A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"A must for anyone interested in adolescent behavior."—Edward Z. Dager, Contemporary Sociology
Gandhi weaves together the stories of a number of South Asian and European friendships that flourished between 1878 and 1914, tracing the complex historical networks connecting figures like the English socialist and homosexual reformer Edward Carpenter and the young Indian barrister M. K. Gandhi, or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo. In a global milieu where the battle lines of empire are reemerging in newer and more pernicious configurations, Affective Communities challenges homogeneous portrayals of “the West” and its role in relation to anticolonial struggles. Drawing on Derrida’s theory of friendship, Gandhi puts forth a powerful new model of the political: one that finds in friendship a crucial resource for anti-imperialism and transnational collaboration.
All the Tiny Beauties begins with a kitchen fire that sends the reclusive Webster Jackson to the home of his new neighbor, Colleen, who discovers him on her doorstep wearing a lacy peignoir, his house in flames. Unwilling to take responsibility for the lonely eccentric, Colleen reaches out to Webb’s estranged daughter, Debra. She also helps him find a live-in companion, a young adult reeling from the loss of her childhood friend.
Moving among perspectives and generations, we see the longings and vulnerabilities that drive and impede these characters as their stories intertwine—Webb’s first love clashing with his last; Colleen embarking on a secret affair with Debra; the older Webb and his young housemate, Hannah, forming a bond over tragedy, guilt, and his passion for baking.
Confronting the many ways they’ve failed others as well as themselves, Webb, Colleen, Hannah, and Debra slowly find ways forward and ways out. While exploring the fragile nature of our connections to one another, All the Tiny Beauties asks larger questions about the constraints society imposes that warp and wound, leading us to deny those things that make us wholly ourselves.
The cliché of the Ugly American—loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic—still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a very different national archetype—the nice American—which has been central to ideas of U.S. identity since the nineteenth century.
Niceness is often assumed to be a superficial concept unworthy of serious analysis. Yet the distinctiveness of Americans has been shaped by values of sociality and likability for which the adjective “nice” became a catchall. In America’s fledgling democracy, niceness was understood to be the indispensable trait of a people who were refreshingly free of Old World snobbery. Bramen elucidates the role niceness plays in a particular fantasy of American exceptionalism, one based not on military and economic might but on friendliness and openness. Niceness defined the attitudes of a plucky (and white) settler nation, commonly expressed through an affect that Bramen calls “manifest cheerfulness.”
To reveal its contested inflections, Bramen shows how American niceness intersects with ideas of femininity, Native American hospitality, and black amiability. Who claimed niceness and why? Despite evidence to the contrary, Americans have largely considered themselves to be a fundamentally nice and decent people, from the supposedly amicable meeting of Puritans and Native Americans at Plymouth Rock to the early days of American imperialism when the mythology of Plymouth Rock became a portable emblem of goodwill for U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines.
The compelling translation by Samuel N. Rosenberg and Samuel Danon is accompanied by an introduction on the background, genre, and general sense of the tale. The volume also includes an afterword by David Konstan, which examines the medieval work's concept of friendship within a perspective extending back to classical antiquity.
This translation will reveal Ami and Amile as a major work of the French Middle Ages. In elegant and forceful prose, it weaves together the themes of friendship and love and the status of women, of sin and punishment, the moral problem of doing wrong for the right reason, and the mythic affliction of leprosy. The work will foster lively literary and philosophical discussion.
Ami and Amile is of interest to a wide range of readers, including students of history, comparative literature, and gender studies. Medievalists will find it a welcome addition to their libraries and a captivating experience for their students.
The volume is published in the series Stylus: Studies in Medieval Culture, edited by Eugene Vance, University of Washington. Samuel N. Rosenberg is Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University; Samuel Danon is Professor of French at Reed College.
This collection of letters chronicles a remarkable, long-term friendship between two women who, despite differences of religion and ethnicity, have followed remarkably parallel paths from their first adolescent meeting in their native Chile to their current lives in exile as writers, academics, and political activists in the United States. Spanning more than thirty years (1966-2000), Agosín's and Sepúlveda's letters speak eloquently on themes that are at once personal and political—family life and patriarchy, women's roles, the loneliness of being a religious or cultural outsider, political turmoil in Chile, and the experience of exile.
A capacious analysis of a legendary intellectual friendship and the material legacies it left behind
Over the course of their decades-long friendship, Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida assembled overlapping archives of written experiments and exchanges that document a shared interest in their literary afterlives. In this incisive account, Laura Hughes shows how pushing against the limits of writing and of life itself means not only imagining but manifesting a community of future readers.
