front cover of A Family Practice
A Family Practice
The Russell Doctors and the Evolving Business of Medicine, 1799-1989
William D. Lindsey
University of Arkansas Press, 2020
A Family Practice is the sweeping saga of four generations of doctors, Russell men seeking innovative ways to sustain themselves as medical practitioners in the American South from the early nineteenth to the latter half of the twentieth century. The thread that binds the stories in this saga is one of blood, of medical vocations passed from fathers to sons and nephews. This study of four generations of Russell doctors is an historical study with a biographical thread running through it.
 
The authors take a wide-ranging look at the meaning of intergenerational vocations and the role of family, the economy, and social issues on the evolution of medical education and practice in the United States.
 
[more]

front cover of A Fictional Commons
A Fictional Commons
Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature
Michael K. Bourdaghs
Duke University Press, 2021
Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons, Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system. Many of his works feature narratives about inheritance, thievery, and the struggle to obtain or preserve material wealth while also imagining alternative ways of owning and sharing. For Sōseki, literature was a means for thinking through—and beyond—private property. Bourdaghs puts Sōseki into dialogue with thinkers from his own era (including William James and Mizuno Rentarō, author of Japan’s first copyright law) and discusses how his work anticipates such theorists as Karatani Kōjin and Franco Moretti. As Bourdaghs shows, Sōseki both appropriated and rejected concepts of ownership and subjectivity in ways that theorized literature as a critical response to the emergence of global capitalism.
[more]

front cover of Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea
Sergio Ramírez
Northwestern University Press, 2008
León, Nicaragua, 1907. During a tribute he delivers during his triumphal return to his native city, Rubén Darío writes on the fan of a little girl one of his most famous poems, "Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea."

In 1956 in a cafe in León, a group of literati gather, dedicated, among other things, to the rigorous reconstruction of the legend surrounding Darío—but also to conspire. There will be an attempt against dictator Somoza's life, and that little girl with the fan a half-century before will not be a disinterested party.

In Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea, Sergio Ramírez encompasses, in a complete metaphor of reality and legend, the entire history of his country. The narrative moves along paths fifty years apart, which inevitably converge. The story becomes a fascinating exercise on the power of memory, on the influence of the past, fictitious or not, in the finality of reality.

[more]

front cover of Nowaki
Nowaki
Natsume Soseki; Translated and with an Afterword and Chronology by William N. Ridgeway
University of Michigan Press, 2011
Shirai Dōya is a man of letters, a man of principles. His principles sometimes stand in the way of his teaching career, but his writing allows him to openly address “today’s youth” with stern conviction—although he is still unable to make a comfortable living from his writing. Two youths in particular show interest in his ideas: the tubercular impoverished Takayanagi, an aspiring writer himself (and former student of Dōya’s, as it turns out), and his rich friend, the dandy Nakano. The lives and minds of the three men come together in ways that are both commonplace and surprising. The setting—mainly Tokyo of one hundred years ago—and the preoccupations of these characters will appear distinctly familiar, even today.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Psychological World of Natsume Soseki
Takeo Doi
Harvard University Press, 1976

This book offers an analysis of ten works by the leading twentieth-century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), by one of Japan's most distinguished psychiatrists. Dr. Takeo Doi, whose Amae no Kozo is well known in the West in its English translation, The Anatomy of Dependency, describes the principal characters of Soseki's novels from a psychological point of view, treating them as case studies and demonstrating the clarity and accuracy of Soseki's psychological insights.

This volume, one of the few pieces of literary criticism ever translated from the Japanese, will introduce the reader to these novels, some of which are not available in English. Furthermore, the book is a penetrating account of the universal problems faced by individuals coping with a rapidly modernizing society.

[more]

front cover of Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity
Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity
The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition
By Cathy Login Jrade
University of Texas Press, 1983

Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time.

Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry."

Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature.

After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief.

The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.

[more]

front cover of Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza
Songs of Life and Hope/Cantos de vida y esperanza
Rubén Darío
Duke University Press, 2004
Renowned for its depth of feeling and musicality, the poetry of Rubén Darío (1867–1916) has been revered by writers including Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. A leading figure in the movement known as modernismo, Darío created the modern Spanish lyric and permanently altered the course of Spanish poetry. Yet while his output has inspired a great deal of critical analysis and a scattering of translations, there has been, until now, no complete English translation of any of his books of poetry. This bilingual edition of Darío’s 1905 masterpiece, Cantos de vida y esperanza, fills a crucial gap in Hispanic and world literature studies. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda have provided not only an elegant English translation of Darío’s work but also an authoritative version of the original Spanish text.

Written over the course of seven years and in many locales in Latin America and Europe, the poems in Cantos de vida y esperanza reflect both Darío’s anguished sense of modern life and his ecstatic visions of transcendence, freedom, and the transformative power of art. They reveal Darío’s familiarity with Spanish, French, and English literature and the wide range of his concerns—existential, religious, erotic, and socio-political. Derusha and Acereda’s translation renders Darío’s themes with meticulous clarity and captures the structural and acoustic dimensions of the poet’s language in all its rhythmic sonority. Their introduction places this singular poet—arguably the greatest to emerge from Latin America in modern literature—and his best and most widely known work in historical and literary context. An extensive glossary offers additional information, explaining terms related to modernismo, Hispanic history, mythological allusions, and artists and writers prominent at the turn of the last century.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter