The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics continues to be an essential resource for students and faculty pursuing the latest developments in Christian and religious ethics, publishing refereed scholarly articles on a variety of topics. The Journal also contains book reviews of the latest scholarship in the field.

The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics continues to be an essential resource for students and faculty pursuing the latest developments in Christian and religious ethics, publishing refereed scholarly articles on a variety of topics. The Journal also contains book reviews of the latest scholarship in the field.

The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics continues to be an essential resource for students and faculty pursuing the latest developments in Christian and religious ethics, publishing refereed scholarly articles on a variety of topics. The Journal also contains book reviews of the latest scholarship in the field.

The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics continues to be an essential resource for students and faculty pursuing the latest developments in Christian and religious ethics, publishing refereed scholarly articles on a variety of topics. The Journal also contains book reviews of the latest scholarship in the field.

Georgetown University Press no longer publishes the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (JSCE). To subscribe or find out more about the journal, please visit the JSCE website. 

Georgetown University Press no longer publishes the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (JSCE). To subscribe or find out more about the journal, please visit the JSCE website. 

Georgetown University Press no longer publishes the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics (JSCE). To subscribe or find out more about the journal, please visit the JSCE website. 

This is the famous naturalist Thomas Nuttall's only surviving complete journal of his American scientific explorations. Covering his travels in Arkansas and what is now Oklahoma, it is pivotal to an understanding of the Old Southwest in the early nineteenth century, when the United States was taking inventory of its acquisitions from the Louisiana Purchase.

The account follows Nuttall's route from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, down the Ohio River to its mouth, then down the Mississippi River to the Arkansas Post, and up the Arkansas River with a side trip to the Red River. It is filled with valuable details on the plants, animals, and geology of the region, as well as penetrating observations of the resident native tribes, the military establishment at Fort Smith, the arrival of the first governor of Arkansas Territory, and the beginnings of white settlement.

Originally published in 1980 by the University of Oklahoma Press, this fine edited version of Nuttall's work boasts a valuable introduction, notes, maps, and bibliography by Savoie Lottinville. The editor provided common names for those given in scientific classification and substituted modern genus and species names for the ones used originally by Nuttall. The resulting journal is a delight to read for anyone—historian, researcher, visitor, resident, or enthusiast.

In This Issue

Editor’s Introduction
Vincent Hiribarren, “African History Will Make Us Breathe”

Articles
Klas Rönnbäck, “The Built Environment of the Precolonial West African Coast: Materials, Functions, and Housing Standards”

Ismail Warscheid, “The West African Jihād Movements and the Islamic Legal Literature of the Southwestern Sahara (1650–1850)”

Holly Rose Ashford, “Modern Motherhood, Masculinity, and Family Planning in Ghana, 1960–75”

Retrospective
Jan Jansen and James R. Fairhead, “The Mande Creation Myth, by Germaine Dieterlen, as a Historical Source for the Mali Empire”

Conversations
Kwasi Konadu, “COVID-19 and Caution for Historians: Views from a Place in West Africa”

Karen Flint, “‘Africa Isn’t a Testing Lab’: Considering COVID Vaccine Trials in a History of Biomedical Experimentation and Abuse”

Alhaji U. Njai, “COVID-19 Pandemic at the Intersection of Ebola, Global Leadership, and the Opportunity to Decolonize the Political Economy of Sierra Leone”

Helen Tilley, “COVID-19 across Africa: Colonial Hangovers, Racial Hierarchies, and Medical Histories”

Book Reviews
Harry N. K. Odamtten, Edward W. Blyden’s Intellectual Transformations: Afropublicanism, Pan-Africanism, Islam, and the Indigenous West African Church, reviewed by Tracy Keith Flemming

Jonathan E. Robins, Cotton and Race across the Atlantic: Britain, Africa, and America, 1900–1920, reviewed by Andrew James Kettler

Emily S. Burrill, States of Marriage: Gender, Justice, and Rights in Colonial Mali, reviewed by Harmony O’Rourke

Katherine Ann Wiley, Work, Social Status, and Gender in Post-Slavery Mauritania, reviewed by Erin Pettigrew

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, Mediators, Contract Men, and Colonial Capital: Mechanized Gold Mining Colony, 1879–1909, reviewed by Andrea Ringer

In This Issue

Editors’ Introduction

Ndubueze L. Mbah and Saheed Aderinto, “‘The Ghost of Macaulay’: Nigeria’s Anticolonialism and Struggle for Independence”

Articles

Mark Reeves, “A Gilded Cage? Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Pan-Africanism as Governor-General of Nigeria, 1960–63”

Rouven Kunstmann, “Fashioning Nationalism and the Shaping of the Public Sphere in 1950s Nigeria”

Jonathan T. Reynolds, “‘We Own Kano and Kano Owns Us’: Politics, Place, and Identity in Independence-Era Kano”

Robin P. Chapdelaine, “‘He remains a second person no matter the age’: Historical and Contemporary Perceptions of Childlessness and Adoption in Nigeria”

Retrospective

Agbenyega Adedze, “Nigeria: A Philatelic Essay”

Book Reviews

Mohammed Bashir Salau, Plantation Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate: A Historical and Comparative Study, reviewed by Bekeh Utietiang Ukelina

Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon, reviewed by Andrew Kettler

Bala Saho, Contours of Change: Muslim Courts, Women, and Islamic Society in Colonial Bathurst, the Gambia, 1905–1965, reviewed by Sara Katz

Alusine Jalloh, Muslim Fula Business Elites and Politics in Sierra Leone, reviewed David Newman Glovsky

Abou B. Bamba, African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast, reviewed by Kevin E. Grimm

In This Issue

Editor’s Introduction
Perceptible Pasts and Histories of Perceptions
Trevor R. Getz

“As Bitter as Senegalese Mahogany”: Mande Perceptions of Violence on the Road to Glory
David C. Conrad

Contemporary Africans Meet Timeless Africa: The Conflicted Impact of Asadata Dafora’s “African Operas” on Pan-African Work in the United States, 1930–50
Philip Serge Zachernuk

African Traditional Healing and Biomedicine: A Reconstruction of Colonial and Postindependence Health-Care History under Kwame Nkrumah, 1951–66
Samuel Adu-Gyamfi and Eugenia Anderson

Wealth in Knowledge: Spiritual Service and Political Power in Precolonial Asante
Emmanuel Akyeampong and David Owusu-Ansah

“The River Is Not to Be Crossed”: Anglo-French Boundary and Konkomba Cross-Border Mobility on the Ghana-Togo Border, 1918–30s
Joseph Udimal Kachim

Book Reviews
Power, Culture and Modernity in Nigeria: Beyond the Colony, by Oluwatoyin Oduntan
Reviewed by Katharina A. Oke

Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions, by Wole Soyinka
Reviewed by Haythem Guesmi

Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon, Florence Bernault
Reviewed by Jeremy Dell

Essai d’histoire locale. L’oeuvre d’un historien guinéen à l’époque coloniale/The Work of a Guinean Historian during the Colonial Period, by Djiguiba Camara
Reviewed by Douglas W. Leonard

White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. Journalism and Jim Crow centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.

