A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY375 start with R start with R
Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Hallock approaches literary study from the overlapping perspectives of pedagogue, scholar, unrepentant tourist, husband, father, friend, and son. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s premise that there is “creative reading as well as creative writing,” Hallock turns to the vibrant and accessible tradition of American travel writing, employing the form of biblio-memoir to bridge the impasse between public and academic discourse and reintroduce the dynamic field of early American literature to wider audiences.
Hallock’s own road course begins and ends at the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. He weaves his journey through a wide swath of American literatures and authors: from Native American and African American oral traditions, to Wheatley and Equiano, through Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson, among others. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century invasion of Florida through the Mexican War of 1846–1848 and the American Civil War. Shorter chapters bridge the book’s central themes—the mapping of cognitive and physical space, our personal stake in reading, the tensions that follow earlier acts of erasure, and the impossibility of ever fully shutting out the past.
Exploring complex cultural histories and contemporary landscapes filled with ghosts and new voices, this volume draws inspiration from a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based works ranging from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch.
An accompanying bibliographic essay is periodically updated and available at Hallock’s website: www.roadcourse.us.
From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history.
In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.
In The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television, Beat studies scholar Katie Mills examines how road stories, which have offered declarations of independence to generations of rebellious Americans, have been transformed by media, technology, and social movements. The genre, which includes literature, films, television shows, and several types of digital media, has evolved, says Mills, as each new generation questions its own identity and embraces the thrill of “automobility” (autonomy and mobility) thus providing audiences a means to consider radically altered notions of independence, even as the genre cycles between innovation and commodification.
This cultural history reveals the unique qualities of road stories and follows the evolution from the Beats’ postwar literary adventures to today’s postmodern reality television shows. Tracing the road story as it moves to both LeRoi Jones’s critique of the Beats’ romanticization of blacks as well as to the mainstream in the 1960s with CBS’s Route 66, Mills also documents the rebel subcultures of novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who used film and LSD as inspiration on a cross-country bus trip, and she examines the sexualization of male mobility and biker mythology in the films Scorpio Rising,The Wild Angels, and Easy Rider. Mills addresses how the filmmakers of the 1970s—Coppola, Scorsese, and Bogdanovich—flourished in New Hollywood with road films that reflected mainstream audiences and how feminists Joan Didion and Betty Friedan subsequently critiqued them. A new generation of women and minority storytellers gain clout and bring genre remapping to the national consciousness, Mills explains, as the road story evolves from such novels as Song of Solomon to films like Thelma and Louise and television’s Road Rules 2.
The Road Story and the Rebel, which includes twenty illustrations, effectively explores the cultural significance of sixty years of rebellion in film, literature, television, and digital media. Spanning media platforms and marginalized communities, the text offers new interpretations of canonical works and reintroduces forgotten works, revealing the genre to be more political and philosophical than previously understood.
In The Road to Armageddon Cecil Eby shows how the widely admired writers of English popular fiction and poetry contributed, at least in England, to a romantic militarism coupled with xenophobia that helped create the climate that made World War I seem almost inevitable.
Between the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the opening guns of 1914, the works of such widely read and admired writers as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Rupert Brooke, as well as a host of now almost forgotten contemporaries, bombarded their avid readers with strident warnings of imminent invasions and prophecies of the collapse of civilization under barbarian onslaught and internal moral collapse.
Eby seems these narratives as growing from and in turn fueling a collective neurosis in which dread of coming war coexisted with an almost loving infatuation with it. The author presents a vivid panorama of a militant mileau in which warfare on a scale hitherto unimaginable was largely coaxed into being by works of literary imagination. The role of covert propaganda, concealed in seemingly harmless literary texts, is memorably illustrated.
Road-Book America discloses how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of new American texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that decisively share the characterizing form. Sherrill's discussion encompasses hundreds of American narratives published in the past four decades, including such examples of the genre as William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, and E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate.
Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, traveling characters common to both old and new versions, Sherrill shows how the "new American picaresque" transforms the satirical aims of the original into an effort to map and catalog the immensity and variety of America.
