front cover of Haints
Haints
American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions
Arthur Redding
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Examines the work of contemporary American authors who draw on the gothic tradition in their fiction
 
In Haints: American Ghosts, Millennial Passions, and Contemporary Gothic Fictions, Arthur Redding argues that ghosts serve as lasting witnesses to the legacies of slaves and indigenous peoples whose stories were lost in the remembrance or mistranslation of history.
 
Authors such as Toni Morrison and Leslie Marmon Silko deploy the ghost as a means of reconciling their own violently repressed heritage with their identity as modern Americans. And just as our ancestors were haunted by ghosts of the past, today their descendants are haunted by ghosts of contemporary crises: urban violence, racial hatred, and even terrorism. In other cases that Redding studies—such as James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen and Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child—gothic writers address similar crises to challenge traditional American claims of innocence and justice.
 
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Halberd at Red Cliff
Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms
Xiaofei Tian
Harvard University Press, 2018

The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events have also inspired works of poetry, fiction, drama, film, and art throughout Chinese history, including Internet fantasy literature today. There is a vast body of secondary literature on these two subjects individually, but very little on their interface.

The image of the Jian’an era, with its feasting, drinking, heroism, and literary panache, as well as intense male friendship, was to return time and again in the romanticized narrative of the Three Kingdoms. How did Jian’an bifurcate into two distinct nostalgias, one of which was the first paradigmatic embodiment of wen (literary graces, cultural patterning), and the other of wu (heroic martial virtue)? How did these largely segregated nostalgias negotiate with one another? And how is the predominantly male world of the Three Kingdoms appropriated by young women in contemporary China? The Halberd at Red Cliff investigates how these associations were closely related in their complex origins and then came to be divergent in their later metamorphoses.

[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
The Hamlet Vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth
Martin Greenberg
University of Iowa Press, 1986

front cover of Handel as Orpheus
Handel as Orpheus
Voice and Desire in the Chamber Cantatas
Ellen T. Harris
Harvard University Press, 2004

Handel wrote over 100 cantatas, compositions for voice and instruments that describe the joy and pain of love. In Handel as Orpheus, the first comprehensive study of the cantatas, Ellen Harris investigates their place in Handel's life as well as their extraordinary beauty.

The cantatas were written between 1706 and 1723--from the time Handel left his home in Germany, through the years he spent in Florence and Rome, and into the early part of his London career. In this period he lived as a guest in aristocratic homes, and composed these chamber works for his patrons and hosts, primarily for private entertainments. In both Italy and England his patrons moved in circles in which same-sex desire was commonplace--a fact that is not without significance, Harris reveals, for the cantatas exhibit a clear homosexual subtext.

Addressing questions about style and form, dating, the relation of music to text, rhythmic and tonal devices, and voicing, Handel as Orpheus is an invaluable resource for the study and enjoyment of the cantatas, which have too long been neglected. This innovative study brings greater understanding of Handel, especially his development as a composer, and new insight into the role of sexuality in artistic expression.

[more]

front cover of HandiLand
HandiLand
The Crippest Place on Earth
Elizabeth A. Wheeler
University of Michigan Press, 2019

HandiLand looks at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books of the last 25 years in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses—for instance, Harry Potter’s headaches or Hazel Lancaster’s oxygen tank—and redefine them as part of the hero’s journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana.
 
Elizabeth A. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion. The book moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world. Moving, funny, and beautifully written, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth is the definitive study of disability in contemporary literature for young readers.

 

[more]

front cover of Hands
Hands
Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work
Zandy, Janet
Rutgers University Press, 2004
 What are two hands worth?

In linking forms of cultural expression to labor, occupational injuries, and deaths, Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work centers what is usually decentered--the complex culture of working-class people. Janet Zandy begins by examining the literal loss of lives to unsafe jobs and occupational hazards. She asks critical and timely questions about worker representation--who speaks for employees when the mills, mines, factories, and even white-collar cubicles shut down? She presents the voices of working-class writers and artists, and discusses their contribution to knowledge and culture.

This innovative study reveals the flesh and bone beneath the abstractions of labor, class, and culture. It is an essential contribution to the emerging field of working-class studies, offering a hybrid model for bridging communities and non-academic workers to scholars and institutions of knowledge.
[more]

front cover of Handsomely Done
Handsomely Done
Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville
Edited by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville brings together leading and emerging scholars from comparative literature, critical theory, and media studies to examine Melville’s works in light of their ongoing afterlife and seemingly permanent contemporaneity. The volume explores the curious fact that the works of this most linguistically complex and seemingly most “untranslatable” of authors have yielded such compelling translations and adaptations as well as the related tendency of Melville’s writing to flash into relevance at every new historical-political conjuncture.

The volume thus engages not only Melville reception across media (Jorge Luis Borges, John Huston, Jean-Luc Godard, Led Zeppelin, Claire Denis) but also the Melvillean resonances and echoes of various political events and movements, such as the Attica uprising, the Red Army Faction, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. This consideration of Melville’s afterlife opens onto theorizations of intermediality, un/translatability, and material intensity even as it also continually faces the most concrete and pressing questions of history and politics. 
 
[more]

front cover of Hansberry's Drama
Hansberry's Drama
COMMITMENT AMID COMPLEXITY
Steven R. Carter
University of Illinois Press, 1991
"Carter's thoughtful and lucid examination makes us recognize the importance not only of 'A Raisin in the Sun,' but also of Lorraine Hansberry as a playwright with a significant body of work, a seemingly limitless vision and the artistry to match." -- New York Times Book Review
[more]

front cover of Happy In Service Of Lord
Happy In Service Of Lord
African-American Sacred Vocal Harmony
Kip Lornell
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
"Happy in the Service of the Lord" provides an in-depth look at the development of the African-American gospel quartet. Focusing argely on Memphis - long famous for its blues, jazz, and soul music - Kip Lornell reveals the special contributions that quartet members have made to the cultural and musical identity of the city.
The author traces the evolution of such groups as the I. C. Glee Club Quartet, the Spirit of Memphis, the Sunset Travelers, and the Southern Wonders from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. Drawing on extensive interviews and field research, Lornell describes a unique world of radio personalities, quartet unions, fans, promoters, and singing teachers. What emerges is a fascinating picture of the complex, multilayered relationships within these communities, enhanced by a probing analysis of the gospel quartets' place within the larger contexts of popular culture and African-American history.
"Happy in the Service of the Lord" was first published in 1988. For this second edition, Lornell has added a new chapter on the role of gospel composers and the importance of spirituality in quartet performances. The first chapter, a survey of the history of quartet singing across the United States from Reconstruction to the present, has been completely rewritten to reflect the most recent scholarship. Lornell has also updated and expanded the book's audiography and bibliography.
 
[more]

front cover of Hard-Boiled
Hard-Boiled
Erin A. Smith
Temple University Press, 2000
In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The “hard-boiled” stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In Hard-Boiled Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s.

Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read. She shows that although the work of pulp fiction authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner have become “classics” of popular culture, the hard-boiled genre was dominated by hack writers paid by the word, not self-styled artists. Pulp magazine editors and writers emphasized a gritty realism in the new genre. Unlike the highly rational and respectable British protagonists (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, for instance), tough-talking American private eyes relied as much on their fists as their brains as they made their way through tangled plotlines.

Casting working-class readers of pulp fiction as “poachers,” Smith argues that they understood these stories as parables about Taylorism, work, and manhood; as guides to navigating consumer culture; as sites for managing anxieties about working women. Engaged in re-creating white, male privilege for the modern, heterosocial world, pulp detective fiction shaped readers into consumers by selling them what they wanted to hear – stories about manly artisan-heroes who resisted encroaching commodity culture and the female consumers who came with it. Commenting on the genre’s staying power, Smith considers contemporary detective fiction by women, minority, and gay and lesbian writers.
[more]

front cover of Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority
Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority
Susanna Lee
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
The cynical but kind-hearted detective is the soul of the classic hard-boiled story, that chronicle of world-weary urban pessimism. In Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority, Susanna Lee argues that this fiction functions as a measure for individual responsibility in the modern world and that it demonstrates the enduring status of individual conscience across a variety of cultural crises. In this major rethinking of the hard-boiled genre, Lee suggests that, whether in Los Angeles, New York, or Paris, the hard-boiled detective is the guardian of individual moral authority and the embodiment of ideals in a corrupt environment.
Lee traces the history of the hard-boiled detective through the twentieth century and on both sides of the Atlantic (France and the United States), tying the idea of morality to the character model in nuanced, multifaceted ways. When the heroic model devolves, the very conceptual validity of individual moral authority can seem to devolve as well. Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Decline of Moral Authority charts the evolution of that character model of the hard-boiled hero, the mid-century deterioration of his exemplarity, and twenty-first-century endeavors to resuscitate the accountable hero. The history of hard-boiled crime fiction tells nothing less than the story of individual autonomy and accountability in modern Western culture.
 
[more]

front cover of Hard-Boiled Masculinities
Hard-Boiled Masculinities
Christopher Breu
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
The persona of the American male in the period between the two world wars was characterized by physical strength, emotional detachment, aggressive behavior, and an amoral worldview. This ideal of a hard-boiled masculinity can be seen in the pages and, even more vividly, on the covers of magazines such as Black Mask, which shifted from Victorian-influenced depictions of men in top hats and mustaches in the early 1920s to the portrayal of much more overtly violent and muscular men. 

Looking closely at this transformation, Christopher Breu offers a complex account of how and why hard-boiled masculinity emerged during an unsettled time of increased urbanization and tenuous peace and traces the changes in its cultural conception as it moved back and forth across the divide between high and low culture as well as the color line that bifurcated American society. 

Examining the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, and William Faulkner, as well as many lesser-known writers for the hypermasculine pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, Breu illustrates how the tough male was a product of cultural fantasy, one that shored up gender and racial stereotypes as a way of lashing out at the destabilizing effects of capitalism and social transformation. 

Christopher Breu is assistant professor of English at Illinois State University.
[more]

front cover of HARLAN ELLISON
HARLAN ELLISON
THE EDGE OF FOREVER
ELLEN WEIL
The Ohio State University Press, 2002

front cover of The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader
The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader
Shawn Anthony Christian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2016
Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a "reading folk." Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it.

In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of "good literature" both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White
George Hutchinson
Harvard University Press, 1995

It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States.

What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.

A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.