Original and revelatory, Journalism and Jim Crow opens up new ways of thinking about the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy.

Contributors: Sid Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Kathy Roberts Forde, Robert Greene II, Kristin L. Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, and Razvan Sibii

From cynical portrayals like The Front Page to the nuanced complexity of All the President’s Men, and The Insider, movies about journalists and journalism have been a go-to film genre since the medium's early days. Often depicted as disrespectful, hard-drinking, scandal-mongering misfits, journalists also receive Hollywood's frequent respect as an essential part of American life. 

Matthew C. Ehrlich tells the story of how Hollywood has treated American journalism. Ehrlich argues that films have relentlessly played off the image of the journalist as someone who sees through lies and hypocrisy, sticks up for the little guy, and serves democracy. He also delves into the genre's always-evolving myths and dualisms to analyze the tensions—hero and oppressor, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and falsehood—that allow journalism films to examine conflicts in society at large.

In-depth and dramatic, Andrew E. Stoner's biography follows the remarkable life of the brash, pioneering journalist. Shilts's reporting on AIDS in San Francisco broke barriers even as other gay writers and activists ridiculed his overtures to the mainstream and labeled him a traitor to the movement, charges the combative Shilts forcefully answered. Behind the scenes, Shilts overcame career-threatening struggles with alcohol and substance abuse to achieve the notoriety he had always sought, while the HIV infection he had purposely kept hidden began to take his life.

Filled with new insights and fascinating detail, The Journalist of Castro Street reveals the historic work and passionate humanity of the legendary investigative reporter and author.

Volume VI in this series contains quotation books and miscellaneous notebooks that Ralph Waldo Emerson kept between 1824 and 1838, and to which he added occasionally as late as the 1860s. With some attempt at a systematic listing, but more often at random, he set down an enormous variety of entries from Burke, Montaigne, Madame de Staël, Bacon, Plutarch, Jeremy Taylor, and a host of other writers both famous and obscure, with frequent comments of his own.

One book contains Emerson’s lengthy translations of Goethe, while another is devoted to his brother Charles, who died in 1836, and includes, among other items, excerpts from Charles’s letters to his fiancée. A third contains an interview with a survivor of the battle of Concord and household accounts from the fall and winter of 1835, just after Emerson’s marriage to Lydia Jackson.

Frequent annotations show that Emerson referred to several of these books in composing the sermons he began to give late in 1826, and that many of the entries found their way into his public lectures, into Nature, and into Essays: First Series. These pages are a fascinating indication of the sources on which Emerson drew steadily in his writing and thinking, and reflect clearly, although indirectly, his own characteristic philosophy.

The journals printed in this volume, covering the years 1852 to 1855, find Emerson increasingly drawn to the issues and realities of the pragmatic, hard-working nineteenth century. His own situation as a middle-aged, property-owning New Englander with a large household to support gave him a strong sense of everyday financial necessity, and his wide reading for his projected book on the English impressed him deeply with the worldly success that had come to that unphilosophical people. The growing crisis over slavery at home, moreover, demanded the attention of every citizen, even one as reluctant to engage in social issues as Emerson.

Emerson's extensive reading about the English, which ranged from Camden's Britannia through the diaries of Samuel Pepys and Thomas Moore to the latest issues of the London Times, convinced him that, despite its materialism, England was "the best of actual nations." The robust physical health of the English, their common sense, and their instinct for fair play insured that the future belonged to them and their transatlantic cousins, the Americans.

Yet the facts of American political life often led Emerson to wonder whether his country had any future at all. So long as his fellow citizens were willing to countenance the evil of slavery, they could not play their proper role in the world, the pages of his journals indicate, Emerson, like an increasing number of other Americans, was coming to believe that the issue had to he resolved, whatever the cost.

The journals of 1835–1838, perhaps the richest Ralph Waldo Emerson had yet written, cover the pivotal years when he brought to Concord his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, published Nature (1836), and wrote “The American Scholar” (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). As he turned from the pulpit to the lecture platform in the 1830’s, the journals became more and more repository for the substance of future lectures; his annual winter series, particularly those dealing with The Philosophy of History, in 1836–1837, and Human Culture, in 1837–1838, were drawn largely from materials contained in this volume.

Along with lecture material, the journals of these years include Emerson’s notes on his extensive reading, expressions of his griefs and joys, and his perennial reflections on man and his relation to nature and the divine. The birth of his son Waldo in October of 1836 compensated perhaps for the death of his beloved brother Charles the previous May. New friendships with Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and especially Bronson Alcott (whom Emerson called “the highest genius of the time”) replaced to a degree the close intellectual companionship he had enjoyed with Charles.

Printed here for the first time are the complete texts of these journals. They reveal the continuity of Emerson’s development and add to the understanding both of his thought and of his methods of literary composition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life from 1826 to 1832 has a classic dramatic structure, beginning with his approbation to preach in October 1826, continuing with his courtship, his brief marriage to Ellen Tucker, and his misery after her death, and concluding with his departure from the ministry.

The journals and notebooks of these years are far fewer than those in the preceding six years. Emerson noted down many ideas for sermons in his journals, but as time went on he wrote the sermons independently. Occasionally he wrote openly about family matters, but except for the passionate response to Ellen and her death the journals tell little about the impact upon him of other people and outside events. The pattern is consistent with the earlier journals: Emerson used them mainly to record his thought, to develop and express his ideas. His religious and intellectual interests were undergoing significant changes in orientation or emphasis. He was less concerned with the existence of God than with the nature and influence of Christ. He continued to reassert the truth of Christianity, but in his growing unorthodoxy he came to show less and less sympathy with the church, with forms and ritual, with convention. And he began to wonder whether it is not the worst part of the man that is the minister.

