A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY636 start with A start with A
Refined midnight oil.
Aulus Gellius (ca. AD 123–170) is known almost wholly from his Noctes Atticae, “Attic Nights,” so called because it was begun during the nights of an Attic winter. The work collects in twenty books (of Book VIII only the index is extant) interesting notes covering philosophy, history, biography, all sorts of antiquities, points of law, literary criticism, and lexicographic matters, explanations of old words, and questions of grammar. The work is valuable because of its many excerpts from other authors whose works are lost, and because of its evidence for people’s manners and occupations. At least some of the dramatic settings may be genuine occasions.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Attic Nights is in three volumes.
Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different options for performative pause—a phonetic phenomenon evidenced by phonology.
From the ubiquitous compositional pauses in sense and metrical surface structure, Audible Punctuation selects the pauses that, under specific phonetic circumstances, double as rests of some duration during a performance. In this way, Blankenborg identifies those places in the verses that a performer of Homeric poetry was most likely to have used as opportunities to pause. The distribution of pauses over Homer’s hexameters proves to be irregular and unpredictable because phonological phrases and grammatical clauses differ considerably in the way they terminate. The mismatch of prosodic and other levels of phrasing draws attention to the need to reassess stylistic issues, notably enjambment.
Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies is the first book to systematically document and thoroughly investigate Lorde's influence beyond the United States. Arranged in three thematically interrelated sections—Archives, Connections, and Work—the volume brings together scholarly essays, interviews, Lorde's unpublished speech about Europe, and personal reflections and testimonials from key figures throughout the world. Using a range of interdisciplinary approaches, contributors assess the reception, translation, and circulation of Lorde's writing and activism within different communities, audiences, and circles. They also shed new light on the work Lorde inspired across disciplinary borders.
In addition the volume editors, contributors include Sarah Cefai, Cassandra Ellerbe-Dueck, Paul M. Farber, Tiffany N. Florvil, Katharina Gerund, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Gloria Joseph, Jackie Kay, Marion Kraft, Christiana Lambrinidis, Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, Rina Nissim, Chantal Oakes, Lester C. Olson, Pratibha Parmar, Peggy Piesche, Dagmar Schultz, Tamara Lea Spira, and Gloria Wekker.
Augustine of Hippo, a central figure in the history of Western thought, is also the author of a theory of reading that has had a profound influence on Western letters from the ages of Petrarch, Montaigne, Luther, and Rousseau to those of Freud and our own time. Brian Stock provides the first full account of this theory within the evolution of Augustine’s early dialogues, his Confessions, and his systematic treatises.
Augustine was convinced that words and images play a mediating role in our perceptions of reality. In the union of philosophy, psychology, and literary insights that forms the basis of his theory of reading, the reader emerges as the dominant model of the reflective self. Meditative reading, indeed the meditative act that constitutes reading itself, becomes the portal to inner being. At the same time, Augustine argues that the self-knowledge reading brings is, of necessity, limited, since it is faith rather than interpretive reason that can translate reading into forms of understanding.
In making his theory of reading a central concern, Augustine rethinks ancient doctrines about images, memory, emotion, and cognition. In judging what readers gain and do not gain from the sensory and mental understanding of texts, he takes up questions that have reappeared in contemporary thinking. He prefigures, and in a way he teaches us to recognize, our own preoccupations with the phenomenology of reading, the hermeneutics of tradition, and the ethics of interpretation.
The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton rewrites the history of the Renaissance Vergilian epic by incorporating the neo-Latin side of the story alongside the vernacular one, revealing how epics spoke to each other "across the language gap" and together comprised a single, "Augustinian tradition" of epic poetry. Beginning with Petrarch's Africa, Warner offers major new interpretations of Renaissance epics both famous and forgotten—from Milton's Paradise Lost to a Latin Christiad by his near-contemporary, Alexander Ross—thereby shedding new light on the development of the epic genre. For advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the fields of Italian, English, and Comparative literatures as well as the Classics and the history of religion and literature.
A master of the jeweled style.