[more]

front cover of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman
The Life and the Life Stories
Jean M. Humez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

    Harriet Tubman’s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children’s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez’s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life—a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women.
    Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women’s club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of "race" throughout the twentieth century.
    Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman’s work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing
Daniel Hoffman
Harvard University Press, 1979

front cover of Harvester of Hearts
Harvester of Hearts
Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein
Rachel Feder
Northwestern University Press, 2018

In the period between 1815 and 1820, Mary Shelley wrote her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, as well as its companion piece, Mathilda, a tragic incest narrative that was confiscated by her father, William Godwin, and left unpublished until 1959. She also gave birth to four—and lost three—children.

In this hybrid text, Rachel Feder interprets Frankenstein and Mathilda within a series of provocative frameworks including Shelley’s experiences of motherhood and maternal loss, twentieth-century feminists’ interests in and attachments to Mary Shelley, and the critic’s own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Harvester of Hearts explores how Mary Shelley’s exchanges with her children—in utero, in birth, in life, and in death—infuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Feder theorizes “elective affinities,” a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history. Feder blurs the distinctions between intellectual, bodily, literary, and personal history, reanimating the classical feminist discourse on Frankenstein by stepping into the frame.

The result—at once an experimental book of literary criticism, a performative foray into feminist praxis, and a deeply personal lyric essay—not only locates Mary Shelley’s monsters within the folds of maternal identity but also illuminates the connections between the literary and the quotidian.

[more]

front cover of The Hatred of Literature
The Hatred of Literature
William Marx
Harvard University Press, 2018

For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.

Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.

In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.

[more]

front cover of Haunted By Waters
Haunted By Waters
Fly Fishing In North American Literature
Mark Browning
Ohio University Press, 1998
Four essential questions: Why does one fish? How should one properly fish? What relations are created in fishing? And what effects does fishing have on the future? Haunted by Waters is a self-examination by the author as he constructs his own narrative and tries to answer these questions for himself. But it is also a thorough examination of the answers he uncovers in the course of reading what's been written on the subject.

As his own story unfolds, Mark Browning analyzes angling literature from the Bible to Norman Maclean, always bringing his inquiry back to the same source: the enigma of this sport.

Haunted by Waters is an exploration of the apparent compulsion of those who fish not only to read about the sport, but to write about it as well. Mark Browning's personal account as a fly fisherman and his perspective as a critic make him uniquely qualified to navigate these waters.
[more]

front cover of Haunted Greece and Rome
Haunted Greece and Rome
Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity
By D. Felton
University of Texas Press, 1998

Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots.

The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.

[more]

front cover of Haunted Man's Report
Haunted Man's Report
Reading Charles Portis
Robert Cochran
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.

Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.
[more]

front cover of Haunted Presence
Haunted Presence
The Numinous in Gothic Fiction
S. L. Varnado
University of Alabama Press, 1987
Are ghosts, vampires, and other forms of “haunted presence” related to universal religious instincts? Are emotions that play a part in religious ritual and narrative similar to those in classical works of Gothic fiction such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe? Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction reveals the intersection of Gothic literature and contemporary theories about the psychology of religious experience, positing that the two share the concept of the numinous, the human response of awe in the face of the eternal.
           
Varnado offers a fresh and audacious analysis of the literature of the supernatural by employing insights derived from the philosophy of religious experience. Ranging from the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century to ghostly tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Varnado frames ghost stories as ontological challenge to the reader. The challenge is not in the form of philosophical proposition, however. Rather it is in the form of feelings and emotions that maintain a connection with the sense of reality. It is this area of reality that Rudolph Otto called the numinous—the feeling of the supernatural—that stands at the center of Gothic literature.
 
An understanding of this unique category of experience, aligned with its associated concept of “the sacred and the profane,” exposes the purpose of ghostly literature and demonstrates the enduring relevance of this mesmerizing genre.
[more]

front cover of Haunting Bollywood
Haunting Bollywood
Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema
By Meheli Sen
University of Texas Press, 2017

Haunting Bollywood is a pioneering, interdisciplinary inquiry into the supernatural in Hindi cinema that draws from literary criticism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, history, and cultural studies. Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days, but only a small segment of these films have been adequately explored in scholarly work; this book addresses this gap by focusing on some of Hindi cinema’s least explored genres.

From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen delves into what the supernatural is and the varied modalities through which it raises questions of film form, history, modernity, and gender in South Asian public cultures. Arguing that the supernatural is dispersed among multiple genres and constantly in conversation with global cinematic forms, she demonstrates that it is an especially malleable impulse that routinely pushes Hindi film into new formal and stylistic territories. Sen also argues that gender is a particularly accommodating stage on which the supernatural rehearses its most basic compulsions; thus, the interface between gender and genre provides an exceptionally productive lens into Hindi cinema’s negotiation of the modern and the global. Haunting Bollywood reveals that the supernatural’s unruly energies continually resist containment, even as they partake of and sometimes subvert Hindi cinema’s most enduring pleasures, from songs and stars to myth and melodrama.

[more]

front cover of Haunting Realities
Haunting Realities
Naturalist Gothic and American Realism
Edited by Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden
University of Alabama Press, 2017
An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities

Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation.
 
At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism.
 
In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.
[more]

front cover of Hawaiian Music in Motion
Hawaiian Music in Motion
Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels
James Revell Carr
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Hawaiian Music in Motion explores the performance, reception, transmission, and adaptation of Hawaiian music on board ships and in the islands, revealing the ways both maritime commerce and imperial confrontation facilitated the circulation of popular music in the nineteenth century. James Revell Carr draws on journals and ships' logs to trace the circulation of Hawaiian song and dance worldwide as Hawaiians served aboard American and European ships. He also examines important issues like American minstrelsy in Hawaii and the ways Hawaiians achieved their own ends by capitalizing on Americans' conflicting expectations and fraught discourse around hula and other musical practices.
[more]

front cover of Hawking Women
Hawking Women
Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture
Sara Petrosillo
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers. Sara Petrosillo’s Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice.
[more]

front cover of Hawthorne and Women
Hawthorne and Women
Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition
John L. Idol
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
Nathaniel Hawthorne is notorious for complaining in a letter to one of his publishers that a "damn'd mob of scribbling women" was stealing his audience. Elsewhere, he referred to women authors as "ink-stained Amazons" who were "without a single exception, detestable," and once expressed his wish that all women be "forbidden to write, on pain of having their faces deeply scarified with an oyster-shell."

This collection of original essays presents a more complex and positive view of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women, demonstrating his recognition of the crucial role that women played--as critics, reviewers, readers, and authors--in building a national readership that made his writing career so successful.

The book begins with an examination of the influence exerted by the women in Hawthorne's immediate family. It goes on to explore his links to a broad range of women writers, as well as his attitudes toward the female characters he created. Among the authors discussed are Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison.
[more]

front cover of Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric
Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric
Edited by Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured. 

In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric's role in eighteenth-century culture.
[more]

front cover of The Haydn Economy
The Haydn Economy
Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
Nicholas Mathew
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.
 
In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined.

The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.
[more]

front cover of Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow
Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow
Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism
Deirdre Loughridge
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn’s career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven’s, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, when audiences started to revel in the sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies—including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays—that offered new performance tools, fostered musical innovation, and shaped the very idea of “pure” music. Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow is a fascinating exploration of the early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism.

Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.
[more]

front cover of The Hayloft Gang
The Hayloft Gang
The Story of the National Barn Dance
Edited by Chad Berry
University of Illinois Press, 2007
The National Barn Dance was the nation's most popular country music radio show during the 1930s and 1940s. The pioneering radio program defined country and western entertainment until the Grand Ole Opry and rock 'n' roll supplanted it in the 1950s. Broadcast for more than three decades from Chicago on WLS's powerful 50,000-watt signal, the show reached listeners throughout the Midwest, the East Coast, and South, delivering popular entertainment to both rural and urban areas while celebrating the fading folk traditions of an increasingly urbanized America.

The Hayloft Gang draws on the colorful commentary of performers and former listeners to analyze the National Barn Dance, its audience, and its impact. Contributors trace the history of barn dance radio, explore the paradox of a foundational country music program broadcast from a major city, investigate notions of authenticity in the presentation of country music and entertainment, and delve into provocative issues raised by the barn dance phenomenon.

Contributors: Chad Berry, Michael T. Bertrand, Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Don Cusic, Wayne W. Daniel, Loyal Jones, Kristine M. McCusker, Stephen Parry, Susan Smulyan, Paul L. Tyler, and Michael Ann Williams.

[more]

front cover of H.D. and Poets After
H.D. and Poets After
Donna Krolik Hollenberg
University of Iowa Press, 2000
From her work's first appearance under the Imagist label to its later development in innovative long poems and prose, H.D.'s excellence was recognized by her peers as well as her successors. H.D. and Poets After is the first book to explore her influence on contemporary American poetry.

Twenty essays—half by eminent American poets writing about their literary engagement with H.D. and half by critics writing about H.D. in relation to these same poets—provide a fruitful exchange of perceptions and interpretations. The dialogue between these two perspectives—the first autobiographical testimony and the second critical analysis by scholars attuned to both modern and contemporary poetries and poetics—calls into question both traditional notions of literary criticism and earlier theories of literary influence.

The volume includes a range of contemporary responses to H.D.'s work—from Alicia Ostriker's radical eroticism to Brenda Hillman's epistemological restlessness to Carolyn Forché's response to moral disasters of the century. H.D. and Poets After demonstrates key aspects of the poet's continuing importance as a "poet's poet" in the best sense.
[more]

front cover of He, Leo
He, Leo
The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch
Ewan Clark
Oregon State University Press, 2023
Largely remembered for his mysterious disappearance in May 1971, Lew Welch was an important voice of the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. He spoke of key issues that America was facing in the aftermath of World War II—from the rise of consumerism and complacent suburban sensibilities to the threat of environmental disaster. He championed American speech, idioms, and identities. He found inspiration in the words of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, in the philosophies of Senzaki and the Buddha, and in his myriad friendships with some of the most renowned and revered poets, musicians, and artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His search for authenticity in language and poetry was a small part of a far greater search to establish a clear sense of himself.

He, Leo investigates Welch’s life and work in a chronological fashion, structured around Welch’s own notion of how three main aspects of his life—The Man, The Mountain, and The City—were interdependent. From his birth until his disappearance and presumed death, Welch’s life was often defined by problems, including a complex relationship with his mother, a long struggle with alcohol, and a fluctuating mental state. He was open and candid about everything, a fact that is evident in all aspects of his work.