Archival Afterlives: Cixous, Derrida, and the Matter of Friendship examines the embodied nature of literary creation, taking letters, fragments, notes, and other ephemera as objects of critical analysis and care. Combining close readings of key texts and previously unexamined archival materials, Hughes traces critical connections between Cixous and Derrida, between the theoretical and the autobiographical, and between life writing and its limits. In putting deconstruction into dialogue with new material analyses and archive studies, Archival Afterlives positions this historical and intellectual relationship as a lens through which to reexamine the legacy of critical theory itself.
A sequel to the author's HERmione, Asphodel takes the reader into the bohemian drawing rooms of pre-World War I London and Paris, a milieu populated by such thinly disguised versions of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Brigit Patmore, and Margaret Cravens; on the other side of what H.D. calls "the chasm," the novel documents the war's devastating effect on the men and women who considered themselves guardians of beauty. Against this riven backdrop, Asphodel plays out the story of Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe and testing for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities. Following Hermione through the frustrations of a literary world dominated by men, the failures of an attempted lesbian relationship and a marriage riddled with infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child, and, finally, happiness with a female companion, Asphodel describes with moving lyricism and striking candor the emergence of a young and gifted woman from her self-exile.
Editor Robert Spoo's introduction carefully places Asphodel in the context of H.D.'s life and work. In an appendix featuring capsule biographies of the real figures behind the novel's fictional characters, Spoo provides keys to this roman à clef.
“Autumn wind, autumn rain, fill my heart with sorrow”—these were the last words of Qiu Jin (1875–1907), written before she was beheaded for plotting to overthrow the Qing empire. Eventually, she would be celebrated as a Republican martyr and China’s first feminist, her last words committed to memory by schoolchildren. Yet during her lifetime she was often seen as eccentric, even deviant; in her death, and still more in the forced abandonment of her remains, the authorities had wanted her to disappear into historical oblivion.
Burying Autumn tells the story of the enduring friendship between Qiu Jin and her sworn-sisters Wu Zhiying and Xu Zihua, who braved political persecution to give her a proper burial. Formed amidst social upheaval, their bond found its most poignant expression in Wu and Xu’s mourning for Qiu. The archives of this friendship—letters, poems, biographical sketches, steles, and hand-copied sutra—vividly display how these women understood the concrete experiences of modernity, how they articulated those experiences through traditional art forms, and how their artworks transformed the cultural traditions they invoked even while maintaining deep cultural roots. In enabling Qiu Jin to acquire historical significance, their friendship fulfilled its ultimate socially transformative potential.
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre first met in 1943, during the German occupation of France. The two became fast friends. Intellectual as well as political allies, they grew famous overnight after Paris was liberated. As playwrights, novelists, philosophers, journalists, and editors, the two seemed to be everywhere and in command of every medium in post-war France. East-West tensions would put a strain on their friendship, however, as they evolved in opposing directions and began to disagree over philosophy, the responsibilities of intellectuals, and what sorts of political changes were necessary or possible.
As Camus, then Sartre adopted the mantle of public spokesperson for his side, a historic showdown seemed inevitable. Sartre embraced violence as a path to change and Camus sharply opposed it, leading to a bitter and very public falling out in 1952. They never spoke again, although they continued to disagree, in code, until Camus's death in 1960.
In a remarkably nuanced and balanced account, Aronson chronicles this riveting story while demonstrating how Camus and Sartre developed first in connection with and then against each other, each keeping the other in his sights long after their break. Combining biography and intellectual history, philosophical and political passion, Camus and Sartre will fascinate anyone interested in these great writers or the world-historical issues that tore them apart.
Of his friend of many years, Dr. John Fothergill, Benjamin Franklin wrote: "I can hardly conceive that a better man has ever existed." Fothergill's letters provide a fascinating perspective of his time--a totally different view from that given by his contemporaries Horace Walpole and Dr. Johnson.
The "Quaker internationalist" (as his editors aptly call him) was during the middle decades of the eighteenth century one of the half dozen leading physicians of London, a horticulturist of great distinction, an educational reformer, a patron of many philanthropic causes, and a tireless friend of Americans and the cause of American rights. He was exceedingly generous as a patron of scientific undertakings and of young Americans abroad. He founded a famous Quaker school for boys and girls which is still flourishing; he helped found various benevolent and educational institutions in America and he continually subsidized worthy books and gave them to worthy recipients.
All these activities and others are recorded in the some two hundred letters here selected for publication. They throw light on Quaker history on both sides of the Atlantic, on advances in medical science and institutional care of the sick, on discoveries in natural history, and on political developments from the Jacobite Rebellion through the American Revolution. From the beginnings of the rift between colonies and mother country, Fothergill served as a vigorous advocate of conciliatory measures and commonwealth status for America, speaking with equal frankness and impartiality to leaders on both sides until well after hostilities began.