Open, resilient, perennially hopeful, and endowed with a protean adaptability, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self. Mining the relevance of the reformulated picaresque for American life, Road-Book America shows how this old form, adaptable as the picaro himself, lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal and a restoration of cultural confidence in some old ways of being American.
Merging literary analysis with cultural criticism and biographical study, Patricia R. Schroeder explores Johnson's ongoing role as a cultural icon. Schroeder's detailed analysis engages key images and myths about the blues musician (such as the Faustian crossroads exchange of his soul for guitar virtuosity). Navigating the many competing interpretations that swirl around him, Schroeder reveals the cultural purposes served by the stories and the storytellers. The result is a fascinating examination of the relationships among Johnson's life, its subsequent portrayals, and the forces that drove the representations.
Offering penetrating insights into both Johnson and the society that perpetuates him, Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture is essential reading for blues fans and cultural critics interested in a foundational musical figure.
Toward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction.” Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own “shadowy autobiography” in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warren’s poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warren’s literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warren’s later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into play—that is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry.
Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warren’s life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warren’s critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warren’s own autobiography under these influences. Millichap’s latest book focuses on Warren’s critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making.
Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichap’s scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and critic—and as an American.
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.
Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan.
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture.
Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre.
Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U.
Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University.
Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.
Paper is temporarily out of stock, Cloth (0-87972-368-8) is available at the paper price until further notice.
Bridging the disciplines of musicology and cultural studies, the collection has two primary goals: to seek out a language for talking about music culture and to look at the relationship of music to culture in general. The editors’ introduction provides a backward glance at recent rock criticism and also looks to the future of the rapidly expanding discipline of popular music studies. Taking seriously the implications of critical theory for the study of non-literary aesthetic endeavors, the volume also addresses such issues as the affective power of popular music and the psychic construction of fandom.
Rock Over the Edge will appeal to scholars and students in popular music studies and American Studies as well as general readers interested in popular music.
Contributors. Ian Balfour, Roger Beebe, Michael Coyle, Robert Fink, Denise Fulbrook, Tony Grajeda, Lawrence Grossberg, Trent Hill, Josh Kun, Jason Middleton, Lisa Ann Parks, Ben Saunders, John J. Sheinbaum, Gayle Wald, Warren Zanes
Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels.
Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.
Histories of American rock music and the 1960s counterculture typically focus on the same few places: Woodstock, Monterey, Altamont. Yet there was also a very active college circuit that brought edgy acts like the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground to different metropolitan regions and smaller towns all over the country. These campus concerts were often programmed, promoted, and reviewed by students themselves, and their diverse tastes challenged narrow definitions of rock music.
Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s. Analyzing campus archives and college newspapers, historian James Carter traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities in the 1960s. Furthermore, he finds that these progressive students refused to segregate genres like folk, R&B, hard rock, and pop. Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower gives readers a front-row seat to a dynamic time for the music industry, countercultural politics, and youth culture.
Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. F. Brett Cox surveys the landscape of Zelazny's creative life and contradictions. Launched by the classic 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," Zelazny soon won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with …And Call Me Conrad and two years later won again for Lord of Light. Cox looks at the author's overnight success and follows Zelazny into a period of continued formal experimentation, the commercial triumph of the Amber sword and sorcery novels, and renewed acclaim for Hugo-winning novellas such as "Home Is the Hangman" and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai." Throughout, Cox analyzes aspects of Zelazny's art, from his preference for poetically alienated protagonists to the ways his plots reflected his determined individualism.
Clear-eyed and detailed, Roger Zelazny provides an up-to-date reconsideration of an often-misunderstood SF maverick.
-Jonathan Dollimore, York University
"Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here."
-Lawrence Manley, Yale University
"A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students."
-Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes.
Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets.
Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.
DeBrohun finds the most striking element of Book 4 to be the apparent polarity of the poems, whose themes are split between new, aetiological subjects of Roman national significance and amatory affairs that evoke the themes of Propertius' first three books. In her compelling reassessment of Propertius' aspirations in Book 4, DeBrohun identifies the conflict between his new ambitions to produce Roman aetiological elegy and his traditional, exclusive devotion to erotic concerns as the central dynamic of his collection. Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy reveals how the poet came to find in the subcodes of the elegiac genre a medium of interaction between the opposing values of the two themes.