Each of the three main sections of He, Leo includes key poems, essays, and events—both personal and cultural—to help establish Welch’s importance as a prominent poet and figure during the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his crushing self-criticism and his reputation as a “friend of,” he was a bona fide poet with a strong voice and message of his own. With this first full-length biography, Ewan Clark restores Lew Welch to his rightful place as an important member of a significant American literary and cultural movement.
[more]

front cover of Head Hunters
Head Hunters
The Making of Jazz's First Platinum Album
Steven F. Pond
University of Michigan Press, 2010
". . . [a] very readable dissection of all the different ways in which Herbie Hancock's 1973 album Head Hunters broke the mould. . . . An entertaining and thought-provoking read."
---Jazzwise Magazine
 
"An important and timely book. Pond's work reflects the insight an informed researcher and skilled performer can bring to the study of music."
---Travis Jackson, Associate Professor of American Music, University of Chicago
 
Winner of the U.S. chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Award for most distinguished work on popular music.
 
Steven Pond's Head Hunters captures a transitional moment in modern music history, a time when jazz and rock intermingled to create a new, often controversial, genre. At the forefront of that style was Head Hunters, Herbie Hancock's foray into the fusion jazz market.
 
The album became a turning point for a radical shift in both the production and reception of jazz. It was the best-selling jazz record of all time to that point, and the music industry quickly responded to the expanded market, with production and promotion budgets rising tenfold. Such a shift helped musicians pry open the control-booth door, permanently enlarging their role in production. But critics, believing that rock and funk might be appropriating jazz to new musical ends---or more ominously, for commercial reasons---grew increasingly alarmed at what they saw as the beginning of the end of jazz.
 
Steven F. Pond is Associate Professor of music at Cornell University. He will become Editor-in-Chief for the journal Jazz Perspectives in 2011.
[more]

front cover of Healing Memories
Healing Memories
Puerto Rican Women's Literature in the United States
Elizabeth Garcia
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Healing Memories analyzes the ways that Puerto Rican women authors use their literary works to challenge historical methodologies that have silenced the historical experiences of Puerto Rican women in the United States. Following Aurora Levins Morales's alternative historical methodology she calls “curandera history,” this work analyzes the literary work of authors, including Aurora Levins Morales, Nicholasa Mohr, Esmeralda Santiago, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, and the ways they create medicinal histories that not only document the experiences of migrant women but also heal the trauma of their erasure from mainstream national history. Each analytical chapter focuses on the various methods used by each author including using the literary space as an archive, reclaiming memory, and (re)writing cultural history, all through a feminist lens that centers the voices and experiences of Puerto Rican women.
 
[more]

front cover of Healing Narratives
Healing Narratives
Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease
Wilentz, Gay
Rutgers University Press, 2000
In Healing Narratives, Gay Wilentz explores the relationship between culture and health. In close reading of works by five women writers - Toni Cade Bambara, Erna Broder, Leslie Marmon Silko, Keri Hulme, and Jo Sinclair-she traces the narrative and structural similarities of a main character moving form a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions. Whether due to the history of diaspora, colonial oppression, or the subversion of traditional culture by modernity, illness can only be overcome when the cultural construction of disease is recognized and a link to the indigenous is restored. Wilentz's cross-cultural approach-African American, Jamaican, Native American, Maori, and Jewish stories-offers a rich context from which the basis of cultural illness can be examined.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture
Bruce Haley
Harvard University Press, 1978

Health obsessed the Victorians. The quest for health guided Victorian living habits, shaped educational goals, and sanctioned a mania for athletic sports. As both metaphor and ideal, it influenced psychology, religion, moral philosophy; it affected the writing of history as well as the criticism of literature. Here is a wide-ranging and ably written exploration of this fascinating aspect of Victorian ideas.

Bruce Haley looks at developments in personal and public health, and at theories about the relation between medical and psychological disorders. He examines influential conceptions of the healthy man: Carlyle's healthy hero, Spencer's biologically perfect man, Newman's gentleman-Christian, Kingsley's muscular Christian. He describes the development of sports and physical training in nineteenth-century England and their importance in schools and universities. He traces the concept of healthy body and healthy mind in boy's fiction (such as Torn Brown's School Days), self-help literature, and the widely read novels of George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, George Meredith, and Charles Kingsley. All these strands of social history, literature, and philosophy are woven together into a seamless whole.

[more]

front cover of Hearing the Hurt
Hearing the Hurt
Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement
Eric King Watts
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Hearing the Hurt is an examination of how the New Negro movement, also known as the Harlem Renaissance, provoked and sustained public discourse and deliberation about black culture and identity in the early twentieth century.
 
Borrowing its title from a W. E. B. Du Bois essay, Hearing the Hurt explores the nature of rhetorical invention, performance, and mutation by focusing on the multifaceted issues brought forth in the New Negro movement, which Watts treats as a rhetorical struggle over what it means to be properly black and at the same time properly American.
 
Who determines the meaning of blackness? How should African Americans fit in with American public culture? In what way should black communities and families be structured? The New Negro movement animated dynamic tension among diverse characterizations of African American civil rights, intellectual life, and well-being, and thus it provides a fascinating and complex stage on which to study how ideologies clash with each other to become accepted universally.
 
Watts, conceptualizing the artistic culture of the time as directly affected by the New Negro public discourse, maps this rhetorical struggle onto the realm of aesthetics and discusses some key incarnations of New Negro rhetoric in select speeches, essays, and novels.
[more]

front cover of The Heart as a Drum
The Heart as a Drum
Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry
Robin Riley Fast
University of Michigan Press, 2000
The Heart as a Drum celebrates poetry by a range of contemporary Native American writers, illuminating the poets' shared commitments and distinctive approaches to political resistance and cultural survival. The poetry reflects an awareness of the divisions and conflicts inherited from colonization and a commitment to traditional beliefs about the relatedness of all beings. This double perception engenders poetry that emphasizes resistance and continuance and poetry that makes creative and unique use of language. The book elucidates these aspects of the work through cultural and historical readings of poetry written by both urban- and reservation-identified Indians from varied geographic and tribal origins.
The book's focus is on the major themes in contemporary Native American literature: community and audience, the meanings of place and history, spiritual experiences, the nature of language, and the roles and varieties of storytelling. The poets whose works are discussed include Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, Simon J. Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Elizabeth Woody, and Ray Young Bear.
The first critical book dedicated to contemporary Native American poetry, The Heart as a Drum will be useful to students, teachers, and critics of American Indian cultures and literatures, and to all readers of contemporary American poetry.
Robin Riley Fast is Associate Professor of Literature, Emerson College.
[more]

front cover of The Heart of Achilles
The Heart of Achilles
Characterization and Personal Ethics in the Iliad
Graham Zanker
University of Michigan Press, 1996
In The Heart of Achilles, Graham Zanker addresses the task of reconstructing the ethical thought-world in which the characters of the Iliad live and move. It is only against this background, Zanker argues, that we can convincingly place the ethical status of the heroes and their actions. This in turn helps us to form a comprehensive view of the Iliad'scharacterization of its people, especially that of Achilles, by examining all his responses to the question of allegiance, the value of heroic prowess, and of life itself.
"[Zanker] investigates altruistic behavior in the epic with professional sophistication but in a way that makes his investigation available to a wide audience from undergraduates to advanced scholars. . . . [A] very useful interpretative study." --Choice
Graham Zanker is Senior Lecturer in Classics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Heart of Time
Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
Sabina Knight
Harvard University Press, 2006

By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. How does Chinese fiction express the desire for freedom as well as fears of attendant responsibilities and abuses? How does it depict struggles for and against freedom? How do the texts allow for or deny the possibility of freedom and agency? By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century. She links these changes to representations of time and to enduring commitments to human-heartedness and social justice.

Although Chinese fiction may contain some of the most disconsolate pages in the twentieth century's long literature of disenchantment, it also bespeaks, Knight argues, a passion for freedom and moral responsibility. Responding to ongoing conflicts between the claims of modernity and the resources of past traditions, these stories and novels are often dominated by challenges to human agency. Yet read with sensitivity to traditional Chinese conceptions of moral experience, their testimony to both the promises of freedom and the failure of such promises opens new perspectives on moral agency.

[more]

front cover of Heartless Immensity
Heartless Immensity
Literature, Culture, and Geography in Antebellum America
Anne Baker
University of Michigan Press, 2010
As the size of the United States more than doubled during the first half of the nineteenth century, a powerful current of anxiety ran alongside the well-documented optimism about national expansion. Heartless Immensity tells the story of how Americans made sense of their country’s constantly fluctuating borders and its annexation of vast new territories. Anne Baker looks at a variety of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, schoolbooks, as well as visual and literary works of art. These cultural artifacts suggest that the country’s anxiety was fueled primarily by two concerns: fears about the size of the nation as a threat to democracy, and about the incorporation of nonwhite, non-Protestant regions. These fears had a consistent and influential presence until after the Civil War, functioning as vital catalysts for the explosion of literary creativity known as the “American Renaissance,” including the work of Melville, Thoreau, and Fuller, among others.

Building on extensive archival research as well as insights from cultural geographers and theorists of nationhood, Heartless Immensity demonstrates that national expansion had a far more complicated, multifaceted impact on antebellum American culture than has previously been recognized. Baker shows that Americans developed a variety of linguistic strategies for imagining the form of the United States and its position in relation to other geopolitical entities. Comparisons
to European empires, biblical allusions, body politic metaphors, and metaphors derived from science all reflected—and often attempted to assuage—fears that the nation was becoming either monstrously large or else misshapen in ways that threatened cherished beliefs and national self-images.

Heartless Immensity argues that, in order to understand the nation’s shift from republic to empire and to understand American culture in a global context, it is first necessary to pay close attention to the processes by which the physical entity known as the United States came into being. This impressively thorough study will make a valuable contribution to the fields of American studies and literary studies.

Anne Baker is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University.
[more]

logo for Rutgers University Press
Hearts and Minds
Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era
Bibby, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 1996

The early 1960s to the mid-1970s was one of the most turbulent periods in American history. The U.S. military was engaged in its longest, costliest overseas conflict, while the home front was torn apart by riots, protests, and social activism. In the midst of these upheavals, an underground and countercultural press emerged, giving activists an extraordinary forum for a range of imaginative expressions. Poetry held a prominent place in this alternative media. The poem was widely viewed by activists as an inherently anti-establishment form of free expression, and poets were often in the vanguards of political activism.

Hearts and Minds is the first book-length study of the poems of the Black Liberation, Women's Liberation, and GI Resistance movements during the Vietnam era. Drawing on recent cultural and literary theories, Bibby investigates the significance of images, tropes, and symbols of human bodies in activist  poetry. Many key political slogans of the period––"black is beautiful," "off our backs"––foreground the body. Bibby demonstrates that figurations of bodies marked important sites of social and political struggle.