During these years, Emerson read more in Madame de Staël, Wordsworth, Gérando, and Coleridge, less in Milton, the Augustans, Dugald Stewart, and Scott. In style, he moved from a rambling, bookish rhetoric to the tautness and the cadences that mark his later Essays.

In faithfully reproducing all of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s handwritten journals and notebooks, this edition is succeeding in revealing Emerson the man and the thinker. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omission of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his views of woman, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Canceled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed.

Here is the twelfth volume, which makes available nine of Emerson’s lecture notebooks, covering a span of twenty-seven years, from 1835 to 1862, from apprenticeship to fame. These notebooks contain materials Emerson collected for the composition of his lectures, articles, and essays during those years, a complex mixture of index-like surveys of his journals, lists of possible topics and titles, salvaged journal passages and revisions, new drafts ranging from brief paragraphs to several pages in length, notes and translations from his reading, working notes, and partial outlines. In them we see Emerson at work, balancing his aspirations as orator and writer against the practicalities of deadlines, finances, and audiences.

The journals from 1854 to 1861 show the ripeness of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought overshadowed by the gravest problem of his time—slavery. In addition to completing English Traits (1856) and Conduct of Life (1860), Emerson wrote many of the lectures and articles that made up his next book, Society and Solitude. He also contributed often to The Atlantic Monthly after helping to found that magazine in 1857. Throughout these years he extended his strenuous trips as a lyceum lecturer, crossing and recrossing the frozen Mississippi several times each winter. In Concord, he continued his omnivorous reading, his beloved walks, and his friendships with Alcott, Channing, and Thoreau, but at home or away he saw America’s future darkening daily. In 1856, Emerson wrote to his brother William, “But what times are these, & how they make our studies impertinent, & even ourselves the same! I am looking into the map to see where I shall go with my children when Boston & Massachusetts surrender to the slave-trade.”

Influenced by events such as the murder of New England men in bloody Kansas and the assault on Charles Sumner in the U.S. Congress in 1856, by a growing friendship with Theodore Parker, and by John Brown’s visits to Concord in 1857 and 1859, Emerson became one of the most notable speakers against slavery. He armed himself for his emergence from the study by marshalling his thoughts on liberty as he would have ranged his thoughts on any other topic. Notebook WO Liberty, rediscovered in the Library of Congress in 1964, collects his ideas on slavery and human liberty. Probably begun in 1854 it contains drafts or records of seven antislavery speeches, including his major antislavery address, “American Slavery,” first given in January, 1855. These notebooks and journals bring the philosopher of "the infinitude of the private man" to January 1861 and the brink of war.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson began these journals in June of 1838, he “had achieved initial success in each of his main forms of public utterance. The days of finding his proper role and public voice were now behind him…and his…personal life had healed from earlier wounds.” Now he was married to Lydia Jackson of Plymouth and was the father of a young son, Waldo. They lived in a large, comfortable house in Concord, only a half-day’s drive from Boston but close to the solitude of nature. Still to come was the controversy he would create by his address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School, an address in which he would say that the Divinity School trained ministers for a dead church. These journals record his responses to the severe criticism and trace his struggles as he overcame the stings of attack with a growing confidence in himself as a thinker, lecturer, and writer.

In addition to introspective writings, the journals contain Emerson’s observations on his reading, on his country, especially during the presidential campaign of 1840, on slavery, on art and nature, on religion and the need for a new understanding of its meaning, and on love. His relations with such close friends as Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller also are reflected here, as are his developing friendships with Thoreau, Jones Very, Samuel Ward, Caroline Sturgis, and William Ellery Channing, the poet.

During this period he gave three series of lectures and published his second book, Essays, which contains some of his greatest work: “Self Reliance,” “Compensation,” and “The Over-Soul.” The major workshop for Essays, these journals are indispensable for the study of Emerson’s creative processes. Many entries are published here for the first time, including experimental lists of topics for Essays and possibly the earliest draft of the poem “The Sphinx.”

For Emerson, the journal was one of the most important of literary genres. His own journals not only formed his “artificial memory,” but became “a living part of him.” He later wrote, “The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”

The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. “The war searches character,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people. He read military biographies and memoirs, while turning again to Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. The deaths of Clough, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson prompted him to reread their letters and journals, remembering and reappraising.

These were stirring, poignant years for Emerson. The times were hard, his lecturing was curtailed, and a new book seemed out of the question. He felt the losses, fears, and frustrations that come to those who believe in a cause they are too old to fight for. But his respected position as a man of letters brought him some unusual experiences, such as a trip to Washington in which he met President Lincoln, Secretaries Seward and Chase, and other key figures in the government. Inspecting West Point as a member of the Board of Visitors, he was deeply impressed by the character and spartan training of the cadets who were soon to see action.

At the war’s end, busy again with a heavy lecture schedule and feeling his age a little, he took a long look back at the conflict and concluded that war “heals a deeper wound than any it makes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas.

The second volume prints the exact texts of nine journals and three notebooks. It reveals the shape of some of Emerson’s enduring interests, in embryo “essays” on the moral sense, moral beauty, taste, greatness and fame, friendship, compensation, and the unity of God and the universe. Restored from oblivion are suppressed passages on the Negro and revelations of acute melancholy and rebelliousness. These records of his developing thought are also the history of his early obscurity, when the fame he sought was still painfully remote.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s decision to quit the ministry, arrived at painfully during the summer and fall of 1832, was accompanied by illness so severe that he was forced to give up any immediate thought of a new career. Instead, in December, he embarked on a tour of Europe that was to take him to Italy, France, Scotland, and England. Within a year after his return in the fall in 1833, his health largely restored, he went to live in the town of Concord, his home from then on.

The record of Emerson’s ten months in Europe which makes up a large part of this book is unusually detailed and personal, actually a diary recording what Emerson saw and did as well as what he thought. He describes cities, scenes, and buildings that he found striking in one way or another and he gives impressions of the people he met. During his travels he made the acquaintance of Landor, of Lafayette, and of Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, all of whom stimulated him. In Paris he was so much stirred by a visit to the Jardin des Plantes that he determined “to become a naturalist.”

On his return to America, still without a profession, he reverted in his journals to the more impersonal form they had taken in his days as a minister, focusing on his inner experiences rather than on external events. Notes start dotting the pages once again, this time not so much for future sermons—although for years he did a certain amount of occasional preaching as for the addresses of the public lecturer he would soon become.

Through the thirty-four months covered by this volume, the journals continue to he the advancing record of Emerson’s mind, demonstrating a growing maturity and firmness of style by compression and aphorism.

In July 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle: “My whole philosophy…teaches acquiescence and optimism.” The journals in this volume, beginning in the summer of 1841, record the spiritual history of two years that can be viewed as the most critical test in Emerson’s life of his ability to maintain the two aspects of that philosophy.

Early in 1842 his son Waldo died, and the man who only months before had described himself as “professor of the joyous Science” found himself once again confronting the full implications of grief. Seeking to comprehend the loss, he used his journals to articulate and rediscover the vital faith upon which his philosophy rested. In passages that went eventually into “Experience,” and in the earliest drafts of the poem “Threnody,” which appear for the first time in these pages, he discovered that even this harsh event had its “compensations.” Waldo’s death forced a reassessment of the convictions that gave life to his earlier writings. He transformed his numb responses into his most moving poetry and prose, giving new and significant meaning to his “old motto”: “I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born.”

Emerson’s motto is revealing, for its concepts display aptly the bipolarity that characterizes so much of his thought during these crucial years. He carried on at length an internal debate between the active and passive life styles. He saw his friends committed in their various ways to a more emphatic practice of their philosophies than he was able to undertake. Moving between engagement and withdrawal, commitment and aloofness, action and passivity, he consistently sought that point of equilibrium where the opposing forces of his thought could be held in creative tension.

As Emerson’s private experience deepened, he was becoming more completely the public man of letters: writing, publishing, editing The Dial, and lecturing. His travels brought him in contact with the leading men of his day, and with sights and exposures which even his beloved New England could not offer. Amidst the public duties, however, it was Concord which remained the still, vital center of his life. A brilliant and widely diversified range of visitors brought the world to Emerson’s home and inspired him to explore personal and literary issues which he would develop in his journals and later utilize in lectures and essays.

Emerson saw his calling as that of a poet; these journals are abundant in verse. Working versions of some of his most noted poems reveal the complex relationship between his private and literary life and the manner in which he attempted to fuse the diversities of his thought. In the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of this volume is the record of these fusions. This period of his life closes, as it opened, with “acquiescence and optimism.” But the creative skepticism which is so characteristic of the second series of essays and the poems of 1841–1843 is the mark of a “very real philosophy,” tempered and tried by adversity, by success, and by “Experience.”

Emerson's journals of 1847-1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour that began at Manchester and Liverpool in November of 1847, took him to Scotland in the following February, and concluded in London during June after he had spent a month as a sightseer in Paris. The journals of these years, along with associated notebooks and letters, recorded the materials for lectures that Emerson composed while abroad, for additional lectures on England and the English that he wrote shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately, for English Traits, the book growing out of his travels that he was to publish in 1856.

Travel abroad provided a needed change for Emerson in 1847 as it had done on previous occasions, though with his usual discounting of the values of mere change of place he was slow in deciding to make the trip. Discouragement with the prevailing political climate at the time of the Mexican War and the old uncertainty about his own proper role in the "Lilliput" of American society were much on his mind as the year began. In March he thought of withdrawing temporarily "from all domestic & accustomed relations"--preferably to enjoy "an absolute leisure with books," though he also recognized the want of some "stated task" to stimulate his flagging vitality; in July he finally agreed to accept a long-standing invitation to visit England as a lecturer. As matters turned out, a full schedule of lectures and travel, unexpectedly heavy social engagements along the way, and proliferating correspondence left Emerson little time for reading but did not prevent him from filling his journals with sharp observations on the passing scene.

As Emerson moved about England his acknowledged admiration for the English rose every day, though he was careful to distinguish their less admirable qualities.

The Englishman's "stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world," he told Margaret Fuller. "I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration." He took a wry amusement from the new experience of being lionized by his hosts. In his journals are lively portraits of those who entertained him, such as Richard Monckton Milnes, his particular sponsor in the society of London and Paris, and sketches of literary notables including Rogers, Dc Quincey, Wilson, Tennyson, and Dickens. He renewed acquaintance with Wordsworth and recorded in detail the pronouncements of his old friend Carlyle. Settling in London in March and April of 1848, he divided his time between work at his desk, visits to nearby points of interest, and the mixed pleasures of a busy social life. In May he went to France just as an abortive uprising against the new provisional government was brewing. Four weeks in Paris served to correct his old "prejudice" against the French, who on closer acquaintance rose in his estimation just as the English had done. In June he returned to London to lecture, and in July, after visiting Stonehenge with Carlyle, he sailed home. As the journals reveal, he reached Concord refreshed and renewed by the change of scene, the new acquaintance, and the generous reception that the trip had brought him, and with an enlarged perspective that revealed to him once again the "proper glory" of his own country.

The pages of these five journals covering the years 1843 to 1847 are filled with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle to formulate the true attitude of the scholar to the vexing question of public involvement. Pulled between his belief that a disinterested independence was a requisite for the writer and the public demands heaped upon him as a leading intellectual figure, he notes to himself that he “pounds…tediously” on the “exemption of the writer from all secular works.”

Although Emerson concluded his editorship of The Dial in 1844, he was continually beset by calls for public service, most of which drew their impetus from the reformist syndrome of the 1840s. In response to such issues as the Temperance Movement, the utopian communities, and Henry Thoreau’s experiment in self-reliance at Walden Pond, Emerson exercised sympathetic skepticism and held a growing conviction that the society of the day was not the lost cause many of his contemporaries believed it to be.

These journals record Emerson’s optimistic attitudes and show how later they existed side-by-side with concerns that, under the impulse of abolition, Texas, and the Mexican War, led him to some bitter conclusions about the state of the nation. Thoreau’s refusal to pay his poll tax in demonstration against slavery and the war particularly horrified him, and he confides in his journal that Thoreau’s action diverted attention from the possibility of real reform.

The moral ambivalence and cynicism of the day strengthened Emerson’s belief that the self-reliant individual was the only answer. These individuals—men like Garrison, Phillips, and Carlyle—were, in Emerson’s estimation, destined to set the standards by which society would be judged. Encouraged by the prospective publication of his first volume of poetry in 1846, Emerson also spent much of this period composing verse. Among the poems in these journals are “Uriel,” “Merlin,” “Ode to Beauty,” and a section from “Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love.”

In anticipation of his second visit to Europe, Emerson began preparing a lecture series on “Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century.” In these lectures he would take to the Old World his observations on the complexities of the times.

