive study of pao-chüan in any language, studies 34 early examples of this literature in order to understand the origins and development of this textual tradition. Although the work focuses on content and structure, it also treats the social context of these works as well as their transmission and ritual use.
Plato’s frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato’s hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.
The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction—Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.
The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
When Tony Tanner died in 1998, the world lost a critic who was as sensitive a reader of Jane Austen as he was of Thomas Pynchon, and who wrote with a warmth and clarity that belied his fluency in literary theory.
In the final ten years of his life Tanner tackled the largest project any critic in English can take on—writing a preface to each of Shakespeare’s plays. This collection serves as a comprehensive introduction for the general reader, the greatest and perhaps the last in the line of great introductions to Shakespeare written by such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tanner brings Shakespeare to life, explicating everything from big-picture issues such as the implications of shifts in Elizabethan culture to close readings of Shakespeare’s deployment of complex words in his plays.
Although these prefaces are written for a general audience, there is much value for the scholar as well. Tanner introduces some of the most significant recent and historical scholarship on Shakespeare to show the reader how certain critics frame large issues in a useful way. This scholarly generosity permits Johnson, Hazlitt, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Pater, and many others to enter into conversation. The Independent said of the project, “All of Tanner’s life and education had prepared him for this task and the results are magnificent—both accessible and erudite.”
In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences.
Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.
Explores pioneering works of digital poetry and demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse
For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today’s most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre’s prehistoric period.
Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account
includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication.
In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.
"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. "Subject position" is widely invoked today, yet Hamacher is the first to thoroughly investigate the premises for this invocation. He demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus produces more and more fundamentalisms--but is also unattainable and therefore always open to innovation, revision, and unexpected transformation. In a book that is both philosophical and literary, Hamacher gives us the fullest account of the vast disruption in the very nature of our understanding that was first unleashed by Kant's critique of human subjectivity.
In light of the double nature of every premise--that it is promised but never attainable--Hamacher gives us nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of language in Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals.
There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach.
A Prescription for Adversity makes the revolutionary case that Ambrose Bierce, far from being a bitter misanthrope, was instead both a compassionate and moral author. Berkove, focusing on Bierce's short fiction, establishes the necessity of recognizing the pattern of his intellectual and literary development over the course of his career. The author shows that Bierce, probably the American author with the most extensive experience of the Civil War, turned to classical Stoicism and English and French Enlightenment literature in his postwar search for meaning. Bierce's fiction arose from his ultimately unsatisfying encounters with the philosophies those sources offered, but the moral commitment as well as the literary techniques of heir authors, particularly Jonathan Swift, inspired him. Dating Bierce's fiction, and introducing uncollected journalism, correspondence, and important new literary history and biographical information, Berkove brings new insights to a number of stories, including "A Son of the Gods" and "A Horseman in the Sky," but especially "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and presents compelling readings of the Parenticide Club tales and "Moxon's Master." A Prescription for Adversity substantiates how Bierce at his best is one of the few American authors who rises to the level of Mark Twain, and the only one who touches Jonathan Swift.
A work of both biography and literary criticism, this book rescues Ambrose Bierce and his literature from the neglect to which it has been assigned by "ill-founded, obtuse and unproductive approaches based on skewed notions of his personality and forced or facile readings of individual stories."
Along with the plays of William Shakespeare and the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen’s novels are among the most beloved books of Western literature. Pride and Prejudice (1813) was in Austen’s lifetime her most popular novel, and it was the author’s personal favorite. Adapted many times to the screen and stage, and the inspiration for numerous imitations, it remains today her most widely read book. Now, in this beautifully illustrated and annotated edition, distinguished scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of the novel’s enduring pleasures and provides analysis of Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Catherine, and all the characters who inhabit the world of Pride and Prejudice.
This edition will be treasured by specialists and first-time readers, and especially by devoted Austen fans who think of themselves as Friends of Jane. In her Introduction, Spacks considers Austen’s life and career, the continuing appeal of Pride and Prejudice, and its power as a stimulus for fantasy (Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, can hold forth at length on Obama as a Darcy-figure, knowing full well her readers will “understand that she wished to suggest glamour and sexiness”). Her Introduction also explores the value and art of literary annotation. In her running commentary on the novel, she provides notes on literary and historical contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. She offers interpretation and analysis, always with the wisdom, humor, and light touch of an experienced and sensitive teacher.
One of the masterpieces of Latin and, indeed, world literature, Virgil's Aeneid was written during the Augustan "renaissance" of architecture, art, and literature that redefined the Roman world in the early years of the empire. This period was marked by a transition from the use of rhetoric as a means of public persuasion to the use of images to display imperial power. Taking a fresh approach to Virgil's epic poem, Riggs Alden Smith argues that the Aeneid fundamentally participates in the Augustan shift from rhetoric to imagery because it gives primacy to vision over speech as the principal means of gathering and conveying information as it recounts the heroic adventures of Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome.