Although poetry played such an important role in Vietnam-era activism, literary criticism has largely ignored most of this literature. Bibby recuperates the cultural-historical importance of Vietnam-era activist poetry, highlighting both its relevant contexts and revealing how it engaged political and social struggles that continue to motivate contemporary history. Arguing for the need to read cultural history through these "underground" texts, Hearts and Minds offers new grounds for understanding the recent history of American poetry and the role poetry has played as a medium of imaginative political expression.

 

[more]

front cover of Hearts of Darkness
Hearts of Darkness
White Women Write Race
Marcus, Jane
Rutgers University Press, 2004
In this book, one of modernism's most insightful critics, Jane Marcus, examines the writings of novelists such as Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Mulk Raj Anand, and Djuna Barnes-artists whose work coincided with the end of empire and the rise of fascism before the Second World War. All these writers delved into the "dark hearts" of imperialism and totalitarianism, thus tackling some of the most complex cultural issues of the day. Marcus investigates previously unrecognized ways in which social and political tensions are embodied by their works.

The centerpiece of the book is Marcus's dialogue with one of her best-known essays, "Britannia Rules The Waves." In that piece, she argues that The Waves makes a strong anti-imperialist statement. Although many already support that argument, she now goes further in order to question the moral value of such a buried critique on Woolf's part. In "A Very Fine Negress" she analyzes the painful subject of Virginia Woolf's racism in A Room of One's Own. Other chapters traverse the connected issues of modernism, race, and imperialism. In two of them, we follow Nancy Cunard through the making of the Negro anthology and her appearance in a popular novel of the freewheeling Jazz Age. Elsewhere, Marcus delivers a complex analysis of A Passage to India, in a reading that interrogates E. M. Forster's displacement of his fear of white Englishwomen struggling for the vote.

Marcus, as always, brings considerable gifts as both researcher and writer to this collection of new and reprinted essays, a combination resulting in a powerful interpretation of many of modernism's most cherished figures.



[more]

front cover of Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick
Heggie and Scheer's Moby-Dick
A Grand Opera for the Twenty-first Century
Robert K. Wallace
University of North Texas Press, 2013

front cover of Hellenistic Aesthetic
Hellenistic Aesthetic
Barbara Hughes Fowler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989

“Fowler’s . . . own insights are apparent throughout, and they seem to distill the personal appreciation and understanding of a scholar who has devoted much of her career to both contemplating and enjoying Hellenistic poetry. . . . [This book] would make an excellent background text for courses in later Greek and Roman art, and it can be read with profit by anyone interested in exploring the character of Hellenistic culture.”—J. J. Pollitt, American Journal of Archaeology

“Outstanding is the range of examples discussed both in poetry and art. Theocritus, Callimachus, Appolonius, the epigrammatists, and others—that is, the major figures of the time—are considered at length and in several different contexts. Passages are quoted in the original Greek, translated, and analyzed. Fowler’s sensitivity to poetic forms, evident in her other published writings, is again evident here. In addition, however, the philosophical context is not overlooked. . . . Also highly commendable are the liberal references to works of art. Sculpture in the round and in relief, portraits, terracotta figurines, original paintings (grave stelai) and Campanian murals, mosaics, gold and silver vessels, and jewelry are introduced at various points. Every work of art discussed is illustrated in astonishingly clear photographs, which are interspersed in the body of the text.”—Christine Mitchell Havelock

The Hellenistic Aesthetic provides classicists with their first thorough discussion of the aesthetic unity found in Hellenistic art and literature. . . . Fowler examines parallels both in subject matter and in artistic approach among a diverse group of literary genres and artistic forms. In twelve chapters, The Hellenistic Aesthetic surveys Alexandrian epigrams, pastorals, epics, sculptural groups, mosaics, paintings, and jewelry to supply a convincing, and frequently unexpected, picture of a unified aesthetic vision.”—Jeffrey Buller, Classical Outlook

[more]

front cover of Hellenistic Poetry
Hellenistic Poetry
A Selection
David Sider, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2017
This collection of texts is designed to supplement those currently available for use in courses on Hellenistic poetry. Most have never before appeared in a similar collection; several have only recently been discovered. The individual commentaries have been written by the leading international scholars on Hellenistic poetry, and are designed to help the reader with more difficult aspects of the language, as well as to provide some basic guidance to each poem’s literary value and relevant scholarship.

The text of each poem is presented, together with basic help on obscure vocabulary, morphology, dialect, meter, syntax, and similar philological issues. The modern commentators also offer guidance on a poem’s literary significance and a brief introduction to the scholarship.

Among the 44 named and anonymous poets represented here are Apollonius of Rhodes, Archimedes, Aristotle, Callimachus, Cercidas, Corinna, Eratosthenes, Erinna, Ezekiel, Hermesianax, Herodas, Lycophron, and Phanocles.

Contributors to the volume in addition to David Sider include: Silvia Barbantani, James Clauss, Dee Clayman, Christophe Cusset, Claudio De Stefani, Marco Fantuzzi, Andrew Ford, Kathryn Gutzwiller, Johanna Hanink, Regina Hoeschele, Richard Hunter, David Konstan, Pauline LeVen, Kelly MacFarlane, Enrico Magnelli, Jackie Murray, Pura Nieto, Maria Noussia, Douglas Olson, Floris Overduin, Richard Rawles, Ralph Rosen, Chad Schroeder, Alexander Sens, Evina Sistakou, Michael Tueller, and Athanassios Vergados.

Although designed primarily as a textbook for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates, the book offers texts and subsidiary information not easily found (if at all) elsewhere. Since Latin poets made constant allusion to Hellenistic poetry, it will also be an important resource for Latinists.
[more]

front cover of Hello, Hello Brazil
Hello, Hello Brazil
Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil
Bryan McCann
Duke University Press, 2004
“Hello, hello Brazil” was the standard greeting Brazilian radio announcers of the 1930s used to welcome their audience into an expanding cultural marketplace.  New genres like samba and repackaged older ones like choro served as the currency in this marketplace, minted in the capital in Rio de Janeiro and circulated nationally by the burgeoning recording and broadcasting industries. Bryan McCann chronicles the flourishing of Brazilian popular music between the 1920s and the 1950s. Through analysis of the competing projects of composers, producers, bureaucrats, and fans, he shows that Brazilians alternately envisioned popular music as the foundation for a unified national culture and used it as a tool to probe racial and regional divisions.

McCann explores the links between the growth of the culture industry, rapid industrialization, and the rise and fall of Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship. He argues that these processes opened a window of opportunity for the creation of enduring cultural patterns and demonstrates that the understandings of popular music cemented in the mid–twentieth century continue to structure Brazilian cultural life in the early twenty-first.

[more]

front cover of Hemingway and the Black Renaissance
Hemingway and the Black Renaissance
Edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs
The Ohio State University Press, 2012

 Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, edited by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs, explores a conspicuously overlooked topic: Hemingway’s wide-ranging influence on writers from the Harlem Renaissance to the present day. An observable who’s who of black writers—Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Chester Himes, Alex la Guma, Derek Walcott, Gayl Jones, and more—cite Hemingway as a vital influence. This inspiration extends from style, Hemingway’s minimalist art, to themes of isolation and loneliness, the dilemma of the expatriate, and the terrifying experience of living in a time of war. The relationship, nevertheless, was not unilateral, as in the case of Jean Toomer’s 1923 hybrid, short-story cycle Cane, which influenced Hemingway’s collage-like 1925 In Our Time.

            Just as important as Hemingway’s influence, indeed, is the complex intertextuality, the multilateral conversation, between Hemingway and key black writers. The diverse praises by black writers for Hemingway in fact signify that the white author’s prose rises out of the same intensely American concerns that their own writings are formed on: the integrity of the human subject faced with social alienation, psychological violence, and psychic disillusionment. An understanding of this literary kinship ultimately initiates not only an appreciation of Hemingway’s stimulus but also a perception of an insistent black presence at the core of Hemingway’s writing.
[more]

front cover of Hemispheres and Stratospheres
Hemispheres and Stratospheres
The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment
Kevin L. Cope
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
[more]

front cover of Hemispheric American Studies
Hemispheric American Studies
Levander, Caroline F
Rutgers University Press, 2007
This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.



[more]

front cover of Hemispheric Imaginations
Hemispheric Imaginations
North American Fictions of Latin America
Helmbrecht Breinig
Dartmouth College Press, 2016
What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies.
[more]

front cover of Henry Cow
Henry Cow
The World Is a Problem
Benjamin Piekut
Duke University Press, 2019
In its open improvisations, lapidary lyrics, errant melodies, and relentless pursuit of spontaneity, the British experimental band Henry Cow pushed rock music to its limits. Its rotating personnel, sprung from rock, free jazz, and orchestral worlds, synthesized a distinct sound that troubled genre lines, and with this musical diversity came a mixed politics, including Maoism, communism, feminism, and Italian Marxism. In Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem Benjamin Piekut tells the band’s story—from its founding in Cambridge in 1968 and later affiliation with Virgin Records to its demise ten years later—and analyzes its varied efforts to link aesthetics with politics. Drawing on ninety interviews with Henry Cow musicians and crew, letters, notebooks, scores, journals, and meeting notes, Piekut traces the group’s pursuit of a political and musical collectivism, offering up its history as but one example of the vernacular avant-garde that emerged in the decades after World War II. Henry Cow’s story resonates far beyond its inimitable music; it speaks to the avant-garde’s unpredictable potential to transform the world.
[more]

front cover of Henry Mancini
Henry Mancini
Reinventing Film Music
John Caps
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Through film composer Henry Mancini, mere background music in movies became part of pop culture--an expression of sophistication and wit with a modern sense of cool and a lasting lyricism that has not dated. The first comprehensive study of Mancini's music, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music describes how the composer served as a bridge between the Big Band period of World War II and the impatient eclecticism of the Baby Boomer generation, between the grand formal orchestral film scores of the past and a modern American minimalist approach. Mancini's sound seemed to capture the bright, confident, welcoming voice of the middle class's new efficient life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movie and television, in outreach politics but also conventional stay-at-home comforts. As John Caps shows, Mancini easily combined it all in his music.
 
Mancini wielded influence in Hollywood and around the world with his iconic scores: dynamic jazz for the noirish detective TV show Peter Gunn, the sly theme from The Pink Panther, and his wistful folk song "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Through insightful close readings of key films, Caps traces Mancini's collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of the film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent musical gestures, and meaningful resonances and continuities in his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini's oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music.
 