Roman Propertius will interest not only scholars and students of Greek and Roman Poetry but also students of later traditions who are interested in the questions of genre and the relationship between poetry and wider cultural discourses.
Jeri Blair DeBrohun is Associate Professor of Classics, Brown University.
William Slater's new volume Roman Theater and Society brings an important perspective to the much-maligned status of the Roman theater, which has only recently been reappraised and appreciated as uniquely Roman rather than criticized for not being Greek. From this point of embarkation, William Slater and the nine contributors discuss theater in Rome and the Greek east with a definition of performance incorporating not only stage performances but also dinnertime entertainment, sporting events, and political events. Contributors are T. D. Barnes, K. M. Coleman, J. C. Edmonson, E. R. Gebhard, J. R. Green, E. J. Jory, W. D. Lebek, and D. S. Potter.
Individual chapters combine literary evidence with archaeological, thereby engendering a deeper appreciation for the social and political roles of Roman theater. It becomes clear that these roles were of great influence in giving voice to the popular demands of the average Roman. In examining the roles of theater the contributors turn to the players and audience themselves for deeper understanding.
Roman Theater and Society will be of great interest to classicists, theater specialists, and anyone interested in the interplay among plays, theaters, and the people on stage and in the audience.
William J. Slater is Professor of Classics, McMaster University.
Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage.
Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.
The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom is a colorful figure, and along with Plutarch one of the major sources of information about Greek civilization during the early Roman Empire. C.P. Jones offers here the first full-length portrait of Dio in English and, at the same time, a view of life in cities such as Alexandria, Tarsus, and Rhodes in the first centuries of our era.
Skillfully combining literary and historical evidence, Mr. Jones describes Dio's birthplace, education, and early career. He examines the civic speeches for what they reveal about Dio's life and art, as well as the life, thought, and language of Greek cities in this period. From these and other works he reinterprets Dio's attitude toward the emperors and Rome. The account is as lucid and pleasantly written as it is carefully documented.
Cohn argues that a full understanding of the contemporary romance requires an investigation of its literary and historical sources and analogues. Three principal sources are examined in the context of women's history in bourgeois society. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Erye, and Gone With the Wind demonstrate the development of romance fiction's themes, yet in all three the central love story is complicated by issues of property, the sign of male power. Jan Cohn further considers the development of the genre n the fictions of Harriet Lewis and May Agnes Fleming, prolific and popular American romance writers of the late nineteenth century who developed the role of the villain, thereby bringing into focus the sexual and economic struggles faced by the heroine.
Romance and the Erotics of Property sets romance fiction against a historic and literary background, arguing that contemporary romance disguises as tales of love the subversive fantasies of female appropriation and male property and power.
In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.
The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.
By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.
Writers examined include Jack Kerouac, Jim Dodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Least Heat Moon, Robert M. Pirsig, Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mona Simpson, and Walt Whitman.
Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In Romantic Complexity, Jack Stillinger examines three of the most admired poets of English Romanticism--Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth--with a focus on the complexity that results from the multiple authorship, the multiple textual representation, and the multiple reading and interpretation of their best works.
Specific topics include the joint authorship of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, an experiment of 1798 that established the most essential characteristics of modern poetry; Coleridge's creation of eighteen or more different versions of The Ancient Mariner and how this textual multiplicity affects interpretation; the historical collaboration between Keats and his readers to produce fifty-nine separate but entirely legitimate readings of The Eve of St. Agnes; and a number of practical and theoretical matters bearing on the relationships among these writers and their influences on one another.
Stillinger shows his deep understanding of the poets' lives, works, and the history of their reception, in chapters rich with intriguing questions and answers sure to engage students and teachers of the world's greatest poetry.
Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.
Traditionally, romance novels have a reputation as being no more than trashy, sex-filled fantasy escapes for frustrated housewives. But books in this genre account for nearly half of the paperbacks published. Contributors examine the patterns used by the romance authors to tell their stories.