Working from the theories of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Smith characterizes Aeneas as a voyant-visible, a person who both sees and is seen and who approaches the world through the faculty of vision. Engaging in close readings of key episodes throughout the poem, Smith shows how Aeneas repeatedly acts on what he sees rather than what he hears. Smith views Aeneas' final act of slaying Turnus, a character associated with the power of oratory, as the victory of vision over rhetoric, a triumph that reflects the ascendancy of visual symbols within Augustan society. Smith's new interpretation of the predominance of vision in the Aeneid makes it plain that Virgil's epic contributes to a new visual culture and a new mythology of Imperial Rome.
Tony C. Brown examines “the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not-quite-nothing” in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considers—including the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoe—turn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage.
In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the aesthetic and the savage an element that proves necessary yet difficult to conceive. At its most profound, Brown explains, this element engenders a loss of confidence in one’s ability to understand the human’s relation to itself and to the world. That loss of confidence—what Brown refers to as a breach in anthropological security—traces to an inability to maintain a sense of self in the face of the New World. Demonstrating the impact of the primitive on the aesthetic and the savage, he shows how the eighteenth-century writers he focuses on struggle to define the human’s place in the world. As Brown explains, these authors go back again and again to “exotic” examples from the New World—such as Indian burial mounds and Maori tattooing practice—making them so ubiquitous that they come to underwrite, even produce, philosophy and aesthetics.
Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to "return the gaze" of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity.
Examining such subjects as Julio Cortázar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry.
This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them.
CONTENTSIn Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W. E. B. DuBois famously termed “the problem of the color line.”
A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: “we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary.” Such rampant racism co ntributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America’s national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.
Private Lives, Proper Relations begins with the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety. Candice M. Jenkins argues that this preoccupation has its origins in recurrent ideologies about African American sexuality, and that it expresses a fundamental aspect of the racial self—an often unarticulated link between the intimate and the political in black culture.
In a counterpoint to her paradigmatic reading of Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jenkins’s analysis of black women’s narratives—including Ann Petry’s The Street, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Paradise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man—offers a theory of black subjectivity. Here Jenkins describes middle-class attempts to rescue the black community from accusations of sexual and domestic deviance by embracing bourgeois respectability, and asserts that behind those efforts there is the “doubled vulnerability” of the black intimate subject. Rather than reflecting a DuBoisian tension between race and nation, to Jenkins this vulnerability signifies for the African American an opposition between two poles of potential exposure: racial scrutiny and the proximity of human intimacy.
Scholars of African American culture acknowledge that intimacy and sexuality are taboo subjects among African Americans precisely because black intimate character has been pathologized. Private Lives, Proper Relations is a powerful contribution to the crucial effort to end the distortion still surrounding black intimacy in the United States.
Candice M. Jenkins is associate professor of English at Hunter College, City University o
"Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers--but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal.
In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle--childhood, passage to maturity, and death--she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination.
Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality---whether private or on the stage.
Defense of a poet, and five speeches from after exile.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Three postconsular speeches.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The ascending statesman.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Speeches from turbulent times.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The early speeches.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
The statesman defends a friend and assails an enemy.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
Peripatetic potpourri.
Aristotle of Stagirus (384–322 BC), the great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and scholar, studied with Plato at Athens and taught in the Academy (367–347). Subsequently he spent three years in Asia Minor at the court of his former pupil Hermeias, where he married Pythias, one of Hermeias’ relations. After some time at Mitylene, he was appointed in 343/2 by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year.
Problems, the third-longest work in the Aristotelian corpus, contains thirty-eight books covering more than 900 problems about living things, meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, parts of the human body, and other topics. Although Problems is an accretion of multiple authorship over several centuries, it offers a fascinating technical view of Peripatetic method and thought. Problems, in two volumes, replaces the earlier Loeb edition by Hett, with a text and translation incorporating the latest scholarship.
Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias’s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices.
II. Logical: Categories; On Interpretation; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); On Sophistical Refutations; Topica.
III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV. Metaphysics: on being as being.
V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
Peripatetic potpourri.
Aristotle of Stagirus (384–322 BC), the great Greek philosopher, researcher, logician, and scholar, studied with Plato at Athens and taught in the Academy (367–347). Subsequently he spent three years in Asia Minor at the court of his former pupil Hermeias, where he married Pythias, one of Hermeias’ relations. After some time at Mitylene, he was appointed in 343/2 by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died the following year.
Problems, the third-longest work in the Aristotelian corpus, contains thirty-eight books covering more than 900 problems about living things, meteorology, ethical and intellectual virtues, parts of the human body, and other topics. Although Problems is an accretion of multiple authorship over several centuries, it offers a fascinating technical view of Peripatetic method and thought. Both Problems, in two volumes, and Rhetoric to Alexander replace the earlier Loeb edition by Hett and Rackham, with texts and translations incorporating the latest scholarship.
Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–47); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias’s relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:I. Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Oeconomica (on the good of the family); Virtues and Vices.
II. Logical: Categories; On Interpretation; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); On Sophistical Refutations; Topica.
III. Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV. Metaphysics: on being as being.
V. On Art: Art of Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI. Other works including the Athenian Constitution; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII. Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
The Harvard Celtic Colloquium was established in 1980 by two graduate students in the Harvard University Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures as a forum in which graduate students could share their work and gain experience in professional academia. Since then, it has been organized annually by a team of students in the department, grown in size, and gained an international reputation which annually draws a diverse mix of scholars from around the world to present papers on all facets of Celtic Studies.
The Harvard Celtic Colloquium is the only conference in the field of Celtic Studies to be wholly organized and run by graduate students. Since its inception, established and internationally-renowned scholars in Celtic as well as graduate students, junior academics, and unaffiliated scholars have been drawn to this dynamic setting, presenting papers on ancient, medieval, and modern topics in the many disciplines relating to Celtic Studies; including literature, linguistics, art, archeology, government, economics, music, and history.
Papers given at the Colloquium may be submitted for review to the organizers of the conference, who become the editors for those papers selected for publication in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Only papers presented at the annual conference are considered for publication.
Harvard University Press is proud to announce that we will distribute the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. Two new issues are available this Fall: Volume 18/19 (1998 and 1999) and Volume 20/21 (2000 and 2001). Back issues are also available.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 20 includes “Retoiric and Composition in Geneamuin Chormaic,” by Hugh Fogarty; “Classical Ethnography and Celts: Can We Trust the Sources?” by Philip Freeman; “Prayers, Prizefights and Prostitution: The Medieval Irish Cemetery and Its Many Uses,” by Susan Leigh Fry; “Magical Realism and the Mabinogi: An Exercise in Methodology,” by Michael Linkletter; “Rebuke and Revision in the Early Irish Annals: The Death-Notices of Muirchertach mac Ercae [†534],” by Laurence Maney; “‘To a man for the King’: The Allegiance of Welsh Catholics during the First Civil War, 1642–46,” by Robert Matthews; “King and Druid,” by Arun Micheelsen; “‘Words, words, words’: Language about Language in France and Ireland,” by Grace Neville; “Ystoria Tri Brenin o Gwlen,” by Prydwyn Piper; and “Highland Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745–46: ‘Forcing Out,’ Traditional Documentation and Gaelic Poetry,” by James A. Stewart, Jr.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 21 includes “Gendering the Vita Prima: An Examination of St. Brigid’s Role as ‘Mary of the Gael,’” by Diane Peters Auslander; “Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica: A Mythology of Greek Expansion in Celtic Lands,” by Timothy P. Bridgman; “The Wealth of the Medieval Welsh Gentry: The Case of Gwilym ap Gruffydd of Penrhyn,” by A. D. Carr; “Celtic Languages in the 1910 U.S. Census,” by Jonathan Dembling; “Digging Deeper: Adventures in Medieval Irish Burial and the Case for Interdisciplinary Scholarship,” by Susan Leigh Fry; “Laoiseach Mac an Bhaird and the Politics of Close Reading,” by Sarah E. McKibben; “Prescient Birds and Prospective Kings: Further Comments on Irish Elements in the Eddic Poem Rígsþula,” by Amy Eichhorn Mulligan; “The Descent of the Gods: Creation, Cosmogony, and Divine Order in Lebor Gabála,” by Sharon Paice Macleod; “Babel Is Come Again: Linguistic Colonisation and the Bardic Response in Early Modern Ireland,” by Patricia Palmer; “‘In Defiance of the Gospel and by Authority of the Devil’: Criticism of Welsh Marriage Law by the English Ecclesiastical Establishment and Its Socio-Political Context,” by Laura Radiker; and “The Way We Were: Twentieth Century Brittany through the Eyes of Breton Language Memorialists,” by Lenora Timm.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 24 includes “The Celticity of Galicia and the Arrival of the Insular Celts,” by Manuel Alberro; “Reading Aislinge Óenguso as a Christian-Platonist Parable,” by Brenda Gray; “Celtic Legends in Irish Opera, 1900–1930,” by Axel Klein; “‘I wonder what the king is doing tonight’—Looking for Arthur in All the Wrong Places,” by Laurance J. Maney†; “What Future for the Irish Gaeltacht Communities in the Twenty-First Century?” by Nollaig Ó Gadhra†; “Acallam Na Senórach as Prosimetrum,” by Geraldine Parsons; “Traditional and Courtly Themes in a Medieval Welsh Elegy to a ‘Góann Wargann Wery’ (‘A Fair Virgin, Meek and Mild’),” by Laura Radiker; and “Welsh Prophetic Poetry in the Age of the Princes,” by Elizabeth Schoales.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 25 includes “Keltoi, Galatai, Galli: Were They All One People?” by Timothy P. Bridgman; “On Verbal Nouns in Celtic Languages,” by Chao Li; “Cross-Linguistic Discourse Markers in Manx Gaelic and English,” by Marie Clague; “The Acallam na Senórach: A Medieval Instruction Manual,” by Annie Donahue; “Gendered Postcolonial Discourse in the Mabinogi,” by Morgan Kay; “Language Death and Resurrection in the Isle of Man: The Continuity of Manx Gaelic Exemplified by the Use of Inflected Verb Tenses,” by Jennifer Kewley Draskau; “High Kings and Pipe Dreams: Revisiting John Vincent Kelleher’s Theory of Revision to the Early Irish Annals,” by Laurance J. Maney†; and “The Rise of Christian Nomenclature in Medieval Scotland,” by David Morris.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 26 includes “Heroic Recycling in Celtic Tradition,” by Joseph F. Nagy; “On the Celtic-American Fringe: Irish–Mexican Encounters in the Texas–Mexico Borderlands,” by Marian J. Barber; “The Encomium Urbis in Medieval Welsh Poetry,” by Helen Fulton; “Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts,” by Morgan Kay; “‘Ceol agus Gaol’ (‘Music and Relationship’): Memory, Identity, and Community in Boston’s Irish Music Scene,” by Natalie Kirschstein; “Colonization Circulars: Timber Cycles in the Time of Famine,” by Kathryn Miles; “Up Close and Personal: The French in Bantry Bay (1796) in the Bantry Estate Papers,” by Grace Neville; “In Praise of Two Margarets: Two Laudatory Poems by Piaras Feiritéar,” by Deirdre Nic Mhathúna; “Observations on Cross-Cultural Names and Name Patterns in Medieval Wales and the March,” by Laura Radiker; and “Mouth to Mouth: Gaelic Stories as Told within One Family,” by Carol Zall.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 27 includes “Poets and Carpenters: Creating the Architecture of Happiness in Late-Medieval Wales,” by Richard Suggett; “Revisiting Preaspiration: Evidence from the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland,” by Anna Bosch; “The Anoetheu Dialogue in Culhwch ac Olwen,” by Fiona Dehghani; “Homophony and Breton Loss of Lexis,” by Francis Favereau; “The Origins of ‘the Jailtacht,’” by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost; “A Confluence of Wisdom: The Symbolism of Wells, Whirlpools, Waterfalls and Rivers in Early Celtic Sources,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; “The Real Charlotte: The Exclusive Myth of Somerville and Ross,” by Donald McNamara; “Language Shift in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland,” by Máire Ní Chiosáin; and “Conceptions of an Urban Ideal and the Early Modern Welsh Town,” by Sally-Anne Shearn.
Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium has in its purview all aspects of culture, language, and history of the Celtic peoples, from ancient to modern times.
This volume of PHCC contains articles on medieval Irish, Welsh, and Breton literature; post-1800 to modern poetry in Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic; the Irish Revival Movement; and modern Irish and Welsh linguistics. The volume also features the 2010 J. V. Kelleher Lecture by Dr. M. Katharine Simms on the social expression of the literary model of the barefoot king in late medieval Ireland.
The Harvard Celtic Colloquium provides a small but international audience for presentations by scholars from all ranks of scholarship and all areas of Celtic Studies. Among the topics covered are the archaeology, history, culture, linguistics, literatures, politics, religion, and social structures of the countries and regions in which Celtic languages are, or were, spoken, as well as their extended influence, from prehistory to the present. The broad range of the conference is reflected in the content of its published proceedings, which will interest both students newly attracted to Celtic Studies and senior scholars in the field.
PHCC, 33 features the annual John V. Kelleher Lecture for 2013, given by Thomas Owen Clancy, Professor of Celtic at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Clancy discusses connections between Scottish saints’ names and cults and the onomastics of settlements and topographical features gathered and investigated in preparation for a digital atlas project, “Commemoration of Saints in Scottish Place Names.” In addition, PHCC, 33 includes contributions in the areas of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish history, Irish and Welsh literature and poetry, and Irish ecclesiastical learning.
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