John Caps is an award-winning writer and producer of documentaries. He served as producer, writer, and host for four seasons of the National Public Radio syndicated series The Cinema Soundtrack, featuring interviews with and music of film composers. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
 

A volume in the series Music in American Life

[more]

front cover of Her Stories
Her Stories
Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History
Elana Levine
Duke University Press, 2020
Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen.
[more]

front cover of Heresy and the Ideal
Heresy and the Ideal
On Contemporary Poetry
David Baker
University of Arkansas Press, 2000
Heresy and the Ideal is a powerful collection of essays and essay-reviews which David Baker wrote and published throughout the 1990s. He thoroughly discusses the work of more than fifty contemporary poets, including T. R. Hummer, Miller Williams, Albert Goldbarth, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, David Wojahn, Alice Fulton, Louise Glück, and Charles Wright. He takes as his models some of the great critical books of the past three decades, especially Richard Howard's masterpiece, Alone with America, and Helen Vendler's Part of Nature, Part of Us, as well as other works by Laurence Lieberman, Majorie Perloff, Carol Muske, and Mary Kinzie. At its center, Heresy and the Ideal is based on Baker's sense of Romantic poetics, especially on how contemporary poets have applied, altered, or rejected certain Romantic principles. He uses the Romantic trope to measure the tension between passion and reason and between the problems of literary transcendence and the obligations of social engagement. The result is a welcome variety of enlightening, practical criticism devoid of exclusionary jargon and based on persistent attention to an individual poem or book of poems. Utilizing the essay-review, Baker considers each poet's purposes and achievements. He blends the strategies of explanation, analysis, and evaluation, clarifying each poet's work instead of complaining or condemning. Heresy and the Ideal addresses a wide and diverse range of contemporary poetry and should take a deserved place both as a critical introduction to the work of many important poets and as a work that documents and explores the shape of poetry at the end of the millennium.
[more]

front cover of Heretical Hellenism
Heretical Hellenism
Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
Shanyn Fiske
Ohio University Press, 2008

The prevailing assumption regarding the Victorians’ relationship to ancient Greece is that Greek knowledge constituted an exclusive discourse within elite male domains. Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination challenges that theory and argues that while the information women received from popular sources was fragmentary and often fostered intellectual insecurities, it was precisely the ineffability of the Greek world refracted through popular sources and reconceived through new fields of study that appealed to women writers’ imaginations.

Examining underconsidered sources such as theater history and popular journals, Shanyn Fiske uncovers the many ways that women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy without formal classical training. Through discussions of women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Harrison, Heretical Hellenism demonstrates that women established the foundations of a heretical challenge to traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.

Heretical Hellenism provides a historical rationale for a more expansive definition of classical knowledge and offers an interdisciplinary method for understanding the place of classics both in the nineteenth century and in our own time.

[more]

front cover of Heretics and Hellraisers
Heretics and Hellraisers
Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917
By Margaret C. Jones
University of Texas Press, 1993

The Masses was the most dynamic and influential left-wing magazine of the early twentieth century, a touchstone for understanding radical thought and social movements in the United States during that era. As a magazine that supported feminist issues, it played a crucial role in shaping public discourse about women's concerns. Women editors, fiction writers, poets, and activists like Mary Heaton Vorse, Louise Bryant, Adriana Spadoni, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inez Haynes Gillmore, and Helen Hull contributed as significantly to the magazine as better-known male figures.

In this major revisionist work, Margaret C. Jones calls for reexamination of the relevance of Masses feminism to that of the 1990s. She explores women contributors' perspectives on crucial issues: patriarchy, birth control, the labor movement, woman suffrage, pacifism, and ethnicity. The book includes numerous examples of the writings and visual art of Masses women and a series of biographical/bibliographical sketches designed to aid other researchers.

[more]

front cover of The Hernandez Brothers
The Hernandez Brothers
Love, Rockets, and Alternative Comics
Enrique Garcia
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
This study offers a critical examination of the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mexican-American brothers whose graphic novels are highly influential. The Hernandez brothers started in the alt-comics scene, where their ‘Love and Rockets’ series quickly gained prominence. They have since published in more mainstream venues but have maintained an outsider status based on their own background and the content of their work. Enrique García argues that the Hernandez brothers have worked to create a new American graphic storytelling that, while still in touch with mainstream genres, provides a transgressive alternative from an aesthetic, gender, and ethnic perspective. The brothers were able to experiment with and modify these genres by taking advantage of the editorial freedom of independent publishing. This freedom also allowed them to explore issues of ethnic and gender identity in transgressive ways. Their depictions of latinidad and sexuality push against the edicts of mainstream Anglophone culture, but they also defy many Latino perceptions of life, politics, and self-representation. The book concludes with an in-depth interview with Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez that touches on and goes beyond the themes explored in the book.
[more]

front cover of Hero Me Not
Hero Me Not
The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero
Chesya Burke
Rutgers University Press, 2023

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. 
 
Hero Me Not offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. 
 
With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you. 

[more]

logo for University of Wisconsin Press
Heroes and Humanities
Detective Fiction and Culture
Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986
Mystery fiction, although essentially the same in all its national varieties, nevertheless comes in several types and several wrappings.
    The present study of American, Australian, and Canadian detective fiction concerns literature which speaks in the ways of heroes and humanities about the human condition. All authors studied here, to one degree or another, demonstrate their concern with human society, some more strongly than others, but all with their eyes on the human situation and human existence. At times these studies lean toward the tragic in their outlook and development. In all instances they center on the humanistic.
[more]

front cover of Heroes In Hard Times
Heroes In Hard Times
Neal King
Temple University Press, 1999
According to Neal King, cop action movies point both an accusatory finger and homoerotically murderous race at powerful white men. A close look at a massive and hugely popular fictional culture, Heroes in Hard Times considers the over 190 cop action movies released  between 1980 and 1997; examines the generic moral logic that they offer; and  explores the crisis in American masculinity that, King argues, propels the action in their stories.

King studies how, in the cop action genre, working-class police officers weigh in on such topics as racial justice, homosexuality, misogyny, unemployment, worker resistance, affirmative action, drug use, poverty, divorce, and the use of violence to deal with social problems. Facing their enemies with wisecracks and firepower, these men prove themselves at once complicitous in a system of violence and corruption and worthy to "blow away," with neither hesitation nor remorse, their -- society's -- menacing threats. The central male figures in these stories are heroes in their fight against criminals, but, as individuals, they fell undervalued by women, unappreciated by their bosses, and out of place in a society where fat cats and liberals have all the power. Such "hard times," King's study reveals, position them to simultaneously long for, disdain, and heroically -- if violently -- stake their frustrated claim to white male privilege.

Discussing such topics as white male guilt and the rage of the oppressed and examining such films as Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and Silence of the Lambs, King's book notes the socially-charged roles given to American culture's fictional police heroes. The last artisan in a culture that has become increasingly corporate and bureaucratized, the movie cop is the last 'real man' in a world that has emasculated men and the last non-conforming patriot in a world that  pays more attention to rules than what is morally right.

A book that shows how modern mythology makes sense of rampant corruption (and provides entertainment in its punishment), Heroes in Hard Times will educate and provoke those interested in American popular culture, film, and gender studies.
[more]

front cover of The Hero's Place
The Hero's Place
Medieval Literary Traditions of Space and Belonging
Molly Robinson Kelly
Catholic University of America Press, 2009
The Hero's Place presents an innovative study of how the spaces described in a literary work contribute dynamically and profoundly to that work's meaning.
[more]

front cover of Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood
Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood
German and American Film after World War I
Kristin Thompson
Amsterdam University Press, 2005
Ernst Lubitsch, the German filmmaker who left Berlin for Hollywood in the 1920s, is best remembered today for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Ninotchka, which featured Greta Garbo's first-ever screen smile, and Heaven Can Wait. Kristin Thompson's study analyzes Lubitsch's earlier silent films of 1918 to 1927 in order to trace the mutual influences between the classical Hollywood film style as it had evolved in the 1910s and the German film industry of the same period, which had emerged from World War I second in strength only to Hollywood.

During World War I, American firms supplied theaters around the world as French and Italian films had become scarce. Ironically, the war strengthened German filmmaking due to a ban on imports that lasted until 1921. During that period of isolation, Lubitsch became the finest proponent of German filmmaking and once Hollywood films appeared in Germany again Lubitsch was quick to absorb their stylistic traits as well. He soon became the unique master of both styles as the golden ages of the American and German cinema were beginning. This innovative study utilizes Lubitsch's silent films as a means to compare two great national cinemas at a vital formative period in cinema history.
[more]

front cover of Hewing to Experience
Hewing to Experience
Essays and Reviews on Recent American Poetry and Poetics, Nature and Culture
Sherman Paul
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Hewing to Experience charts Sherman Paul's course of coming to know William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder and the critical scholarship devoted to them as it provides an assessment of recent criticism. The initial section, on criticism and poetry, sets out many of the insistences that give this valuable collection of essays and reviews its coherence. Considered are criticism, poetics, poetry and old age, ethnopoetics, the gift exchange of imagination, and the recent and controversial enterprise of canon formation.
The final section of Hewing to Experience provides an important, meditative rereading of the work of Barry Lopez that convincingly places ecological writing within the large revisionist project of avant-garde poetry. Of particular note, too, is the full commentary on the Olson-Creeley correspondence.
Throughout, Paul's humane enthusiasm is evident. Hewing to Experience merits the readership of all those who are interested in contemporary poetry and concerned with the ongoing criticism of major poets and with critical practice.
[more]

front cover of Hidden Hands
Hidden Hands
Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction
Patricia E. Johnson
Ohio University Press, 2001

Tracing the Victorian crisis over the representation of working-class women to the 1842 Parliamentary bluebook on mines, with its controversial images of women at work, Hidden Hands argues that the female industrial worker became even more dangerous to represent than the prostitute or the male radical because she exposed crucial contradictions between the class and gender ideologies of the period and its economic realities.

Drawing on the recent work of feminist historians, Patricia Johnson lays the groundwork for a reinterpretation of Victorian social-problem fiction that highlights its treatment of issues that particularly affected working-class women: sexual harassment; the interconnections between domestic ideology and domestic violence; their relationships to male-dominated working-class movements such as Luddism, Chartism, and unionism; and their troubled connection to middle-class feminism.

Uncovering a series of images in Victorian fiction ranging from hot-tempered servants and sexually harassed factory girls to working-class homemakers pictured as beaten dogs, Hidden Hands demonstrates that representations of working-class women, however marginalized or incoherent, reveal the very contradictions they are constructed to hide and that the dynamics of these representations have broad implications both for other groups, such as middle-class women, and for the emergence of working-class women as writers themselves.