What Charles Rosen's celebrated book The Classical Style did for music of the Classical period, this new, much-awaited volume brilliantly does for the Romantic era. An exhilarating exploration of the musical language, forms, and styles of the Romantic period, it captures the spirit that enlivened a generation of composers and musicians, and in doing so it conveys the very sense of Romantic music. In readings uniquely informed by his performing experience, Rosen offers consistently acute and thoroughly engaging analyses of works by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Bellini, Liszt, and Berlioz, and he presents a new view of Chopin as a master of polyphony and large-scale form. He adeptly integrates his observations on the music with reflections on the art, literature, drama, and philosophy of the time, and thus shows us the major figures of Romantic music within their intellectual and cultural context.
Rosen covers a remarkably broad range of music history and considers the importance to nineteenth-century music of other cultural developments: the art of landscape, a changed approach to the sacred, the literary fragment as a Romantic art form. He sheds new light on the musical sensibilities of each composer, studies the important genres from nocturnes and songs to symphonies and operas, explains musical principles such as the relation between a musical idea and its realization in sound and the interplay between music and text, and traces the origins of musical ideas prevalent in the Romantic period. Rich with striking descriptions and telling analogies, Rosen's overview of Romantic music is an accomplishment without parallel in the literature, a consummate performance by a master pianist and music historian.
Although modern media tend to represent globalization as an essentially contemporary phenomenon, many scholars now agree that its fundamental dynamics—especially its characteristic annulment of spatial and temporal differences—have been present for several centuries. Moreover, the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth century saw the convergence of a number of world-changing socio-political developments in the Western world. Romantic Globalism is significant because it is the first extended scholarly study that brings together these lines of inquiry. In so doing, Romantic Globalism not only charts a new course of study for British Romanticism but also suggests how the Romantics’ visions of globality might still be valuable to us today.
In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.
The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but enhances understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims, and accomplishments--and of its continuing relevance.
Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded--and still demands--that we transform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticized." Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labor in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined in this book.
Few can match Charles Rosen's cultivation and discernment, whether as pianist, music historian, or critic. Here he gives us a performance of literary criticism as high art, a critical conjuring of the Romantic period by way of some of its central texts.
"What is the real business of the critic?" Rosen asks of George Bernard Shaw in one of his essays. It is a question he answers throughout this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Hölderlin, he examines the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In essays on Honoré de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations of it; and the significance of the established text.
With an apt comparison or a startling juxtaposition, Rosen opens whole worlds of insight, as in his linking of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape painting and Schumann's music, or in his review of the theory and musicology of Heinrich Schenker alongside the work of Roman Jakobson.
Throughout this volume we hear the voice of a shrewd aesthetic interpreter, performing the critic's task even as he redefines it in his sparkling fashion.
Simpson demonstrates the close association between "theory" and "method" and shows that by the mid-eighteenth century, "method" had acquired distinctly subversive associations in England. Attributed increasingly to the French and the Germans, "method" paradoxically evoked images both of inhuman rationality and unbridled sentimentality; in either incarnation, it was seen as a threat to what was claimed to be authentically British. Simpson develops these paradigms in relation to feminism, the gendering of Anglo-American culture, and the emergence of literature and literary criticism as antitheoretical discourses. He then looks at the Romantic poets' response to this confining ideology of the cultural role of literature. Finally, Simpson considers postmodern theory's claims for the radical energy of nonrational or antirationalist positions.
This is an essential book not only for students of the Romantic period and intellectual historians concerned with the idea of "method," but for anyone interested in the historical background of today's debates over the excesses and possibilities of "theory."
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness?
A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain’s military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens’s and Thackeray’s acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton’s curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill’s The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde’s clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope’s novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London’s clubland—this all-important room of his own—comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.
Wampole examines both the philosophical implications of this metaphor and its political evolution. From the root as home to the root as genealogical origin to the root as the past itself, rootedness has survived in part through its ability to subsume other compelling metaphors, such as the foundation, the source, and the seed. With a focus on this concept’s history in France and Germany, Wampole traces its influence in diverse areas such as the search for the mystical origins of words, land worship, and nationalist rhetoric, including the disturbing portrayal of the Jews as an unrooted, and thus unrighteous, people. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences.
Joe Wilson served for twenty-eight years as executive director of the National Folk Festival and National Council for Traditional Arts. Throughout his impressive career, Wilson wrote extensively and colorfully about many facets of vernacular music in North America, including works on major folk instruments, as well as on characteristic musical styles, especially old-time, bluegrass, modern country, blues, cowboy, a cappella gospel, and others. This volume, a companion to Lucky Joe’s Namesake: The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson, compiles Wilson’s best writings on musical topics, including some previously unpublished works.
With wry humor, Wilson covers the origins of roots music in eighteenth-century America and its subsequent dispersion through races, classes, ethnic groups, and newly settled regions. Wilson knew, worked with, and wrote about many iconic artists of the twentieth century, including Willie Nelson, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, the Stanley Brothers, Kenny Baker, Cephas & Wiggins, John Jackson, and members of the Hill Billies—the band whose name came to signify an entire genre of the earliest recorded roots music. This carefully curated volume is comprised of works previously scattered in liner notes, small-circulation magazines, tour booklets, and unpublished manuscripts, all collected here and organized by theme.
The writings of this legendary, internationally recognized figure will be indispensable to roots music fans and will delight readers and students interested in the traditional arts and dedicated to preserving historic folkways.
After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the authors explore the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. Cohen and Donaldson place the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over "authenticity" in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream.
From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, Roots of the Revival offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.
Throughout her career, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin has been at the vanguard of discussions about feminism and sexism, the state of poetry, and our place in the natural world. The Roots of Things gathers into one volume her best essays on the issues that have been closest to her throughout her storied career.
Divided into sections on "Taking Root," "Poets and Poetry," and "Country Living," these pieces reveal Kumin honing her views within a variety of forms, including speeches, critical essays, and introductions of other writers’ work. Whether she is recollecting scenes from her childhood, ruminating on the ups and downs of what she calls "pobiz" (for "poetry business"), describing the battles she’s fought on behalf of women, or illuminating the lives of animals, Kumin offers insight that can only be born of long and closely observed experience.
The book’s examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. J. Chris Westgate further explores links between the Bowery Boy’s rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.
Rubble Films is a close look at German cinema in the immediate postwar era, and a careful examination of its relationship to Allied occupation. Shandley reveals how German film borrowed -- both literally and figuratively -- from its Nazi past, and how the occupied powers (specifically the US) used its position as victor to open Europe to Hollywood movie products and aesthetics.
Incorporating a careful reading of several important postwar films, Shandley also discusses how the German studio system operated immediately after the war, in the east and the west, giving special focus on DEFA, the east German studio that rose during Soviet occupation.
Pathbreaking in its research, Rubble Films sheds new light on a significant moment of German cultural rebirth, and adds a new dimension to the study of the history of film.
One of the most common scenes in Augustan and Romantic literature is that of a writer confronting some emblem of change and loss, most often the remains of a vanished civilization or a desolate natural landscape. Ruins and Empire traces the ruin sentiment from its earliest classical and Renaissance expressions through English literature to its establishment as a dominant theme of early American art.
Martin shows how Paradise Lost, written at the threshold of the enormous imaginative shift that accompanied the Protestant, scientific, and political revolutions of the seventeenth century, conforms to a prophetic baroque model of allegory similar to that outlined by Walter Benjamin. As she demonstrates, Milton’s experimentation with baroque forms radically reformulates classical epic, medieval romance, and Spenserian allegory to allow for both a naturalistic, empirically responsible understanding of the universe and for an infinite and incomprehensible God. In this way, the resulting poetic world of Paradise Lost is like Milton’s God, an allegorical “ruin” in which the divine is preserved but at the price of a loss of certainty. Also, as Martin suggests, the poem affirmatively anticipates modernity by placing the chief hope of human progress in the fully self-authored subject.
Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets Paradise Lost in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds. Ruins of Allegory will greatly interest all Milton scholars, as well as students of literary criticism and early modern studies.
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others—and deft use of psychoanalytic theory—The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.
2022 Belmont Award for the Best Book on Country Music, International Country Music Conference/Belmont University
New and expanded biography of one of country music’s most celebrated singer-songwriters.
Merle Haggard enjoyed numerous artistic and professional triumphs, including more than a hundred country hits (thirty-eight at number one), dozens of studio and live album releases, upwards of ten thousand concerts, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and songs covered by artists as diverse as Lynryd Skynyrd, Elvis Costello, Tammy Wynette, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Willie Nelson, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan.
In The Running Kind, a new edition that expands on his earlier analysis and covers Haggard's death and afterlife as an icon of both old-school and modern country music, David Cantwell takes us on a revelatory journey through Haggard’s music and the life and times out of which it came. Covering the breadth of his career, Cantwell focuses especially on the 1960s and 1970s, when Haggard created some of his best-known and most influential music: songs that helped invent the America we live in today. Listening closely to a masterpiece-crowded catalogue (including “Okie from Muskogee,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,” and “Working Man Blues,” among many more), Cantwell explores the fascinating contradictions—most of all, the desire for freedom in the face of limits set by the world or self-imposed—that define not only Haggard’s music and public persona but the very heart of American culture.
Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and the Gentry Decline offers a comprehensive reevaluation of the Russian realist novel and proposes that a composite style, “grotesque realism,” developed in response to social upheaval during the post-Reform era. In this compelling new study, Ani Kokobobo argues that if the realism of pre-Reform Russia could not depict socioeconomic change directly, the grotesque provided an indirect means for Russian writers to capture the instability of the times and the decline of the gentry. While realism historically represented the psychological depth of characters, the grotesque focused more on the body, materialism, and categorical confusions in order to depict characters whose humanity had eroded.
With original readings of some of Russian realism’s greatest novels, Anna Karenina, Demons, and Brothers Karamazov, as well as lesser known novels like The Family Golovlev, The Precipice, Resurrection, and Cathedral Folk, Russian Grotesque Realism traces the transformation of gentry representation from spiritual strivers and thinkers to more materialist beings. By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentry, originally seen as society’s preservers, were represented as grotesque, reflecting a broader societal breakdown that would eventually precipitate the end of the novel genre itself.
Long recognized as the best and most comprehensive work on its subject, Brown’s fine book is now thoroughly revised and updated. It provides a comprehensive treatment of Russian literature, including underground and émigré writings, from 1917 to the early 1980s.
Every stage in the evolution of Russian literature since 1917, every major author, all the important literary organizations, groups, and movements, are sharply outlined, with a wealth of often unfamiliar detail and a notable economy of means. Critical essays on Mayakovsky, Zamyatin, Olesha, Pasternak, Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin, Erofeev, and many others offer sophisticated formal and thematic analyses of a very large array of literary masterpieces.
The book examines and makes intelligible the persistent conflict between the writer and the state, between the literary artist’s urge for untrammeled self-expression and the pervasive control of intellectual activity exercised by the Soviet government. Chapters on “The Levers of Control under Stalin,” “The First Two Thaws,” “Into the Underground,” and “Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps” reveal the conditions under which Russian literature was produced in various periods and investigate the forces that drove an important segment of the literature into clandestine publication or into exile. “Exiles, Early and Late” deals with some of the leading figures in émigré literature and examines the condition of exile as an influence on literary creation. “The Surface Channel” describes and analyzes a number of significant works published aboveground in the Soviet Union during the sixties and seventies. Brown abandons the old distinction between Soviet and émigré literature, treating all Russian writing as part of a single stream, divided since 1917 into two currents not totally separate but subtly interrelated.
Overall, this volume shows how the Russian memoir specifically compares with and complements the writing of Russian fiction and Russian history, helping readers to appreciate and interpret the most popular form of authoritative “nonfiction” in modern Russian society.
The paradoxical genre of the prose poem, developed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, provides Wanner with an overarching theoretical rubric for a variety of works of Russian literature, ranging from Ivan Turgenev's "Poems in Prose" to a host of decadent, symbolist, realist, and futurist miniatures, including Fedor Sologub's "Little Fairy Tales," Aleksei Remizov's dreams, Vasilii Kandinskii's prose poems, and Daniil Kharms' absurdist ministories. His book demonstrates how the negativity inherent in the form of the prose poem transformed the overwrought lyricism of fin de siècle prose into the ascetic starkness of the twentieth-century minimalist anti-story.
Russia’s Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia’s industrial revolution. During Russia’s first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language.
This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world’s greatest works of literature. Russia’s Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‑century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.
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