A few weeks before he died (at the end of 1780), he wrote Franklin in France to say that with all Europe leagued against England nothing could be hoped for her from this war, but that the world might hope for the establishment of a tribunal to settle disputes among nations and preclude war as an instrument of policy.
This edition includes a substantial introduction, and the letters have been annotated with great skill and authority. Lyman Butterfield, well known editor of the Adams Papers, says, "I have never encountered annotation on bibliographical, biographical, medical, botanical, and topographical matters that is more unfailingly readable per se. The transatlantic combination of editors was obviously just right. Toward understanding one prominent strand in the cultural history of the 18th century, this book is a uniquely valuable contribution."
This lavishly illustrated, bilingual art book presents drawings by Ramón Casas in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at the Northwestern University Library and oil paintings by Casas from private collections and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Charles Deering and Ramón Casas follows the development and dramatic dissolution of a three-way friendship that connected the Spanish painter Ramón Casas (1866–1932); the Chicago industrialist Charles Deering (1852–1927), who was a collector and admirer of Casas’s work as well as a patron of Northwestern University; and the Spanish artist Miguel Utrillo (1862–1934), Casas’s lifelong friend and the father of the French painter Maurice Utrillo.
Casas introduced Deering to Sitges, a beach town near Barcelona, Spain, where the latter created a palatial estate with a museum to house his art collection. Miguel Utrillo served as director of the museum. The text explores the treasures housed at Maricel and what happened among the three men that led Casas to abandon Utrillo and Deering to depart Spain, taking his art collection with him.
Drawing on interviews and an array of scholarly work, Beth Daniell maps out the relations of literacy and spirituality in A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery. Daniell tells the story of a group of women in “Mountain City” who use reading and writing in their search for spiritual growth. Diverse in socioeconomic status, the Mountain City women are, or have been, married to alcoholics. In Al-Anon, they use literacy to practice the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in order to find spiritual solutions to their problems.
In addition, Daniell demonstrates that in the lives of these women, reading, writing, and speaking are intertwined, embedded in one another in rich and complex ways. For the women, private literate practice is of the utmost importance because it aids the development and empowerment of the self. These women engage in literate practices in order to grow spiritually and emotionally, to live more self-aware lives, to attain personal power, to find or make meaning for themselves, and to create community. By looking at the changes in the women’s reading, Daniell shows that Al-Anon doctrine, particularly its oral instruction, serves as an interpretive tool. This discussion points out the subtle but profound transformations in these women’s lives in order to call for an inclusive notion of politics.
Foregrounding the women’s voices, A Communion of Friendship addresses a number of issues important in composition studies and reading instruction. This study examines the meaning of literacy within one specific community, with implications both for pedagogy and for empirical research in composition inside and outside the academy.
Redford examines six masters of the "talking letter": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. All seek the paradoxical goal of artful spontaneity. Each exploits the distinctive resources of the eighteenth-century letter writer: a flexible conversational manner, a repertoire of literary and social allusion, a flair for dramatic impersonation. The voices of these letter writers "make distance, presence," in Samuel Richardson's phrase, by devising substitutes for gesture, vocal inflection, and physical context, turning each letter into a performance—an act. The resulting verbal constructs create a mysterious tension between the claims of fact and the possibilities of art. Redford recovers a neglected literary form and makes possible a deeper understanding of major eighteenth-century writers who devoted much of their talent and time to "the converse of the pen."
“A lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space.” —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life
After spending four years of adolescence in suburban North Carolina, Kristine Langley Mahler, even as an adult, is still buffeted by the cultural differences between her pioneer-like upbringing in Oregon and the settled southern traditions into which she could never assimilate. Collecting evidence of displacement—a graveyard in a mall parking lot, a suburban neighborhood of white kids bused to desegregate public schools in the 1990s, and the death of her best friend—Curing Season is an attempt to understand her failed grasp at belonging.
Mahler’s yearning for acceptance remains buried like a splinter, which she carefully tweezes out in the form of artifacts from her youth. But it isn’t until she encounters a book of local family histories that she takes inhabitation and truth apart, grafting and twisting and imprinting her history on theirs, until even she can no longer tell the difference between their truth and her own. Using inventive essay forms, Mahler pries apart the cracks of exclusion and experiments with the nature of belonging, memory, and place. Curing Season is a coming-of-age memoir for anyone who grew up anywhere but home.
“Boys are emotionally illiterate and don’t want intimate friendships.” In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, Niobe Way reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go “wacko.” Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone.
Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, Deep Secrets reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys’ descriptions of their male friendships sound more like “something out of Love Story than Lord of the Flies.” Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to “man up” by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. “No homo” becomes their mantra.
These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a “boy crisis,” Way argues that boys are experiencing a “crisis of connection” because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. Way argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.
The friendship between Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane began in 1920 in the publicity office of the American Red Cross in Paris and continued until Thompson’s death in 1961. Although both women are today remembered primarily for their connections with others —Thompson as the wife of Sinclair Lewis, and Lane as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House” books —each was remarkable in her own right.
Both women had a vital engagement with life that led them in fearless pursuit of experience. In 1939, Thompson appeared on the cover of Time, which judged her second only to Eleanor Roosevelt among influential women of the day. Typical of Lane were her travels through the mountains of Albania, the deserts of Syria, and Soviet Georgia in the 1920s and her visit as a journalist to Vietnam in 1965 at the age of seventy-eight.
The correspondence of these two talented and articulate women reveals their personal concerns, social ideas, and political/economic philosophies and how they changed over time. Their letters tell the story of the first generation of women to come of age during the twentieth century, as they tried to cope with problems that women still face today. Along with the letters themselves, Holtz has included annotations and footnotes that provide biographical information, as well as explaining personal and topical references.
Inspired by the fish sculptures installed along the walkways welcoming visitors to Hancher, Fishtastic! is a delightful blend of lovable characters and whimsical watercolor illustrations that celebrate the joy of discovering your own path to enchantment.
In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, René Girard has hit upon the origin of culture—the way culture began, the way it continues to organize itself. The way communities of human beings structure themselves in a manner that is different from that of other species on the planet.
Like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Martin Buber, or others who have changed the way we think in the humanities or in the human sciences, Girard has put forth a set of ideas that have altered our perceptions of the world in which we function. We will never be able to think the same way again about mimetic desire, about the scapegoat mechanism, and about the role of Jewish and Christian scripture in explaining sacrifice, violence, and the crises from which our culture has been born.
The contributions fall into roughly four areas of interpretive work: religion and religious study; literary study; the philosophy of social science; and psychological studies.
The essays presented here are offered as "essays" in the older French sense of attempts (essayer) or trials of ideas, as indeed Girard has tried out ideas with us. With a conscious echo of Montaigne, then, this hommage volume is titled Essays in Friendship and in Truth.
Now available from SBL Press
Employing social description, social scientific models, and rhetorical analysis, Alicia J. Batten argues that the letter of James is conversant with the topic of friendship within Greek and Roman literature, as well as within various texts of early Christianity. She illustrates how James drew upon some of the language and concepts related to friendship with an intriguing density to advocate resistance to wealth, avoidance of rich patrons, and reliance upon God.
Features:
- Use of friendship, benefaction, and patronage as lenses through which James and related texts can be viewed
- A strong case for how the letter appels to the language and ideas of friendship with regard to God's relationships with humans
- Exploration of the relationship between the book of James and the teachings of Jesus
Recent scholarship in different disciplinary fields as well as activist literature have brought attention to the political possibilities within friendship. The essays, memoirs, poems, and artwork in Friendship as Social Justice Activism address these political possibilities within the context of gender, sexuality, and economic justice movements.
Based on a decade of direct diplomatic engagement with the United Nations, a decade of teaching on international relations, and another decade of research and teaching on Islamic and comparative peace studies, this book offers a friendship-related academic framework that examines shared moral concepts, philosophical paradigms, and political experiences that can develop and expand multidisciplinary conversations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. By advancing multicultural and interreligious discourses on friendship, this book helps promote actual friendships among diverse cultures and peoples.
This is not a monologue. It provides a model of conversations among scholars and political actors who come from diverse international and interreligious backgrounds. The word “Islamic” should not mislead the reader to suspect that this edited volume delves only into religious discourses. Rather, it provides a forum for conversations within and between religious and philosophical perspectives. It sparks friendship conversations thematically and through disciplinary and cultural diversity. The result of the work of many prominent international scholars and diplomats over many years, it conveys at least one message clearly: friendship matters for not only our happiness but also for our survival.
The question of whether true friendship could exist in an era of patronage occupied Renaissance Florentines as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern notions of disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, in this book Dale Kent explores the meaning of love and friendship as they were represented in the fifteenth century, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship.
She documents the elements of shared experience in friendships between Florentines of various occupations and ranks, observing how these were shaped and played out in the physical spaces of the city: the streets, street corners, outdoor benches and loggias, family palaces, churches, confraternal meeting places, workshops of artisans and artists, taverns, dinner tables, and the baptismal font.
Finally, Kent examines the betrayal of trust, focusing on friends at moments of crisis or trial in which friendships were tested, and failed or endured. The exile of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1433 and his recall in 1434, the attempt in 1466 of the Medici family’s closest friends to take over their patronage network, and the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in 1478 expose the complexity and ambivalence of Florentine friendship, a combination of patronage with mutual intellectual passion and love—erotic, platonic, and Christian—sublimely expressed in the poetry and art of Michelangelo.