[more]

front cover of Hidden in the Mix
Hidden in the Mix
The African American Presence in Country Music
Diane Pecknold, ed.
Duke University Press, 2013
Country music's debt to African American music has long been recognized. Black musicians have helped to shape the styles of many of the most important performers in the country canon. The partnership between Lesley Riddle and A. P. Carter produced much of the Carter Family's repertoire; the street musician Tee Tot Payne taught a young Hank Williams Sr.; the guitar playing of Arnold Schultz influenced western Kentuckians, including Bill Monroe and Ike Everly. Yet attention to how these and other African Americans enriched the music played by whites has obscured the achievements of black country-music performers and the enjoyment of black listeners.

The contributors to Hidden in the Mix examine how country music became "white," how that fictive racialization has been maintained, and how African American artists and fans have used country music to elaborate their own identities. They investigate topics as diverse as the role of race in shaping old-time record catalogues, the transracial West of the hick-hopper Cowboy Troy, and the place of U.S. country music in postcolonial debates about race and resistance. Revealing how music mediates both the ideology and the lived experience of race, Hidden in the Mix challenges the status of country music as "the white man’s blues."

Contributors. Michael Awkward, Erika Brady, Barbara Ching, Adam Gussow, Patrick Huber, Charles Hughes, Jeffrey A. Keith, Kip Lornell, Diane Pecknold, David Sanjek, Tony Thomas, Jerry Wever

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Hidden Reader
Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert
Victor Brombert
Harvard University Press, 1988

Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.

Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.

[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Hide and Seek
The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction
Virginia L. Blum
University of Illinois Press, 1995
In response to widespread cultural fantasies about the child--including childhood innocence, the child as origin of the adult, the fetal emergence of subjectivity, and the "inner child" movement--Hide and Seek examines representations of the child in fiction, psychoanalysis, and popular culture.
Concentrating on the "go-between" function of the child in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British fiction, Virginia Blum shows how selected children in the works of L. P. Hartley, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov were actually fictional messengers who ultimately were unsuccessful at reconciling impasses in the adult world.
Throughout her book Blum draws on pop images of real and fictional children, ranging from the Baby Jessica case, in which the idea of "real" paternity and family bonds comes to the mythic fore, to the film Home Alone, in which the abandoned child becomes protector of his family's hearth and home. Hide and Seek raises provocative questions about the ways in which our culture fetishizes the idea of the child at the same time that we treat with comparative indifference the conditions under which many real children actually live.
"A work of striking originality and consistent intellectual honesty, forcing us into genuinely profound and darkly uncomfortable areas of speculation." -- James R. Kincaid, author of Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian
Culture
 
[more]

front cover of High Stakes of Identity
High Stakes of Identity
Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia
Ian M. Helfant
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Russian life and literature of the nineteenth century abounded with scenes of gambling--nowhere more prominently than in the lives and work of three of Russia's greatest writers: Pushkin, Tolstoi, and Dostoevskii. Focusing on the intersection of gambling performances in society and in literature, this book reveals the significance of gambling as an index of character in nineteenth-century Russia and traces its role in the fate of the gentry over the course of the century.

During the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, Ian Helfant argues, gambling became an essential proving-ground and symbolic locus for noble identity in Russia--a way for the nobility to assert its values (fearlessness, disdain for money, implacable self-possession, deification of whim and will, and stylish performance) against nineteenth-century economics and bourgeois sentimentality. In <i>The High Stakes of Identity</i> Helfant's twin concerns are to analyze the structural components of the myth of the noble "beau joueur" and to show how gambling performances in society and in literature reciprocally reinforced, complicated, and eventually disintegrated its mystique.

Using a broad variety of sources--memoiristic, epistolary, journalistic, legal, fictional, theatrical--Helfant reconstructs both the prevalence and the particular codes of gambling's cultural system in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. These codes allow him to interpret the iconoclastic performances of truly legendary gamblers and to assess the importance and purpose of gambling in works ranging from Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" to Lermontov's "Masquerade." Throughout, Helfant gives voice to the rich variety of discourses, from tsarist laws to moralistic tracts, that came to bear on the culture of gambling in the 1830s and eventually led to its displacement as the key marker of nobility.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Higher Ground
From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory
Sally L. Kitch
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Many feminists love a utopia—the idea of restarting humanity from scratch or transforming human nature in order to achieve a prescribed future based on feminist visions. Some scholars argue that feminist utopian fiction can be used as a template for creating such a future. However, Sally L. Kitch argues that associating feminist thought with utopianism is a mistake.

Drawing on the history of utopian thought, as well as on her own research on utopian communities, Kitch defines utopian thinking, explores the pitfalls of pursuing social change based on utopian ideas, and argues for a "higher ground" —a contrasting approach she calls realism. Replacing utopianism with realism helps to eliminate self-defeating notions in feminist theory, such as false generalization, idealization, and unnecessary dichotomies. Realistic thought, however, allows feminist theory to respond to changing circumstances, acknowledge sameness as well as difference, value the past and the present, and respect ideological give-and-take.

An important critique of feminist thought, Kitch concludes with a clear, exciting vision for a feminist future without utopia.
[more]

front cover of Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls
Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls
Women's Country Music, 1930-1960
Stephanie Vander Wel
University of Illinois Press, 2020
A PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative women artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians, and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl, and honky-tonk angel.

Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film, and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk, and the home. The music also captured the tensions felt by women facing geographic disruption and economic uncertainty. While classic songs and heartfelt performances might ease anxieties, the subject matter underlined women's ambivalent relationships to industrialism, middle-class security, and established notions of femininity.

[more]

logo for University of Iowa Press
Hints and Disguises
Marianne Moore and Her Contemporaries
Celeste Goodridge
University of Iowa Press, 1989

The first book-length exploration of Marianne Moore's prose focuses on her private and public critical exchanges with Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. Drawing on previously unpublished material from the Moore Archive—correspondence, notebooks, manuscript notes, and books—Celeste Goodridge establishes Moore's central role as both poet-critic and prose stylist, providing a new perspective for considering Moore in relation to her contemporaries.

With clarity and elegance, Goodridge shows that Moore's most compelling critical judgments can best be recovered by examining the relationship between her private disclosures and her public pronouncements; her aesthetic of "hints and disguises" reveals a tension between what she felt free to voice and what she chose to veil.

In writing about these four poets, Moore made her greatest contribution to modernist criticism. With unusual perspicacity, she anticipated and defined many of the critical debates which still surround these writers' projects. Furthermore, Moore's critical exchanges indicated that her deepest alliances were with Stevens and Pound and not, as most have argued, with Williams and Eliot.

[more]

front cover of Hip Hop Underground
Hip Hop Underground
The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification
Anthony Kwame Harrison
Temple University Press, 2009

Hip Hop Underground is a vivid ethnography of the author's observations and experiences in the multiracial world of the San Francisco underground hip hop scene. While Anthony Kwame Harrison interviewed area hip hop artists for this entertaining and informative book, he also performed as the emcee "Mad Squirrel." His immersion in the subculture provides him with unique insights into this dynamic and racially diverse but close-knit community.

Hip Hop Underground examines the changing nature of race among young Americans, and examines the issues of ethnic and racial identification, interaction, and understanding. Critiquing the notion that the Bay Area underground music scene is genuinely "colorblind," Harrison focuses on the issue of race to show how various ethnic groups engage hip hop in remarkably divergent ways—as a means to both claim subcultural legitimacy and establish their racial authenticity.

[more]

front cover of Hip Sublime
Hip Sublime
Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition
Sheila Murnaghan and Ralph M. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Despite their self-presentation as iconoclasts, the writers of the Beat Generation were deeply engaged with the classical tradition. Many of them were university-trained and highly conscious of their literary forebears, and they frequently incorporated their knowledge of Greco-Roman literature into their own subversive, experimental practice. Seeking to transcend the superficiality, commercialism, and precariousness of life in post–World War II America, the Beat writers found in their classical models both a venerable literary heritage and a discourse of sublimity through which to articulate their desire for purity.
 
In this volume, a diverse group of contributors explore for the first time the fascinating tensions and paradoxes that arose from interactions between these avant-garde writers and a literary tradition often seen as conservative and culturally hegemonic. With essays that cover the canonical Beat authors—such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—along with less well-known figures—including Kenneth Rexroth, Ed Sanders, and Diane di Prima—Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition brings long overdue attention to the Beat movement’s formative appropriation of the Greek and Latin classics.
 
[more]

front cover of Hip-Hop in Africa
Hip-Hop in Africa
Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers
Msia Kibona Clark
Ohio University Press, 2018

Throughout Africa, artists use hip-hop both to describe their lives and to create shared spaces for uncensored social commentary, feminist challenges to patriarchy, and resistance against state institutions, while at the same time engaging with the global hip-hop community. In Hip-Hop in Africa, Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African narratives of social, political, and economic realities.

Clark looks at the use of hip-hop in protest, both as a means of articulating social problems and as a tool for mobilizing listeners around those problems. She also details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa following its emergence in the United States, assessing the impact of urbanization and demographics on the spread of hip-hop culture.

Hip-Hop in Africa is a tribute to a genre and its artists as well as a timely examination that pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions. Accessibly written by one of the foremost experts on African hip-hop, this book will easily find its place in the classroom.

[more]

front cover of Hip-Hop Japan
Hip-Hop Japan
Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization
Ian Condry
Duke University Press, 2006
In this lively ethnography Ian Condry interprets Japan’s vibrant hip-hop scene, explaining how a music and culture that originated halfway around the world is appropriated and remade in Tokyo clubs and recording studios. Illuminating different aspects of Japanese hip-hop, Condry chronicles how self-described “yellow B-Boys” express their devotion to “black culture,” how they combine the figure of the samurai with American rapping techniques and gangsta imagery, and how underground artists compete with pop icons to define “real” Japanese hip-hop. He discusses how rappers manipulate the Japanese language to achieve rhyme and rhythmic flow and how Japan’s female rappers struggle to find a place in a male-dominated genre. Condry pays particular attention to the messages of emcees, considering how their raps take on subjects including Japan’s education system, its sex industry, teenage bullying victims turned schoolyard murderers, and even America’s handling of the war on terror.