Like Goethe, Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to be the cultural historian and interpreter of his age—its business, politics, discoveries. The journals and notebooks included in this volume and covering in depth the years 1848 to 1851 reflect Emerson’s preoccupations with the events of these often turbulent years in America.

On his return to Concord from his successful lecture trip to England and visit to Paris in 1847–1848, Emerson resumed his familiar life of writer, thinker, and lecturer. Impressions of his recent European travels appear in passages in this volume which are used later in English Traits (1856). He writes of technological and scientific discoveries in America and abroad—one of which, the discovery of ether, was to involve his brother-in-law in legal embroilment. He ponders the meaning, for “the age” or “the times,” of reports on the Dew textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, of faster steamers daily breaking records, of new geological and paleontological findings, of theories of race, and many other matters that were coming increasingly to the fore in the mid-nineteenth century. Many passages on these topics, used first in lectures, later appear in his essays “Fate,” “Wealth,” and “Power” in Conduct of Life (1860). He was also adding to his critical biographies for Representative Men (1850), with special attention to Swedenborg, always a source of particular interest for Emerson.

Between 1850 and 1853, Emerson traveled farther west to lecture than he had hitherto ventured—to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and many other cities in the midwest. One notebook in the present volume records his customary percipient observations of places and people encountered during these western trips.

The tragic drowning of Margaret Fuller Ossoli and her family on her return from Italy in 1850 prompted Emerson to consider a collaboration on her life and writings, and another notebook printed here contains her memorabilia, including original entries by Emerson. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli by Emerson, William Henry Charming, and James Freeman Clarke, was published in 1852.

Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 brought to a boil something in Emerson that had long been simmering. Concerned with slavery, freedom, and the future of the black population in America more than his public record had shown, he now delivered himself of an outburst—pained, vitriolic, ironic—a more sustained response to a single issue than appears elsewhere in all his journals. In this latest move in a compounding national tragedy he could see only chicanery and deterioration, the crumbling of America’s moral fiber. He saw the Fugitive Slave Law in a larger context of a sick age; like Tennyson and Arnold in England, he lamented in moods of spite and chagrin the loss of faith and of an old world where political men of honor stood firm for the moral law. Most of his journal outburst went into his addresses “The Fugitive Slave Law,” 1851 and 1854.

The final volume of the Harvard edition presents the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s last years. In them, he reacts to the changing America of the post–Civil War years, commenting on Reconstruction, immigration, protectionism in trade, and the dangers of huge fortunes in few hands—as well as on baseball and the possibilities of air travel. His role as a Harvard Overseer evokes his thoughts on education during crucial years of reform in American universities.

His travels take him to Europe for the third time, and for the first time he encounters the new garden of California and the enigma of Egypt. He continues to lecture, and a second volume of poems and two more collections of essays, culled from his manuscripts, are published. Finally, his late journals show Emerson confronting his loss of creative vigor, husbanding his powers, and maintaining his equanimity in the face of decline.

This concluding volume thus gives a complex picture of Emerson in his last sixteen years, facing old age but still the advocate of “newness” throughout the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his “nihilizing,” his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God—these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Cancelled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed. The text comes as close to a literal transcription as is feasible. A full apparatus of annotation, identification of quotations, and textual notes is supplied. Reproduced in this volume are twelve facsimile manuscript pages, many with Emerson’s marginal drawings.

The first volume includes some of the “Wide Worlds,” journals begun while Emerson was at Harvard, and four contemporary notebooks, mostly unpublished. In these storehouses of quotation, juvenile verse, themes, and stories are the first versions of Emerson’s “Valedictory Poem,” Bowdoin Prize Essays, and first published work. Together they give a faithful picture of Emerson’s apprenticeship as an artist and reveal the extent of his hidden and frustrated ambition—to become a writer.

The diaries of Clara Mary Jane Clairmont are, so far as is known, the last of the major documents of the Shelley-Byron circle to be published. Only the writings of the Shelleys themselves surpass hers in importance for those interested in the careers of the poets and their friends. Best known as Byron's mistress and the mother of his daughter Allegra, "Claire," as she preferred to be called, is important to literary history for her role in bringing Byron and Shelley together.

Claire Clairmont began her journals in 1814, when she accompanied Shelley and her half-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, on their elopement to the continent. She continued to write them until after Byron and Shelley were dead and she was living as a governess with a wealthy family in Moscow. The journals present a detailed and fascinating picture of life with the Shelley family their discovery of the European landscape, wretched days in London dodging bailiffs and bill collectors, happy days of opera and ballet and endless conversations. Our knowledge of the Shelleys' life in Italy is expanded by this intimate view of the brilliant society of artists, writers, musicians, actors, scholars, revolutionaries, and nobility who were their constant companions. The later entries provide an account of the daily life of an Englishwoman living in Russia during the exciting time of the Decembrist uprising.

In The Journals of Claire Clairemont, Stocking has brought together five of Claire's journals, all that is known of the now-lost Russian journal, and two leaflets of Miscellanea dealing with the years 1828 to 1830. The interruptions in the diaries are bridged by narratives that allow the reader to follow her life, as she develops from an effervescent schoolgirl into a self-possessed, attractive, and talented young woman.

Appendices present reviews of theatrical performances seen by Claire and the Shelleys, biographical sketches of the varied personages they knew in Italy, a review by Mary Shelley (1826) describing people and life on the Continent as Claire and the Shelleys saw it, and the text of a manuscript fragment, possibly by Claire, containing thinly disguised romantic portrayals of the Shelleys and Jane and Edward Ellerker Williams. There is also a list of Claire's voluminous and systematic reading. Editorial comment within the body of the text has been kept to a minimum, and all of Claire's rewritings and crossings out are clearly indicated. Genealogical tables and numerous footnotes help to place Claire's journals in their proper social and historical perspective.

Immigration and the growing Latino population of the United States have become such contentious issues that it can be hard to have a civil conversation about how Latinoization is changing the face of America. So in the summer of 2007, Louis Mendoza set out to do just that. Starting from Santa Cruz, California, he bicycled 8,500 miles around the entire perimeter of the country, talking to people in large cities and small towns about their experiences either as immigrants or as residents who have welcomed—or not—Latino immigrants into their communities. He presented their enlightening, sometimes surprising, firsthand accounts in Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States.

Now, in A Journey Around Our America, Mendoza offers his own account of the visceral, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of traveling the country in search of a deeper, broader understanding of what it means to be Latino in the United States in the twenty-first century. With a blend of first- and second-person narratives, blog entries, poetry, and excerpts from conversations he had along the way, Mendoza presents his own aspirations for and critique of social relations, political ruminations, personal experiences, and emotional vulnerability alongside the stories of people from all walks of life, including students, activists, manual laborers, and intellectuals. His conversations and his experiences as a Latino on the road reveal the multilayered complexity of Latino life today as no academic study or newspaper report ever could.

2008 — Finalist, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, Fiction Category

Young Francis Hanrahan dreams desperately of a life different from that of his country-born, suburban-living parents. On his first day at his first job Francis makes his first real friend. Shay, a would-be older brother, introduces "Hano" to Dublin's appealingly seedy after-hours bars and drug-fueled parties. They are joined by Cait, a troubled teenager who spends her days in a stupor. But the noir thrills of underground Dublin cannot conceal the unemployment, corruption, and violence strangling the city. The Plunkett brothers, masters of "the subtle everyday corruption on which a dynasty was built" will use the friends—with tragic results.

Torn between his friends, his family, and his own ideals, Hano ultimately falls victim to these powerful forces and commits a heinous crime. He flees through the countryside with Cait, wondering, as he narrates the events that set him on this path, if there is a home at the end of it.

Controversial for its gritty portrait of Dublin in the 1980s, The Journey Home is Dermot Bolger's unflinching look at the personal cost of social progress, and those, innocent or not, lost during the journey.

When Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1860s, delicately hand-tinted photographic prints of Japanese people and landscapes were among its earliest and most popular exports. Renowned European photographers Raimund von Stillfried and Felice Beato established studios in Japan in the 1860s; the work was soon taken up by their Japanese protégés and successors Uchida Kuichi, Kusakabe Kimbei, and others. Hundreds of these photographs, collected by travelers from the Boston area, were eventually donated to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they were archived for their ethnographic content and as scientific evidence of an "exotic" culture.

In this elegant volume, visual anthropologist David Odo examines the Peabody’s collection of Japanese photographs and the ways in which such objects were produced, acquired, and circulated in the nineteenth century. His innovative study reveals the images' shifting and contingent uses—from tourist souvenir to fine art print to anthropological “type” record—were framed by the desires and cultural preconceptions of makers and consumers alike. Understood as both images and objects, the prints embody complex issues of history, culture, representation, and exchange.

Most recent books about Chiapas, Mexico, focus on political conflicts and the indigenous movement for human rights at the macro level. None has explored those conflicts and struggles in-depth through an individual woman's life story. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico now offers that perspective in one woman's own words. Anthropologist Christine Eber met "Antonia" in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising.

Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhó, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.

Early in the year 1854 Frederick Law Olmsted, a young New England journalist, crossed the Louisiana border and set off on horseback into the teeth of the Texas winter. In A Journey through Texas he recounts his travels along the Old San Antonio Road through East Texas' piney woods, the dry prairies further west, the chaparral of South Texas, the coastal prairies, and the rich bottomlands around Houston and Galveston.

Olmsted does not romanticize the discomforts of his trip—the monotonous food, crude housing, wet and dry northers, rough companions—yet his book reflects a sense of limitless possibility for this new and open country. The cultured Easterner remembers in relentless detail the squalor and brutality met with in parts of East Texas, but he writes fondly of the civility and cleanliness of the German settlements around New Braunfels.

In his introductory "A Letter to a Southern Friend," omitted in earlier reprints, Olmsted sets forth his views opposing the extension of slavery into the West and promoting free-soil agriculture for frontier states.

The remarkably versatile Olmsted is best known as the founder of landscape architecture in America and for works including Central Park and Stanford University.

In his Foreword, Larry McMurtry calls A Journey through Texas an "intelligent, lively, readable book, packed with keen observation and lightened by a delicate strain of humor."

In 1834, a German immigrant to Texas, D. T. F. (Detlef Thomas Friedrich) Jordt, aka Detlef Dunt, published Reise nach Texas, a delightful little book that praised Texas as “a land which puts riches in [the immigrant’s] lap, which can bring happiness to thousands and to their descendants.” Dunt’s volume was the first one written by an on-the-ground observer to encourage German immigration to Texas, and it provides an unparalleled portrait of Austin’s Colony from the lower Brazos region and San Felipe to the Industry and Frelsburg areas, where Dunt resided with Friedrich Ernst and his family.

Journey to Texas, 1833 offers the first English translation of Reise nach Texas. It brings to vivid life the personalities, scenic landscapes, and customs that Dunt encountered in colonial Texas on the eve of revolution, along with his many practical suggestions for Germans who intended to emigrate. The editors’ introduction describes the social, political, and economic conditions that prompted Europeans to emigrate to Texas and provides biographical background on Dunt and his connection with Friedrich Ernst. Also included in the volume are a bibliography of German works about Texas and an interpretive essay discussing all of the early German literature about Texas and Dunt’s place within it. Expanding our knowledge of German immigration to Texas beyond the more fully documented Hill Country communities, Journey to Texas, 1833 also adds an important chapter to the story of pre-Revolutionary Texas by a sophisticated commentator.

It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Liam Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.

The first narrative history of the Jesuits’ mission from 1579 until the proscription of Christianity in China in 1724, this study is also the first to use extensive documentation of the enterprise found in Lisbon and Rome. The peril of travel in the premodern world, the danger of entering a foreign land alone and unarmed, and the challenge of understanding a radically different culture result in episodes of high drama set against such backdrops as the imperial court of Peking, the villages of Shanxi Province, and the bustling cities of the Yangzi Delta region. Further scenes show how the Jesuits claimed conversions and molded their Christian communities into outposts of Baroque Catholicism in the vastness of China. In the retelling, this story reaches across continents and centuries to reveal the deep political, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and religious complexities of a true early engagement between East and West.

Read the legendary Chinese classic that inspired the hit game Black Myth: Wukong!

Read the legendary Chinese classic that inspired the hit game Black Myth: Wukong!

Read the legendary Chinese classic that inspired the hit game Black Myth: Wukong!

Read the legendary Chinese classic that inspired the hit game Black Myth: Wukong!

When a sheer, brilliant light erupts in the desert night, Jack recognizes it as the awesome and destructive power of an atomic bomb. But in another world, far removed from Jack’s mind, his family sit by his side after a traumatic car accident has rendered him comatose. Jack, relying on fantasies he and his sister fabricated as teenagers, struggles to lead the people he loves out of radiation-contaminated Phoenix as his family keep vigil in his hospital room, marshaling their reserves of patience and determination.

Yet even as Jack and his family experience these different realities, events from one world drift into the other, reshaping and influencing one another  as they move toward a climactic union. Whether fleeing nuclear disaster or pacing by a sickbed, these flawed and stressed individuals behave with fierce loyalty and an equally fierce love that forces an ascension of hope and survival.

Renowned poet Richard Tillinghast’s wanderlust and restless spirit are nearly as well known as his verses. This book of essays captures that penchant to wander, yet Journeys into the Mind of the World is not merely a compilation of travel stories—it is a book of places. It explores these chosen locations—Ireland, England, India, the Middle East, Tennessee, Hawaii—in a deeper way than would be typical of travel literature, attempting to enter not just the world, but “the mind of the world”—the roots and history of places, their political and cultural history, spiritual, artistic, architectural, and ethnic dimensions.

Behind each essay is the presence, curiosity, and intelligence of the author himself, who uses his experience of the places he visits as a way of bringing the reader into the equation. Tillinghast illuminates his travels with a brilliant eye, a friendly soul, and eclectic knowledge of a variety of disparate areas—Civil War history, Venetian architecture, Asian cultures, Irish music, and the ways of out-of-the-way people. This attention to history and cultural embeddedness lends unique perspectives to each essay.

At the heart of his journeys are his deep roots in the South, tracing back to his hometown in Tennessee. The book explores not only Tillinghast’s childhood home in Memphis, but even the time before his birth when his mother lived in Paris. Readers will feel a sense of being everywhere at once, in a strange simultaneity, a time and place beyond any map or guidebook.

RICHARD TILLINGHAST is the author of three recent books of poetry: Sewanee Poems (Evergreen, 2009; second edition, 2012), Selected Poems (Dedalus, Dublin, 2009), and Wayfaring Stranger (Word Palace, 2012). Among his nonfiction books are Finding Ireland (University of Notre Dame, 2008) and An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul (Haus Publishing, London, 2012).

“From the bedroom to the classroom to the courtroom, ‘consent’ is a key term in our contemporary sexual ethics. In this timely reexamination, Manon Garcia deftly reveals the hidden complexities of consent and proposes how to reconceptualize it as a tool of liberation.”
—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

A feminist philosopher argues that consent is not only a highly imperfect legal threshold but also an underappreciated complement of good sex.

In the age of #MeToo, consent has become the ultimate answer to problems of sexual harassment and violence: as long as all parties agree to sex, the act is legitimate. Critics argue that consent, and the awkwardness of confirming it, rob sex of its sexiness. But that objection is answered with the charge that opposing the consent regime means defending a masculine erotics of silence and mystery, a pillar of patriarchy.

In The Joy of Consent, French philosopher Manon Garcia upends the assumptions that underlie this very American debate, reframing consent as an ally of pleasure rather than a legalistic killjoy. In doing so, she rejects conventional wisdom on all sides. As a legal norm, consent can prove rickety: consent alone doesn’t make sex licit—adults engaged in BDSM are morally and legally suspect even when they consent. And nonconsensual sex is not, as many activists insist, always rape. People often agree to sex because it is easier than the alternative, Garcia argues, challenging the simplistic equation between consent and noncoercion.

Drawing on sources rarely considered together—from Kantian ethics to kink practices—Garcia offers an alternative framework grounded in commitments to autonomy and dignity. While consent, she argues, should not be a definitive legal test, it is essential to realizing intimate desire, free from patriarchal domination. Cultivating consent makes sex sexy. By appreciating consent as the way toward an ethical sexual flourishing rather than a legal litmus test, Garcia adds a fresh voice to the struggle for freedom, equality, and security from sexist violence.

A Seminary Co-op Notable Book

“Timely and captivating…advances a powerful critique against the contemporary discourse on consent…offers sharp observations throughout.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Thought-provoking…Garcia argues that we need an emancipatory sexual politics based on a deeper understanding of how social norms generate sexual injustices. Ultimately, she advocates a contextually sensitive approach to consent, a notion that responds to the specifics of sexual situations and is relational in nature.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A brilliant interrogation of the complexities of consent. Manon Garcia shows us that consent can be liberating—for reasons we might not have expected—in enabling good, joyful sex. A must-read.” —Kate Manne, author or Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Consent has become the ultimate answer to problems of sexual harassment and violence: as long as all parties agree to sex, the act is legitimate. Critics reply that the awkwardness of confirming consent robs sex of its sexiness. Supporters answer that opposing the consent regime entails defending a patriarchal erotics of silence and mystery.

Philosopher Manon Garcia upends the debate, reframing consent as an ally of pleasure rather than a legalistic killjoy. In doing so, she rejects conventional wisdom on all sides. Garcia challenges simplistic equations between consent and noncoercion and shows that consent alone doesn’t make sex licit. Drawing on sources from Kantian ethics to kink practices, she offers an alternative framework grounded in commitments to autonomy and dignity. And if consent provides a rickety legal standard, Garcia argues that it is essential to the realization of intimate desire.

By appreciating consent as a source of sexual flourishing rather than a legal litmus test, The Joy of Consent adds a fresh voice to the struggle for freedom from sexist violence.

Brilliant, practical, and humorous conversations with one of the twentieth-century’s greatest musicologists on art, culture, and the physical pain of playing a difficult passage until one attains its rewards.

Throughout his life, Charles Rosen combined formidable intelligence with immense skill as a concert pianist. He began studying at Juilliard at age seven and went on to inspire a generation of scholars to combine history, aesthetics, and score analysis in what became known as “new musicology.”

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking presents a master class for music lovers. In interviews originally conducted and published in French, Rosen’s friend Catherine Temerson asks carefully crafted questions to elicit his insights on the evolution of music—not to mention painting, theater, science, and modernism. Rosen touches on the usefulness of aesthetic reflection, the pleasure of overcoming stage fright, and the drama of conquering a technically difficult passage. He tells vivid stories about composers from Chopin and Wagner to Stravinsky and Elliott Carter. In Temerson’s questions and Rosen’s responses arise conundrums both practical and metaphysical. Is it possible to understand a work without analyzing it? Does music exist if it isn’t played?

Throughout, Rosen returns to the theme of sensuality, arguing that if one does not possess a physical craving to play an instrument, then one should choose another pursuit. Rosen takes readers to the heart of the musical matter. “Music is a way of instructing the soul, making it more sensitive,” he says, “but it is useful only insofar as it is pleasurable. This pleasure is manifest to anyone who experiences music as an inexorable need of body and mind.”

An intimate and revelatory memoir on personal challenges, political turmoil, and the state of American democracy―now in paperback with a new preface

During the past few years, as our country has faced unprecedented challenges, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been in the room where it happens―on the Senate floor for critical votes during the pandemic, at the debate podium during one of the most crucial presidential primaries in U.S. history, and in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the building, interrupting the certification of the Electoral College. It was well past midnight when Klobuchar stood beside then–Vice President Pence to officially certify President Biden's victory.

In her candid, honest, and at times bitingly funny memoir, the pragmatic senator shares insider stories from these historic moments, while also inviting readers into her personal life. An underdog in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, she built surprising early momentum, only to suspend her candidacy in order to support Joe Biden. Within weeks of returning to work in the Senate, the sudden onslaught of Covid-19 hit her family directly: her husband was hospitalized for a week and spent a month in isolation. Klobuchar shares her experience facing a cancer diagnosis while her beloved father succumbs to Alzheimer's. She recounts the dramatic narrative of January 6 and how close we came to losing our democracy. And, with her signature humor, she reveals what it's like to work with some of her more . . . well, interesting . . . colleagues.

At the crux of these stories is a narrative of resilience—of personal resilience and the resilience of a nation—and, improbably, joy.

Uniting Catholic Ireland and Protestant Ireland was a central idea of the "Irish Revival," a literary and cultural manifestation of Irish nationalism that began in the 1890s and continued into the early twentieth century. Yet many of the Revival's Protestant leaders, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge, failed to address the profound cultural differences that made uniting the two Irelands so problematic, while Catholic leaders of the Revival, particularly the journalist D. P. Moran, turned the movement into a struggle for greater Catholic power.

This book fully explores James Joyce's complex response to the Irish Revival and his extensive treatment of the relationship between the "two Irelands" in his letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction up to Finnegans Wake. Willard Potts skillfully demonstrates that, despite his pretense of being an aloof onlooker, Joyce was very much a part of the Revival. He shows how deeply Joyce was steeped in his whole Catholic culture and how, regardless of the harsh way he treats the Catholic characters in his works, he almost always portrays them as superior to any Protestants with whom they appear. This research recovers the historical and cultural roots of a writer who is too often studied in isolation from the Irish world that formed him.

Winner of the American Conference on Irish Studies’ Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature

Part of James Joyce’s genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, “a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.” How might we learn to regain some of the childlike play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that come so naturally to Joyce?   
 
The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world.
 
Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.
 

James Joyce has long been viewed as a literary modernist who helped define and uphold modernism's fundamental concepts of the artist as martyr to bourgeois sensibilities and of an idealistic faith in artistic freedom. In this revolutionary work, however, Margot Norris proposes that Joyce's art actually critiques these modernist tenets by revealing an awareness of the artist's connections to and constraints within bourgeois society.

In sections organized around three mythologized and aestheticized figures in Joyce's works—artist, woman, and child—Norris' readings "unravel the web" of Joyce's early and late stories, novels, and experimental texts. She shows how Joyce's texts employ multiple mechanisms to expose their own distortions, silences, and lies and reveal connections between art and politics, and art and society.

This ambitious new reading not only repositions Joyce within contemporary debates about the ideological assumptions behind modernism and postmodernism, but also urges reconsideration of the phenomenon of modernism itself. It will be of interest and importance to all literary scholars.

Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful. 

Excerpt from “Letter”
      Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud 
just as when we touch a body or door, or think 
of the dead come back, romancing 
us through the warp of memory, lighting a way
by luring . . .

In this collection of stories set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, lonely people travel half-haunted landscapes and discover moments of light.

In this debut collection, tangled bonds of love and family collide with a natural world both fragile and ferocious. Upended by grief, a widowed veterinarian seeks solace by fostering a litter of orphaned opossums. A young lawyer embarks on an affair, only to fall into a deeper, stranger entrancement with her lover’s nine-year-old daughter during a weekend on the Lake Huron coast. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, a recovering alcoholic risks everything to plot a careening course toward atonement. And in the title story, two teenagers steal a car, discover a loaded rifle in the backseat, and set off consequences both devastating and tender for a series of strangers they’ll never meet. 

Set across the Midwest and rural Appalachia, the stories in Joyriders offer a resonant vision of rural and small-town life: lonely, half-haunted landscapes are pierced with moments of light, and even the most taciturn faces conceal inner worlds both rich and strange. Comfort and heartache abound—entangled, inseparable. “What was Kevin suggesting,” wonders Valerie, after struggling for years to steer her innocent, angry, mysteriously afflicted son through the world, “that she loved him less because of his troubles? Oh, preposterous. More, she wanted to tell him, more.” Characters’ paths repeatedly bend in unforeseen directions, and the shape of each story surprises—illuminating, in this way, the surprising contours of entire lives. 

The story of the enigmatic Jozef Pilsudski, the founding father of modern Poland: a brilliant military leader and high-minded statesman who betrayed his own democratic vision by seizing power in a military coup.

In the story of modern Poland, no one stands taller than Jozef Pilsudski. From the age of sixteen he devoted his life to reestablishing the Polish state that had ceased to exist in 1795. Ahead of World War I, he created a clandestine military corps to fight Russia, which held most Polish territory. After the war, his dream of an independent Poland realized, he took the helm of its newly democratic political order. When he died in 1935, he was buried alongside Polish kings.

Yet Pilsudski was a complicated figure. Passionately devoted to the idea of democracy, he ceded power on constitutional terms, only to retake it a few years later in a coup when he believed his opponents aimed to dismantle the democratic system. Joshua Zimmerman’s authoritative biography examines a national hero in the thick of a changing Europe, and the legacy that still divides supporters and detractors. The Poland that Pilsudski envisioned was modern, democratic, and pluralistic. Domestically, he championed equality for Jews. Internationally, he positioned Poland as a bulwark against Bolshevism. But in 1926 he seized power violently, then ruled as a strongman for nearly a decade, imprisoning opponents and eroding legislative power.

In Zimmerman’s telling, Pilsudski’s faith in the young democracy was shattered after its first elected president was assassinated. Unnerved by Poles brutally turning on one another, the father of the nation came to doubt his fellow citizens’ democratic commitments and thereby betrayed his own. It is a legacy that dogs today’s Poland, caught on the tortured edge between self-government and authoritarianism.