While friendship was often discussed by the ancients, moderns have had much less to say on the topic. Leading us into a dialogue with the ancients, the contributors offer a series of far-reaching encounters. Nietzsche debates the meaning of friendship with Socrates; Horatio fulfills the ancient desideratum of the “true friend” in telling Hamlet’s story; and philia becomes the core of a radical ethic through a reconstruction of Marx’s Epicurean ideals. Friendship is also analyzed as the model of a non-narcissistic psychology, on the one hand, and of a “mafia of idealists”—the French Resistance—on the other. Moreover, milieus of friendship are revealed as a unique crucible of creativity for the Benjamin-Bloch cohort in 1920s southern Italy, for Wittgenstein and his Cambridge followers in the 1930s, and for American jazz musicians of the 1950s.
Contributors. Dwight Allman, Fabio Ciaramelli, Marios Constantinou, John Ely, Agnes Heller, Clara Gibson Maxwell (with Ornette Coleman), Peter Murphy, Louis Ruprecht Jr., Jean-Pierre Vernant
Nardi explores the meaning of friends to some gay men, how friends often become a surrogate family, how sexual behavior and attraction affects these friendships, and how, for many, friends mean more and last longer than romantic relationships. While looking at the psychological joys and sorrows of friendship, he also considers the cultural constraints limiting gay men in contemporary urban America—especially those that deal with dominant images of masculinity and heterosexuality—and how they relate to friendship.
By listening to gay men talk about their interactions, Nardi offers a rare glimpse into the mechanisms of gay life. We learn how gay men meet their friends, what they typically do and talk about, and how these strong relationships contain the roots of larger cultural forces such as social movements and gay identities and neighborhoods. Nardi also points out the political and social consequences when friendships fail to provide support against oppression.
An intimate and informative look at gay life in urban America, Gay Men's Friendships ultimately shows how these relationships challenge the gender order of our society by questioning how masculinity is constructed and by offering a model for a more creative blending of gay and heterosexual masculinity.
Ghady and Rawan is a heartfelt and timely novel by the award-winning author Fatima Sharafeddine (The Servant, Cappuccino) and Samar Mahfouz Barraj. The novel follows the close-knit friendship of two Lebanese teenagers, Ghady, who lives with his family in Belgium, and Rawan, who lives in Lebanon. Ghady’s family travels every summer to Beirut, where Ghady gets to spend all his time with Rawan and their other friends, enjoying their freedom from school. During the rest of the year, he and Rawan keep in touch by email. Through this correspondence, we learn about the daily ups and downs of their lives in Brussels and Beirut, including Ghady’s homesickness and his struggles with racism at school, as well as Rawan’s changing relationship to her family. The novel offers a glimpse into the lives of Lebanese adolescents while exploring a range of topics relevant to young people everywhere: bullying, parental conflicts, racism, belonging and identity, and peer pressure. Through the connection between the two main characters, Sharafeddine and Mahfouz Barraj show how the love and support of a good friend can help you through difficulties as well as sweeten life’s triumphs and good times.
Through a series of close readings at all three levels of the text—the author’s statements, the frame narrative, and the stories themselves—Sherberg shows how Boccaccio exposes and explores gender tensions rooted in a notion of the patriarchal household, which finds its own rationale in the natural-law postulate of the inferiority of women. Relying on the writings of the great twentieth-century legal theorist Hans Kelsen, Sherberg demonstrates how through the complex architecture of the Decameron Boccaccio dismantles the logic of natural law, exposing it instead as a rhetoric used by men to justify their control of women.
The Governance of Friendship aims well to advance our understanding of Boccaccio as an intellectual: not only steeped in the key texts of his time, but also at the forefront of critical thinking about such issues as law and gender which will play out over the coming centuries and beyond.
Like waves ebbing and flowing, love surges and subsides among four friends who share a vacation at the house on the beach. As they navigate the seas of love and friendship, jealousy and unfaithfulness, Elena, Marta, Eduardo, and Rafael are swept up in the opposing currents that flow between security and personal freedom, marriage and sexual liberation, family and work, provincial and city life, and traditional and unconventional gender roles.
This deceptively simple novel, published in Mexico in 1966 as La casa en la playa and here translated into English for the first time, is an important work by one of Mexico's, and indeed Latin America's, major writers of the twentieth century. Juan García Ponce helped Mexican arts and letters break out of the ossified styles and themes of the post-Revolutionary "Mexican School" with works that explore the conflict between individual desire and the demands of family and work. Written at a turning point in his career, The House on the Beach foreshadows his embrace of the erotic encounter as a means of undermining rigid, socially constructed personal identity. It supports feminist views and probes deeply into the contradictions, backwardness, and progress of modern Mexican society.
In Search of Snow is an explosive coming-of-age adventure, full of hilarious episodes and still, poignant moments. Like a blue-collar Don Quixote, Mike must blow up his windmills before he can set off to find the things he lacks, especially the snow that will temper the passion he has just set aflame.
Spaniards living in the isolated borderlands region of colonial Sonora were keen to develop an ideologically relevant and socially acceptable form of friendship with Indigenous people that could act as a functional substitute for civil law and governance, thereby regulating Native behavior. But as frontier society grew in complexity and sophistication, Indigenous and mixed-raced people also used the language of friendship and the performance of emotion for their respective purposes, in the process becoming skilled negotiators to meet their own best interests.
In northern New Spain, friendships were sincere and authentic when they had to be and cunningly malleable when the circumstances demanded it. The tenuous origins of civil society thus developed within this highly contentious social laboratory in which friendships (authentic and feigned) set the social and ideological parameters for conflict and cooperation. Far from the coffee houses of Restoration London or the lecture halls of the Republic of Letters, the civil society illuminated by Martínez stumbled forward amid the ambiguities and contradictions of colonialism and the obstacles posed by the isolation and violence of the Sonoran Desert.
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.
Kindred Spirits takes us inside a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges.
For this group, spiritual friendship was inseparable from resistance to European xenophobia and nationalism, anti-racist activism in the United States, and solidarity with Muslims during the Algerian War. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. Some of the figures are still well known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Much more than an idealized portrait of a remarkable group of Catholic intellectuals from the past, Kindred Spirits is a compelling exploration of both the beauty and flaws of a vibrant social network worth remembering.
When a racially mixed family moves into an all-white neighborhood in East Hartford, Connecticut, in 1961, lives are altered forever. Karl Luntta's Know It by Heart follows the adventures of young Dub Teed, his sister Susan and neighbor Doug Hammer, who befriend newly arrived Ricky Dubois, the daughter of an African-American woman and her white husband. When a burning cross flares in the night—and worse—the young adolescents set out to find justice and discover themselves in the process.
Despite the book's serious anti-racist theme, Know It by Heart is filled with humor reminiscent of Mark Twain. In this suspenseful novel, Karl Luntta brilliantly captures the world of the young adolescent in his characters and dialogue and in the innate comedy and awkwardness of that age. This is a book that will appeal to parents and teenagers alike.
Having become “a mad Ahab of reading,” who is driven to dissect the “artificial body of Melville’s behemothian book” to grasp its truth, Lucchesi allows his thoughts to wander and loop from theory to dream to reality to questionable memory. But his black humor-tinged musings are often as profoundly moving as they are intellectual, such as the section in which he ponders the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in relation to the significance of a name—and then attempts to share these thoughts with a sexy, middle-aged flight attendant—or another in which he describes a chance meeting with a similarly-named mafia don.
Despite apparent spiritual emptiness, Lucchesi in the end does find “a secret meaning” to Moby-Dick. And Lentricchia’s creations—both Lucchesi and The Whale and its main character—reveal this meaning through a series of ingeniously self-reflective metaphors, in much the way that Melville himself did in and through Moby-Dick. Vivid, humorous, and of unparalleled originality, this new work from Frank Lentricchia will inspire and console all who love and ponder both great literature and those who would write it.
Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.
Three late dialogues.
Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106–43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the rise, dictatorship, and death of Julius Caesar in a tottering republic. In his political speeches especially and in his correspondence we see the excitement, tension and intrigue of politics and the part he played in the turmoil of the time. Of about 106 speeches, delivered before the Roman people or the Senate if they were political, before jurors if judicial, fifty-eight survive (a few of them incompletely). In the fourteenth century Petrarch and other Italian humanists discovered manuscripts containing more than 900 letters of which more than 800 were written by Cicero and nearly 100 by others to him. These afford a revelation of the man all the more striking because most were not written for publication. Six rhetorical works survive and another in fragments. Philosophical works include seven extant major compositions and a number of others; and some lost. There is also poetry, some original, some as translations from the Greek.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero is in twenty-nine volumes.
A Portal in Space, set in Basra, Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), follows the lives of Anwar, a newly minted architect, and the other members of his affluent family as they attempt to maintain a sense of normality during the frequent bombing attacks from Iran. When Anwar joins the Iraqi army and then goes missing in action, his family struggles to cope with uncertainty over his fate. His mother falls into depression and secludes herself in the family home, while his father shifts his attention from his duties as a judge to the weekly pilgrimage to Baghdad seeking information on his son—and to Zahra, the young widow he meets there.
Emotionally engaging, A Portal in Space is a wry, wise tale of human beings striving to retain their humanity during a war that is anything but humane. Mahmoud Saeed succeeds brilliantly in bringing the sights and sounds of Iraq to life on the page—whether in a bunker on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War or in the parlor of a fortune-teller in Baghdad. As Zahra says of the novel she is writing: “It is a normal novel that contains love, war, life, deceit, and death.”
In this original study, Jonathan Jacobs provides a new account of ethical realism that combines both abstract meta-ethical issues defining the debate on realism and concrete topics in moral psychology. Jacobs argues that practical reasoners can both understand the ethical significance of facts and be motivated to act by that understanding. In that sense, objective considerations are prescriptive. In his discussion of the theory of practical realism, he extends themes and claims originating in Aristotelian ethics while engaging with the most important contemporary literature.
Arguing that desire and reason can agree on what is good, Jacobs explains how good action is naturally pleasing to the agent. In acting well, the agent affirms certain values and enjoys doing so. Jacobs grounds his explanation of ethical value in detailed explorations of the moral psychology of self-love, friendship, and respect. Students and scholars of philosophy will be intrigued by this integrated account of meta-ethics, practical reason, and moral psychology.
Gently inspired by the fable of “The Lion and the Mouse,” Pup and Pokey teaches young readers about living in the wilderness and the sometimes unexpected connections that arise in our lives. Pup and Pokey is the first children’s book from acclaimed Alaska author Seth Kantner. With Kantner’s storytelling and Beth Hill’s original illustrations, Pup and Pokey is a touching outdoor adventure story that only two talented Alaskans could tell.
Heilman and Voegelin first became acquainted around 1941, when Voegelin delivered a guest lecture for the political science department at Louisiana State University. At that time, Heilman was teaching in the English department at LSU along with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. What began as simple exchanges after Voegelin moved to LSU soon grew into full-fledged correspondence—beginning with an eight-page letter by Voegelin commenting on Heilman’s manuscripton Shakespeare’s King Lear. Their correspondence lasted until four months before Voegelin’s death in January 1985.
These letters represent Voegelin’s most prolonged correspondence with a native-born American scholar and provide readers with an insight into Voegelin as a literary critic. While Voegelin’s analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is well known, these letters reveal the context from which the analysis grew. Additional comments by Voegelin on Mann, Eliot, Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Flaubert, and other significant writers are uncovered throughout his exchanges with Heilman.
Readers will appreciate not only Heilman’s elegant style but also his efforts to clarify for himself the meaning and implications of Voegelin’s developing philosophy. Heilman’s questions are often ones that readers of Voegelin continue to ask today. In his queries, as well as in the exposition of his theories of tragedy and melodrama, human nature, and expressionist drama, Heilman displays a canny perception of the philosophical issues and problems of modernity that sustained their interdisciplinary discussion. The letters exchanged by Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin demonstrate the warm friendship these two scholars shared and illuminate many of the turns and transformations in their work as they developed as thinkers.
This volume includes essays on five plays, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and The Winter's Tale, and within these Bloom meditates on Shakespeare's work as a whole. He also draws on his formidable knowledge of Plato, Rousseau, and others to bring both ancients and moderns into the conversation. The result is a truly synoptic treatment of eros—not only a philosophical reflection on Shakespeare, but a survey of the human spirit and its tendency to seek what Bloom calls the "connectedness" of love and friendship.
These highly original interpretations of the plays convey a deep respect for their author and a deep conviction that we still have much to learn from him. In Bloom's view, we live in a love-impoverished age; he asks us to turn once more to Shakespeare because the playwright gives us a rich version of what is permanent in human nature without sharing our contemporary assumptions about erotic love.
"Provocative and illuminating." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"A brilliant analysis of the erotic ugliness and the balancing erotic grace of The Winter's Tale . . . and Bloom makes more sense of [Measure for Measure] than anyone else I have read." —A. S. Byatt, Washington Post Book World
At his death in 1992, Allan Bloom was the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Shakespeare's Politics (with Harry V. Jaffa) and The Closing of the American Mind.
Shannon demonstrates that the likeness of sex and station urged in friendship enabled a civic parity not present in other social forms. Early modern friendship was nothing less than a utopian political discourse. It preceded the advent of liberal thought, and it made its case in the terms of gender, eroticism, counsel, and kingship. To show the power of friendship in early modernity, Shannon ranges widely among translations of classical essays; the works of Elizabeth I, Montaigne, Donne, and Bacon; and popular literature, to focus finally on the plays of Shakespeare. Her study will interest scholars of literature, history, gender, sexuality, and political thought, and anyone interested in a general account of the English Renaissance.
Four old men—John, Gino, Larry, and Frank—have been warehoused at "the Manor," a long-eroded home for the forgotten. The men take turns telling stories, stalling death as they relive pivotal parts of their pasts. Outside, the cliff crumbles and a lighthouse slips toward the sea.
John, in particular, enthralls the others with his tale of Tampico, Mexico, where he met an Indian woman named Chepa who owned a house at the edge of a mountain wilderness. She was his first love—and his first lesson in the dangers of foreign intrigue. But his is not the only memory haunted by mysteries born in Mexico. Sick of waiting for death, stirred by the shifting ground beneath their feet, the Manor's residents finally resolve to quit that place and head out for Tampico.
With inexorable pull, and exquisite scenes that could only come from Toby Olson, Tampico celebrates a sublime band of calaveras, "those skeleton messengers of mortality," who seek self-discovery even as their lives are ending.
One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.
The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the “portraitive” aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.
In 1969, Tom Wesaw was an 83-year-old Shoshone doctor and religious leader on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He could no longer drive, which posed problems in making house calls. The arrival of young anthropologist Tom Johnson changed that. Johnson would drive Wesaw, and cook, pump water, and build fires for sweat lodges. In exchange, the elder Tom would show the younger Tom his work. The two were together so often that the people of Wind River began to refer to them affectionately by one name: Two Toms. By the light of the lamp Wesaw gave him, Johnson would write down what he learned. The Shoshone doctor wanted his student to share everything he saw and heard. Now, in Two Toms: Lessons from a Shoshone Doctor, he has.
"Philipson gives us a very believable portrait of a marriage. He also gives us no easy answers . . . and best of all, real storytelling." —Publishers Weekly
"This solid and serious novel emerges as not just an expose of what really goes on behind the well-groomed facades of the affluent, but a thoughtful exploration of character and the efficacy of moral action in forming and reforming it." —Jane Larkin Crain, New York Times Book Review
"A swift, no-fudging narrative by a writer it is always rewarding to rediscover." —Sophie Wilkins, National Review
"An extraordinary novel, fascinating, compelling, and totally disconcerting." —Fort Worth Star-Telegram
"Has the drama, intelligence and moral force of an American Howards End."-Cynthia Ozick
Begun as a series of stories told by Kenneth Grahame to his six-year-old son, The Wind in the Willows has become one of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever written. It has been illustrated, famously, by E.H. Shepard and Arthur Rackham, and parts of it were dramatized by A.A. Milne as Toad of Toad Hall. A century after its initial publication it still enchants. Much in Grahame’s novel—the sensitivity of Mole, the mania of Toad, the domesticity of Rat—permeates our imaginative lives (as children and adults). And Grahame’s burnished prose still dazzles. Now comes an annotated edition of The Wind in the Willows by a leading literary scholar that instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of the novel’s charms and serene narrative magic.
In an introduction aimed at a general audience, Seth Lerer tells us everything that we, as adults, need to know about the author and his work. He vividly captures Grahame’s world and the circumstances under which The Wind in the Willows came into being. In his running commentary on the novel, Lerer offers complete annotations to the language, contexts, allusions, and larger texture of Grahame’s prose. Anyone who has read and loved The Wind in the Willows will want to own and cherish this beautiful gift edition. Those coming to the novel for the first time, or returning to it with their own children, will not find a better, more sensitive guide than Seth Lerer.
Contributors to the collection include some of the most prominent scholars in the field of early modern sexualities. They think expansively about Bray’s impact on their own work and, most importantly, test the applicability of his theories (that same-sex desire has a history that can be reconstructed and that the actual object of study is difficult to capture, as its expression varies radically across cultures and societies) in areas where they have not been previously employed. Two essays in this collection explore friendships or intimacies between women or between men and women—topics Bray did not pursue extensively. Others deal with locations outside Bray’s heavily English focus, including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, or apply his theories to periods beyond the Renaissance. Additionally, the issue includes a review of Bray’s The Friend, published posthumously, and an assessment of his scholarly career from his earliest writings to this final work.
Contributors. George Chauncey, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, George E. Haggerty, Jeffrey Masten, Jeffrey Merrick, Stephen Orgel, Laurie Shannon, Valerie Traub
Aelred (1110–1167), abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, has always been a controversial figure. He was beloved by his monks and widely admired, but also sharply criticized for his frankness about his own sinfulness and what some considered his favoritism and excessive leniency.
Writings on Body and Soul includes a selection of the prolific abbot’s theological, historical, and devotional works. Each contains autobiographical elements, showing Aelred at turns confident and fearful, tormented and serene. In A Pastoral Prayer, he asserts his unworthiness and pleads for divine aid in leading his monks wisely and compassionately. Spiritual Friendship adapts Cicero’s dialogue on friendship for Christian purposes. A Certain Marvelous Miracle offers a riveting account of a pregnant teenage nun, the bloody vengeance wreaked on her seducer, and the miracle of her release from her fetters. Finally, Teachings for Recluses, addressed to Aelred’s sister, is a guide for women pursuing solitary religious perfection.
Freshly revised editions of the Latin texts appear here alongside new English translations.
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