Condry attended more than 120 hip-hop performances in clubs in and around Tokyo, sat in on dozens of studio recording sessions, and interviewed rappers, music company executives, music store owners, and journalists. Situating the voices of Japanese artists in the specific nightclubs where hip-hop is performed—what musicians and fans call the genba (actual site) of the scene—he draws attention to the collaborative, improvisatory character of cultural globalization. He contends that it was the pull of grassroots connections and individual performers rather than the push of big media corporations that initially energized and popularized hip-hop in Japan. Zeebra, DJ Krush, Crazy-A, Rhymester, and a host of other artists created Japanese rap, one performance at a time.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Hippota Nestor
Douglas Frame
Harvard University Press, 2009

This book is about the Homeric figure Nestor. This study is important because it reveals a level of deliberate irony in the Homeric poems that has hitherto not been suspected, and because Nestor’s role in the poems, which is built on this irony, is a key to the circumstances of the poems’ composition.

Nestor’s stories about the past, especially his own youth, often lack purpose on the surface of the poems, but with a slight shift of focus they provide a deep commentary on the present action of both poems. Nestor’s Homeric epithet, hippota, “the horseman,” permits the necessary refocus. The combination of epithet and name, hippota Nestor, has Indo-European roots, as a comparison with Vedic Sanskrit shows. Interpreted in the context of the Indo-European twin myth, Nestor’s role clearly points beyond itself to the key question in Homeric studies: the circumstances of the poems’ composition.

Nestor has a special relation to Ionia, where the Homeric poems were composed, and through Ionia to early Athens. The relationship between the Ionian city of Miletus and early Athens is particularly important. In addition to the role of these cities, the location of Nestor’s city Pylos, an ancient conundrum, is sharply illuminated by this new interpretation of Nestor’s Homeric role.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Hired Pens
Professional Writers in America’s Golden Age of Print
Ronald Weber
Ohio University Press, 1997

Just as mass-market magazines and cheap books have played important roles in the creation of an American identity, those skilled craftsmen (and women) whose careers are the subjects of Ronald Weber’s narrative profoundly influenced the outlook and strategies of the high-culture writers who are generally the focus of literary studies.

Hired Pens, a history of the writing profession in the United States, recognizes the place of independent writers who wrote for their livelihood from the 1830s and 1840s, with the first appearance of a broad-based print culture, to the 1960s.

Many realist authors began on this American Grub Street. Jack London turned out hackwork for any paying market he could find, while Scott Fitzgerald’s stories in slick magazines in the 1920s and early ’30s established his name as a writer.

From Edgar Allen Poe’s earliest forays into writing for pay to Sylvia Plath’s attempts to produce fiction for mass-circulation journals, Hired Pens documents without agenda the evolution of professional writing in all its permutations—travel accounts, sport, popular biography and history, genre and series fiction—and the culture it fed.

[more]

front cover of Hispanic Immigrant Literature
Hispanic Immigrant Literature
El Sueño del Retorno
By Nicolás Kanellos
University of Texas Press, 2011

Immigration has been one of the basic realities of life for Latino communities in the United States since the nineteenth century. It is one of the most important themes in Hispanic literature, and it has given rise to a specific type of literature while also defining what it means to be Hispanic in the United States. Immigrant literature uses predominantly the language of the homeland; it serves a population united by that language, irrespective of national origin; and it solidifies and furthers national identity. The literature of immigration reflects the reasons for emigrating, records—both orally and in writing—the trials and tribulations of immigration, and facilitates adjustment to the new society while maintaining links with the old society.

Based on an archive assembled over the past two decades by author Nicolás Kanellos's Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, this comprehensive study is one of the first to define this body of work. Written and recorded by people from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, the texts presented here reflect the dualities that have characterized the Hispanic immigrant experience in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, set always against a longing for homeland.

[more]

front cover of Hispanicism and Early US Literature
Hispanicism and Early US Literature
Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity
John C. Havard
University of Alabama Press, 2018
Well-researched analysis of the impact that Spain and Spanish America had on antebellum literature in the United States.
 
In Hispanicism and Early US Literature, author John C. Havard posits that representations of Spain, Spanish America, Spanishness, and Spanish Americanness are integral elements in the evolution of early national and antebellum US literature. He argues that Spanish-speaking countries have long held a broad fascination for Americans and that stock narratives regarding these peoples were central to the period’s US literature.
 
Beginning with the work of eighteenth-century literary nationalists such as Joel Barlow, US literature has been drawn to reflect on Spain and Spanish America. Such reflection was often inspired by geopolitical conflicts such as US expansion into Spanish Louisiana and the US-Mexican War. Havard terms the discourse emerging from these reflections “Hispanicism.” This discourse was used to portray the dominant viewpoint of classical liberalism that propounded an American exceptionalism premised on the idea that Hispanophone peoples were comparatively lacking the capacity for self-determination, hence rationalizing imperialism. On the conservative side were warnings against progress through conquest.
 
Havard delves into selected works of early national and antebellum literature on Spain and Spanish America to illuminate US national identity. Poetry and novels by Joel Barlow, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville are mined to further his arguments regarding identity, liberalism, and conservatism. Understudied authors Mary Peabody Mann and José Antonio Saco are held up to contrast American and Cuban views on Hispanicism and Cuban annexation as well as to develop the focus on nationality and ideology via differences in views on liberalism.
 
More than just a work of literary criticism, there is a substantial amount of cultural and political history discussed. Havard’s use of archival sources such as political articles and personal correspondence elucidates not just literary genres and movements such as early national epic poetry, abolitionist fiction, and the American Renaissance, but also US culture writ large.
[more]

front cover of Hispanisms and Homosexualities
Hispanisms and Homosexualities
Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin, eds.
Duke University Press, 1998
A man masquerading as a lesbian in Spain’s Golden Age fiction. A hermaphrodite’s encounters with the Spanish Inquisition. Debates about virility in the national literature of postrevolutionary Mexico. The work of contemporary artists Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and María Luisa Bemberg. The public persona of Pedro Zamora, former star of MTV’s The Real World. Despite an enduring queer presence in Hispanic literatures and cultures, most scholars have avoided the specter of sexual dissidence in the Spanish-speaking world.
In Hispanisms and Homosexualities, editors Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin bring together a group of essays that advance Hispanic studies and gay and lesbian studies by calling into question what is meant by the words Hispanic and homosexual. The fourteen contributors to this volume not only offer queer readings of Spanish and Latin American texts and performances, they also undermine a univocal sense of homosexual identities and practices. Taking on formations of national identity and sexuality; the politics of visibility and outing; the intersections of race, sexuality, and imperial discourse; the status of transvestism and posing; and a postmodern aesthetic of camp and kitsch, these essays from both established and emerging scholars provide a more complex and nuanced view of related issues involving nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality in the Hispanic world.
Hispanisms and Homosexualities offers the most sophisticated critical and theoretical work to date in Hispanic and queer studies. It will be an essential text for all those engaged with the complexities of ethnic, cultural, and sexual subjectivities.

Contributors. Daniel Balderston, Emilie Bergmann, Israel Burshatin, Brad Epps, Mary S. Gossy, Robert Irwin, Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, Sylvia Molloy, Oscar Montero, José Esteban Muñoz, José Quiroga, Rubén Ríos Avila, B. Sifuentes Jáuregui, Paul Julian Smith

[more]

front cover of The Historical Film
The Historical Film
History and Memory in Media
Landy, Marcia
Rutgers University Press, 2000

What is history? How do we represent it? How do our notions of history change over time? The essays in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media probe the roles that cinema and television play in altering and complicating our understanding of historical events.

The book brings together representative examples of how both media critics and historians write about history as it is created and disseminated through film and television. The essays explore what is at stake culturally and politically in media history and how this form of history-making is different from traditional historiography. The volume is divided into four parts--Regarding History; History as Trauma; History, Fiction, and Postcolonial Memory; and History and Television--that progressively deepen our understanding of just how complex the issues are. Essays by top scholars analyze many different kinds of film: historical film, documentary, costume drama, and heritage films. The section on television is equally broad, examining phenomena as diverse as news broadcasts and Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War.

Contributors are Mbye Cham, George F. Custen, Mary Ann Doane, Richard Dienst, Taylor Downing, Gary Edgerton, Naomi Greene, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Sue Harper, Sumiko Higashi, Anton Kaes, Marcia Landy, Shawn Rosenheim, Robert A. Rosenstone, Pierre Sorlin, Maria Wyke, and Ismail Xavier.

[more]

front cover of The Historical Film
The Historical Film
History and Memory in Media
Landy, Marcia
Rutgers University Press, 2000

What is history? How do we represent it? How do our notions of history change over time? The essays in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media probe the roles that cinema and television play in altering and complicating our understanding of historical events.

The book brings together representative examples of how both media critics and historians write about history as it is created and disseminated through film and television. The essays explore what is at stake culturally and politically in media history and how this form of history-making is different from traditional historiography. The volume is divided into four parts--Regarding History; History as Trauma; History, Fiction, and Postcolonial Memory; and History and Television--that progressively deepen our understanding of just how complex the issues are. Essays by top scholars analyze many different kinds of film: historical film, documentary, costume drama, and heritage films. The section on television is equally broad, examining phenomena as diverse as news broadcasts and Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War.

Contributors are Mbye Cham, George F. Custen, Mary Ann Doane, Richard Dienst, Taylor Downing, Gary Edgerton, Naomi Greene, Miriam Bratu Hansen, Sue Harper, Sumiko Higashi, Anton Kaes, Marcia Landy, Shawn Rosenheim, Robert A. Rosenstone, Pierre Sorlin, Maria Wyke, and Ismail Xavier.

[more]

front cover of The Historical Renaissance
The Historical Renaissance
New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture
Edited by Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The Historical Renaissance both exemplifies and examines the most influential current in contemporary studies of the English Renaissance: the effort to analyze the interplay between literature, history, and politics. The broad and varied manifestations of that effort are reflected in the scope of this collection. Rather than merely providing a sampler of any single critical movement, The Historical Renaissance represents the range of ways scholars and critics are fusing what many would once have distinguished as "literary" and "historical" concerns

The volume includes studies of mid-Tudor culture as well as of Elizabethan and Stuart periods.
The scope of the collection is also manifest in its list of contributors. They include historians and literary critics, and their work spans he spectrum from more traditional methods to those characteristic of what has been termed "New Historicism."One aim of the book is to investigate the apparent division between these older and more current approaches. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier evaluate the contemporary interest in historical studies of the Renaissance, relating it to previous developments in the field, surveying its achievements and limitations, and suggesting new directions for future work.
[more]

front cover of The Historicity of Experience
The Historicity of Experience
Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event
Krysztof Ziarek
Northwestern University Press, 2001
In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization.

The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience.
[more]

front cover of Histories of Infamy
Histories of Infamy
Francisco López de Gómara and the Ethics of Spanish Imperialism
Cristián A. Roa-de-la-Carrera
University Press of Colorado, 2005
"Roa-de-la-Carrera convincingly shows that Gómara, as well as other historians in the period, cannot easily ignore nor erase the contradictions of the Spanish colonial project."
- Luis Fernando Restrepo, University of Arkansas

“In an eloquent and thorough exegesis, Roa-de-la-Carrera reveals how and why López de Gómara, having written the best of all possible books in exultation of Spanish imperialism, nevertheless failed to convince the readers of his time."
- Susan Schroeder, Tulane University

In Histories of Infamy, Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera explores Francisco López de Gómara's (1511-ca.1559) attempt to ethically reconcile Spain's civilizing mission with the conquistadors' abuse and exploitation of Native peoples.

The most widely read account of the conquest in its time, Gómara's Historia general de las Indias y Conquista de México rationalized the conquistadors' crimes as unavoidable evils in the task of bringing "civilization" to the New World. Through an elaborate defense of Spanish imperialism, Gómara aimed to convince his readers of the merits of the conquest, regardless of the devastation it had wrought upon Spain's new subjects. Despite his efforts, Gómara's apologist text quickly fell into disrepute and became ammunition for Spain's critics. Evaluating the effectiveness of ideologies of colonization, Roa-de-la-Carrera's analysis will appeal to scholars in colonial studies and readers interested in the history of the Americas.

[more]

front cover of History and Legend
History and Legend
Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels
Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
University of Michigan Press, 1990
History, according to the Confucian tradition, was a “comprehensive mirror” for aid in government: it was part of the great Way (ta-tao), the tradition of the governing elite. Fiction, which was originally referred to as “the talk of the streets,” belonged to the small Way (hsia-tao), the tradition of the governed masses. In History and Legend: Ideas and Images in the Ming Historical Novels, Shelly Hsueh-Iun Chang maintains that the historical novels blended legends with historical fact, making them a medium of interplay between the elite and popular traditions.
 
This combination of influences in the historical novels was especially significant during the Ming dynasty because of the rise of both urban culture of great refinement and diversity and a popularizing vernacular designed to promote learning among all people. These two exuberant movements came together in the historical novel to propagate the difficult and complex Official Histories of the governing elite, as well as to adapt unofficial histories and fictitious narratives, thus opening the way to the influence of the common people in literature.
 
This book is the first study of the novels from a historical standpoint. Combining traditional historical research with new source material of the historical novels and with analytical strategies, Chang creates a three-dimensional picture of the “historical world” of the Ming people. Chang compares issues of the dynastic cycle and political legitimacy of a regime, human ambitions and immortality, ethics in the relations between historical personages and legendary heroes, ideals of government and grandiose imperial institutions, and supernatural power and the justice of history that emerged from the historical novels with those in the Official Histories and Confucian canon.
 
[more]

front cover of History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870
History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870
Florence Saunders Boos
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Florence S. Boos’s History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870 examines Morris’s literary development in the context of his Victorian contemporaries, probing the cross-influences of temperament, cultural ambiance, early reader reactions, and his restless search for an authentic poetic voice. Boos argues that to understand this development, we must understand how Morris reinterpreted and transformed medieval history and legend into modern guise. In doing so, Morris preserved a duality of privacy and detachment—the intimacy of personal lyrics and the detachment (and silences) of historical judgment.              
Boos’s study is the first to utilize surviving original manuscripts, periodical publications, and poems unpublished during Morris’s lifetime. History and Poetics in the Early Writings of William Morris, 1855–1870traces Morris’s literary evolution through his juvenile poems; the essays, poems, and prose romances of the Oxford and CambridgeMagazine; the startlingly original verses of The Defence of Guenevere; and the ten years of experimentation that preceded his two best-known epics, The Life and Deathof Jason and The Earthly Paradise. This book explores the young poet’s successive efforts to find a balancing ethical framework through poetry—a framework that was at once a motivation for action and a template for authentic, shared popular art, one that reemerges forcefully in his later work.
[more]

front cover of History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic
History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic
Michael Murrin
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Although the Renaissance epic was the principal literary means of representing war in its time, modern readers of the epic often lack a basic understanding of the history of warfare. Michael Murrin here offers the first analysis to bring an understanding of both the history of literature and the history of warfare to the study of the epic.

Analyzing English, Italian, and Iberian epics published between 1483 and 1610, Murrin focuses on particular aspects of warfare (cavalry clashes, old and new style sieges, the tactical use of the gun, naval warfare) and the responses to them by authors from Malory to Milton. Throughout, Murrin traces a parallel development in the art of war and in the epic as it emerged from the romance.

Murrin demonstrates that with new technology and increasing levels of carnage, the practice of war gradually drifted from traditional epic modes. But before changes in warfare completely doomed the tradition in which the epic was rooted, this crisis provoked an unprecedented range of experiment which marks heroic narrative in the late Renaissance and ultimately led to the epic without war.

A much-needed introduction to the neglected subject of warfare in epic literature, this work is an uncommonly wide-ranging exercise in comparative criticism that will appeal to historians and students of literature alike.
[more]

front cover of History by Hollywood, Second Edition
History by Hollywood, Second Edition
Robert Brent Toplin
University of Illinois Press, 2010

This newly updated edition of History by Hollywood explores the question of what happens to history when Hollywood filmmakers get their hands on it. With a fresh look at recent films and television productions such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Patriot, and John Adams, Robert Brent Toplin examines how filmmakers have interpreted American history through their movies. Toplin discusses how writers, producers, and directors become involved in making historical films, what influences their interpretations of the past, and the responses they make to the controversies their works excite. With a realistic appreciation of the challenges filmmakers face, he effectively measures the strengths and weaknesses of Hollywood's presentation of history in the films Mississippi Burning, JFK, Sergeant York, Missing, Bonnie and Clyde, Patton, All the President's Men, and Norma Rae.

[more]

front cover of History Films, Women, and Freud's Uncanny
History Films, Women, and Freud's Uncanny
By Susan E. Linville
University of Texas Press, 2004

History films were a highly popular genre in the 1990s, as Hollywood looked back at significant and troubling episodes from World War II, the Cold War era, and the techno-war in the Persian Gulf. As filmmakers attempted to confront and manage intractable elements of the American past, such as the trauma of war and the legacy of racism, Susan Linville argues that a surprising casualty occurred—the erasure of relevant facets of contemporary women's history.

In this book, Linville offers a sustained critique of the history film and its reduction of women to figures of ambivalence or absence. Historicizing and adapting Freud's concept of the uncanny and its relationship to the maternal body as the first home, she offers theoretically sophisticated readings of the films Midnight Clear, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Nixon, Courage Under Fire, Lone Star, and Limbo. She also demonstrates that the uncanny is not only a source of anxiety but also potentially a progressive force for eroding nostalgic ideals of nation and gender. Linville concludes with a close reading of a recent 9/11 documentary, showing how the patterns and motifs of 1990s history films informed it and what that means for our future.

[more]

front cover of History, Historians, and Autobiography
History, Historians, and Autobiography
Jeremy D. Popkin
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D. Popkin in History, Historians, and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography?

Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others, he reveals the contributions historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust.

An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, this work will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.
[more]

front cover of History Matters
History Matters
Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture
Ira Sadoff
University of Iowa Press, 2009
In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature.

Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history’s margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets—including John Ashbery, Olena Kaltyiak Davis, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O’Hara, and C. K. Williams—as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet’s capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.
[more]

front cover of History, Memory, and the Literary Left
History, Memory, and the Literary Left
Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968
John Lowney
University of Iowa Press, 2006
In this nuanced revisionist history of modern American poetry, John Lowney investigates the Depression era’s impact on late modernist American poetry from the socioeconomic crisis of the 1930s through the emergence of the new social movements of the 1960s. Informed by an ongoing scholarly reconsideration of 1930s American culture and concentrating on Left writers whose historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Lowney articulates the Left’s challenges to national collective memory and redefines the importance of late modernism in American literary history. The late modernist writers Lowney studies most closely---Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen---are not all customarily associated with the 1930s, nor are they commonly seen as literary peers. By examining these late modernist writers comparatively, Lowney foregrounds differences of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social class and region while emphasizing how each writer developed poetic forms that responded to the cultural politics and socioaesthetic debates of the 1930s. In so doing he calls into question the boundaries that have limited the scholarly dialogue about modern poetry.No other study of American poetry has considered the particular gathering of careers that Lowney considers. As poets whose collective historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the turmoil of the Depression and war years and the Cold War’s repression or rewriting of history, their diverse talents represent a distinct generational impact on U.S. and international literary history.
[more]

front cover of A History of English Literature
A History of English Literature
Alastair Fowler
Harvard University Press, 1987
This delightful introduction to English literature, engaging, readable, and wise, is enlivened by the opinions and pleasures of a fine scholar-critic. Historically, it ranges from the Middle Ages to the present, concentrating on British writing but glancing also at selected American and Commonwealth authors, and lingering over the works of key figures such as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dickens.
[more]

front cover of A History of Free Verse
A History of Free Verse
Chris Beyers
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
This book examines the most salient and misunderstood aspect of twentieth-century poetry, free verse. Although the form is generally approached as if it were one indissoluble lump, it is actually a group of differing poetic genres proceeding from much different assumptions. Separate chapters on T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, H.D., and William Carlos Williams elucidate many of these assumptions and procedures, while other chapters address more general theoretical questions and trace the continuity of Modern poetics in contemporary poetry. Taking a historical and aesthetic approach, this study demonstrates that many of the forms considered to have been invented in the Modern period actually extend underappreciated traditions. Not only does this book examine the classical influence on Modern poetry, it also features discussions of the poetics of John Milton, Abraham Cowley, Matthew Arnold, and a host of lesser-known poets. Throughout it is an investigation of the prosodic issues that free verse foregrounds, particularly those focusing on the reader's part in interpreting poetic rhythm.
[more]

front cover of A History of Horror
A History of Horror
Wheeler Winston Dixon
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre.

Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.

Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over fifty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
A History of Italian Literature
Revised Edition
Ernest Hatch Wilkins
Harvard University Press, 1974
At its first appearance in 1954, this book was hailed by reviewers as the best history of Italian literature ever written in the English language. Over the years it has gained a wide and appreciative circle of readers because it was written for all who are interested in Italian literature, whether or not they have any knowledge of the Italian language or any previous acquaintance with the literature of Italy. In the classroom it has proved to be a comprehensive yet concise introductory textbook; specialist and nonspecialist alike have found it both authoritative and exceptionally readable. This new edition allows the reader to survey Italian literature from 1200 right up to the present day.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter