BiblioVault - Books about Appreciation

Race and Romance

Coloring the Past

Margo Hendricks

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2021

This study brings race and the literary tradition of romance into dialogue.

Race and Romance: Coloring the Past explores the literary and cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white presenting in the romance genre. The scope of the study ranges from Heliodorus’ Aithiopika to the short novels of Aphra Behn, to the modern romance novel Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. This analysis engages with the troublesome racecraft of “passing” and the instability of racial identity and its formation from the premodern to the present. The study also looks at the significance of white settler colonialism to early modern romance narratives. A bridge between studies of early modern romance and scholarship on twenty-first-century romance novels, this book is well-suited for those interested in the romance genre.

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Ramona Memories

Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California

Dydia DeLyser

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

The most important woman in the history of southern California never lived. The eponymous heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's popular 1884 novel Ramona, a half-Indian beauty raised on a wealthy Mexican rancho, nonetheless left an indelible imprint on southern California's landscape. Within a year of its publication, landmarks identified with Ramona's fictional life - her birthplace, her home, the site of her wedding, and her grave - became important, even canonical parts of a visit to southern California. One could take the Ramona freeway to town, cook like Ramona, and smell like Ramona. The novel's romanticized version of California's Hispanic past also inspired films, songs, musical instruments, jewelry, clothes, beer, wine, canned goods, collectibles, and a play that still draws thirty thousand people annually. Although historians and other writers have acknowledged Ramona's importance in the shaping of southern California's regional identity, there has never been an in-depth study of the origins and evolution of the "Ramona Myth" itself - until now. In Ramona Memories, Dydia DeLyser traces the myth's emergence within the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourist industry. DeLyser explores the establishment of tourist attractions by fans of the novel. She details the stories of individual Ramona enthusiasts who, guided by numerous travel books and articles, wove the text of the novel and its lavishly described locations into their own lives, from pilgrimages to either of the two ranchos acclaimed as Ramona's home to Ramona-themed luncheons and hopeful honeymoon visits to the Wishing Well at her marriage place. Based on more than a decade of meticulous research, Ramona Memories reveals how a fiction - and the real places and products that it inspired - helped to make an idealized past visible, permeating southern California's social memory.

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Reading Up

Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States

Amy Blair

Temple University Press, 2011

A person who reads a book for self-improvement rather than aesthetic pleasure is “reading up.” Reading Up is Amy Blair's engaging study of popular literary critics who promoted reading generally and specific books as vehicles for acquiring cultural competence and economic mobility. Combining methodologies from the history of the book and the history of reading, to mass-cultural studies, reader-response criticism, reception studies, and formalist literary analysis, Blair shows how such critics influenced the choices of striving readers and popularized some elite writers.

Framed by an analysis of Hamilton Wright Mabie's role promoting the concept of “reading up” during his ten-year stint as the cultivator of literary taste for the highly popular Ladies' Home Journal, Reading Up reveals how readers flocked to literary works that they would be expected to dislike. Blair shows that while readers could be led to certain books by a trusted adviser, they frequently followed their own path in interpreting them in unexpected ways.

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Re-living the American Frontier

Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900

Nancy Reagin

University of Iowa Press, 2021

The historic and mythic elements of the American Old West—covered wagon trains, herds of buffalo, teepee villages, Indigenous warriors on horseback, cowboys on open ranges, and white settlers “taming” a wilderness with their plows and log cabins—have exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years and became the foundation for fan communities who have endured for generations. This book examines some of those communities, particularly German fans inspired by the authors of Westerns such as Karl May, and American enthusiasts of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series.

But the Old West (like all visions of the past) proved to be shifting cultural terrain. In both Germany and the U. S., Western narratives of white settlement were once seen as “apolitical” and were widely accepted by white people. But during the Nazi period in Germany and in East Germany after 1945, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed. Then, during the late twentieth century, understandings of the West changed in the U. S. as well, while the violence of white settler colonialism and the displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in the culture wars between right and left. Reagin shows that the past that fans seek to recreate is shaped by the changing present, as each new generation adapts and relives their own West.

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The Remembered Film

Victor Burgin

Reaktion Books, 2004

Most books about cinema, whether popular or academic, concentrate on what we might call the "inside" of the film: from star performances to narrative structures. The relatively few books about the "outside" of films speak mainly of such aspects of production and reception as the organization of the film industry and the sociology of audiences: the Hollywood studio system, for example, or fan clubs. The Remembered Film is unique in addressing a previously overlooked aspect of cinema: the isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life.

Victor Burgin examines a kaleidoscope of film fragments drawn from a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy. Among these are sequences of such brevity they might almost be stills. Such "sequence-images", as Burgin calls them, are neither strictly "image" nor "image sequence" and have not been considered before by either film or photography theory. He also considers some typical individual experiences "sampled" from mainstream cinema. He reflects on such disparate occurrences as the association in memory of fragments from otherwise unrelated films, of the relation of a recollected film image to an architectural setting, or of a feeling "marked" by an image remembered from a film.

The Remembered Film provides a radical new way of thinking about film outside conventional cinema, and in relation to our everyday lives. It will appeal to a wide audience interested in film and media.

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Remembering the Future

Luciano Berio

Harvard University Press, 2006

In Remembering the Future Luciano Berio shares with us some musical experiences that “invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory.” His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer’s profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art.

There is much in this short book that provides insight on Berio’s own compositions. Indeed, he comments that writing it “led me to formulate thoughts that might otherwise have remained concealed in the folds of my work.” He explores themes such as transcription and translation, poetics and analysis, “open work,” and music theater. The reader will also find here numerous insights on the work of other composers, past and present, and much more. A figure of formidable intellect, Berio ranges easily among topics such as Schenkerian analysis, the criticism of Carl Dahlhaus and Theodor Adorno, the works of his friends and sometime collaborators Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. But Berio carries his learning lightly—his tone is conversational, often playful, punctuated by arresting aphorisms: “The best possible commentary on a symphony is another symphony.”

Remembering the Future is the text of Berio’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures of 1993–94, now made available for the first time.

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Renaissance Postscripts

Responding to Ovid's Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France

Paul White

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Ovid’s Heroides, a collection consisting mainly of poetic love letters sent by mythological heroines to their absent lovers, held a particular fascination for Renaissance readers. To understand their responses to these letters, we must ask exactly how and in what contexts those readers first encountered them: were they read in Latin or in the vernacular; as source texts for the learning of grammar and history or as love poetry; as epistolary and rhetorical models or as moral examples?

Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s Heroides in Sixteenth-Century France by Paul White offers an account of the wide variety of responses to the Heroides within the realm of humanist education, in the works of both Latin commentators and French translators, and as an example of a particular mode of imitation. The author examines how humanists shaped the discourse of Ovid’s heroines and heroes to pedagogical ends and analyses even the woodcuts that illustrated various editions. This study traces comparative readings of French translations through a period noted for important shifts in attitudes to the text and to poetic translation in general and offers an important history of the “reply epistle”—a mode of imitation attempted both in Latin and the vernacular. Renaissance Postscripts shows that while the Heroides was a versatile text that could serve a wide range of pedagogical and literary purposes, it was also a text that resisted the attempts of its interpreters to have the final word.

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Robert Schumann

The Book of Songs

Jon W. Finson

Harvard University Press, 2008

Arguably no other nineteenth-century German composer was as literate or as finely attuned to setting verse as Robert Schumann. Jon W. Finson challenges long-standing assumptions about Schumann's Lieder, engaging traditionally held interpretations. He argues against the belief that the "Year of Song" simply reflects Schumann's personal life. Finson also devotes attention to the form and metric structure of German poetry that is almost entirely new to the discussion of Schumann's songs.

Arranged in part thematically, rather than merely by strict compositional chronology, this book speaks to the heart of Schumann's music. Finson's sustained attention to performance, such as questions of whether two singers might divide performance of cycles or whether miscellanies form coherent entities, allows the reader to engage Schumann's songs in novel ways.

Finson brings original research and the most recent scholarship to the musically literate public and the expert alike. This represents the definitive work on Schumann's songs and the standard reference for any Schumann enthusiast.

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Romance Reader's Advisory

The Librarian's Guide to Love in the Stacks

American Library Association

American Library Association, 2000

Russia Reads Rousseau, 1762-1825

Thomas Barran

Northwestern University Press, 2002

This book is the first study of the dynamics and individual character of the Russian reception of Rousseau. An earlier version of the manuscript was reviewed by the Harriman Institute in 1994, and was subsequently revised and resubmitted.

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