Ausonius (Decimus Magnus), ca. AD 310–ca. 395, a doctor’s son, was born at Burdigala (Bordeaux). After a good education in grammar and rhetoric and a short period during which he was an advocate, he took to teaching rhetoric in a school that he began in the University of Bordeaux in 334. Among his students was Paulinus, who was afterwards Bishop of Nola; and he seems to have become some sort of Christian himself. Thirty years later Ausonius was called by Emperor Valentinian to be tutor to Gratian, who subsequently as emperor conferred on him honors including a consulship in 379. In 383, after Gratian’s murder, Ausonius retired to Bordeaux.
Ausonius’ surviving works, some with deep feeling, some composed it seems for fun, some didactic, include much poetry: poems about himself and family, notably “The Daily Round”; epitaphs on heroes in the Trojan War, memorials on Roman emperors, and epigrams on various subjects; poems about famous cities and about friends and colleagues. “The Moselle,” a description of that river, is among the most admired of his poems. There is also an address of thanks to Gratian for the consulship.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ausonius is in two volumes; the second includes Eucharisticus (“Thanksgiving”) by Paulinus Pellaeus.
A master of the jeweled style.
Ausonius (Decimus Magnus), ca. AD 310–ca. 395, a doctor’s son, was born at Burdigala (Bordeaux). After a good education in grammar and rhetoric and a short period during which he was an advocate, he took to teaching rhetoric in a school that he began in the University of Bordeaux in 334. Among his students was Paulinus, who was afterwards Bishop of Nola; and he seems to have become some sort of Christian himself. Thirty years later Ausonius was called by Emperor Valentinian to be tutor to Gratian, who subsequently as emperor conferred on him honors including a consulship in 379. In 383, after Gratian’s murder, Ausonius retired to Bordeaux.
Ausonius’ surviving works, some with deep feeling, some composed it seems for fun, some didactic, include much poetry: poems about himself and family, notably “The Daily Round”; epitaphs on heroes in the Trojan War, memorials on Roman emperors, and epigrams on various subjects; poems about famous cities and about friends and colleagues. “The Moselle,” a description of that river, is among the most admired of his poems. There is also an address of thanks to Gratian for the consulship.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Ausonius is in two volumes; the second includes Eucharisticus (“Thanksgiving”) by Paulinus Pellaeus.
Contemporary Australian fiction is attracting a world audience, particularly in the United States, where a growing readership eagerly awaits new works. In Australian Voices, Ray Willbanks goes beyond the books to their authors, using sixteen interviews to reveal the state of fiction writing in Australia—what nags from the past, what engages the imagination for the future.
Willbanks engages the writers in lively discussions of their own work, as well as topics of collective interest such as the past, including convict times; the nature of the land; the treatment of Aborigines; national identity and national flaws; Australian-British antipathy; sexuality and feminism; drama and film; writing, publishing, and criticism in Australia; and the continuous and pervasive influence of the United States on Australia.
The interviews in Australian Voices are gossipy, often funny, and always informative, as Willbanks builds a structured conversation that reveals biography, personality, and significant insight into the works of each writer. They will be important for both scholars and the reading public.
Authentic Blackness looks at the place of the “folk”—those African Americans “furthest down,” in the words of Alain Locke—and how the representation of the folk and the black middle class both spurred the New Negro Movement and became one of its most serious points of contention. Drawing on vernacular theories of African American literature from such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Houston Baker as well as theorists Judith Butler and Stuart Hall, Favor looks closely at the work of four Harlem Renaissance fiction writers: James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and Jean Toomer. Arguing that each of these writers had, at best, an ambiguous relationship to African American folk culture, Favor demonstrates how they each sought to redress the notion of a fixed black identity. Authentic Blackness illustrates how “race” has functioned as a type of performative discourse, a subjectivity that simultaneously builds and conceals its connections with such factors as class, gender, sexuality, and geography.
In Authentic Writing, Jeff Rice uses this question to trace a position regarding critique, the role of the scholar, the role of the personal in scholarship, the banal as subject matter, and the idea of authenticity. He explores authenticity as a writing issue, a rhetorical issue, a consumption issue, a culture issue, and an ideological issue. Rather than arguing for a more authentic state or practice, Rice examines the rhetorical features of authenticity in order to expand the focus of scholarship.
This comprehensive study of the Russian literary travelogue, a genre that blossomed in the early nineteenth century, sheds new light on Russian literature and culture of the period.
In the decades before and during the rise of the Russian novel, a new form of prose writing took hold in Russia: travel accounts, often fictional, marked by a fully developed narrator's voice, interpretive impressions, scenic descriptions, and extended narrative. Prompted in part by the growth of leisure travel and in part by publication of Western European examples of travel writing, the genre attracted the talents of numerous writers, including Radishchev, Karamzin, and Pushkin. In illuminating analyses of major texts as well as lesser known but influential works, Andreas Schönle surveys the literary travelogue from its emergence in Russia to the end of the Romantic era. His study offers new insight on the construction of the authorial persona and on the emergence of fiction in a culture that valued nonfiction writing.
Through close examination of four writers, Unseld shows how the author's personality can affect the publisher's dilemma. Hermann Hesse, by virtue of his loyalty and his desire for financial independence, enjoyed an exemplary relationship with his publishers. With Bertolt Brecht it was all confusion; with Rainer Maria Rilke, a one-author-one-publisher lifetime alliance; with Swiss poet Robert Walser, a mire of difficulties ("Each book printed," he once said, was "a grave for its author").
The Prometheus Bound has proved to be both the most problematic and the most influential of extant Greek tragedies. Especially during the past two hundred years the character here created has transcended the boundaries of nationality, ideology, and race: Goethe, Shelley, Marx, and—to judge by other published translations—modern Russia and China have in turn been fascinated by this being who is tortured by the gods for furthering the progress of humanity. Yet the interpretation of the play itself and its relation to the group of now-lost plays with which it was originally produced continue to arouse violent controversy. At the center of the controversy stand the questions, raised with increasing urgency during the twentieth century, whether the play is by Aeschylus at all and when it was written.
This monograph attempts a systematic answer to these questions. It first surveys the general conditions of the authenticity problem as they appeared after the redating of Aeschylus’ Supplices. Next, it catalogues in detail the stylistic, metrical, and thematic features of the Prometheus that have been supposed to tell against Aeschylus’ authorship. Finally, it suggests that these phenomena will not make sense on the assumption that the play was written by anyone other than Aeschylus, and that the date of composition must fall after the Oresteia, in the last two years of Aeschylus’ life. Given this definite context and date, many of the apparent problems of the Prometheus Bound either fall away or at least can be more precisely formulated by reference to the other extant tragedies of Aeschylus’ latest phase.
An exploration of the darker corners of ancient Rome to spotlight the strange sorcery of anonymous literature.
From Banksy to Elena Ferrante to the unattributed parchments of ancient Rome, art without clear authorship fascinates and even offends us. Classical scholarship tends to treat this anonymity as a problem or game—a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. Author Unknown is the first book to consider anonymity as a site of literary interest rather than a gap that needs filling. We can tether each work to an identity, or we can stand back and ask how the absence of a name affects the meaning and experience of literature.
Tom Geue turns to antiquity to show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature. Anonymity supported the illusion of Augustus’s sprawling puppet mastery (Res Gestae), controlled and destroyed the victims of a curse (Ovid’s Ibis), and created out of whole cloth a poetic persona and career (Phaedrus’s Fables). To assume these texts are missing something is to dismiss a source of their power and presume that ancient authors were as hungry for fame as today’s.
In this original look at Latin literature, Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time.
Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each.
For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages.
The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Autistic Disturbances pursues these resonances and explores the tensions of language and culture that lead to the classification of some verbal expression as disordered while other, similar expression enjoys prized status as literature. It identifies the most characteristic patterns of autistic expression-repetition, monologue, ejaculation, verbal ordering or list-making, and neologism-and adopts new language to describe and reimagine these categories in aesthetically productive terms. In so doing, the book seeks to redress the place of verbal autistic language, to argue for the value and complexity of autistic ways of speaking, and to invite recognition of an obscured tradition of literary autism at the very center of Anglo-American text culture.
"Pamuk is a writer who shares my reverence for the great art of the novel. He takes the novel seriously in a way that is perhaps no longer possible for Western writers, boldly describing it as European civilization’s greatest invention."—Michael McGaha
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk is a prominent voice in Turkish literature, speaking to the country’s history, culture, and politics. In 2006, he became the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk is the first book-length study of the life and writings of Pamuk. It provides both a historical and cultural context that will help readers better understand and appreciate both the man and his work. It begins with a brief biography, outlines Pamuk’s contributions to Turkish literature and history, examines how his art has evolved over the past thirty years, and discusses some of the writers who provided inspiration. Though his books deal with specifically Turkish issues, like all great literature the themes they explore are universal. In addition to a thorough analysis of his seven published novels, including Snow and My Name is Red, an entire chapter is devoted to his first two novels, Cevdet Bey and Sons and The Silent House, which have yet to be translated into English.
This is a comprehensive examination of the Nobel laureate’s work, free of jargon and of interest to anyone who enjoys good literature.
When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.
Pagans’ advocate.
A professing pagan in an aggressively Christian empire, a friend of the emperor Julian and acquaintance of St. Basil, a potent spokesman for private and political causes—Libanius can tell us much about the tumultuous world of the fourth century.
Born in Antioch to a wealthy family steeped in the culture and religious traditions of Hellenism, Libanius rose to fame as a teacher of the classics in a period of rapid social change. In his lifetime Libanius was an acknowledged master of the art of letter writing. Today his letters—about 1550 of which survive—offer an enthralling self-portrait of this combative pagan publicist and a vivid picture of the culture and political intrigues of the eastern empire. A. F. Norman selects one eighth of the extant letters, which come from two periods in Libanius’ life, AD 355–365 and 388–393, letters written to Julian, churchmen, civil officials, scholars, and his many influential friends. The Letters are complemented, in this two-volume edition, by Libanius’ Autobiography (Oration 1), a revealing narrative that begins as a scholar’s account and ends as an old man’s private journal.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Orations.
Pagans’ advocate.
A professing pagan in an aggressively Christian empire, a friend of the emperor Julian and acquaintance of St. Basil, a potent spokesman for private and political causes—Libanius can tell us much about the tumultuous world of the fourth century.
Born in Antioch to a wealthy family steeped in the culture and religious traditions of Hellenism, Libanius rose to fame as a teacher of the classics in a period of rapid social change. In his lifetime Libanius was an acknowledged master of the art of letter writing. Today his letters—about 1550 of which survive—offer an enthralling self-portrait of this combative pagan publicist and a vivid picture of the culture and political intrigues of the eastern empire. A. F. Norman selects one eighth of the extant letters, which come from two periods in Libanius’ life, AD 355–365 and 388–393, letters written to Julian, churchmen, civil officials, scholars, and his many influential friends. The Letters are complemented, in this two-volume edition, by Libanius’ Autobiography (Oration 1), a revealing narrative that begins as a scholar’s account and ends as an old man’s private journal.
Also available in the Loeb Classical Library is a two-volume edition of Libanius’ Orations.
A bold challenge to established scholarship, Autochthonomies ranges from Africa to Europe and the Americas to provide powerful new tools for charting the transnational interactions between African cultural producers and sites.
In Available Surfaces, T. R. Hummer explores the art of making both poetry and music, and of the concept of "making" itself. He draws on childhood experiences and experiences as an adult, as a poet, and as an explorer of unworldly spaces to examine that "something ineffable about the process of making of which the poem is the exemplary artifact."
Hummer grew up in the deep South, and spent many of his high school years playing saxophone in various rock and roll bands before he met poetry. This musical influence is visible in his work: he often discusses poetry together with music, or music with poetry, and his career has included both writing and performance.
The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America examines the canonical Latin American avant-garde texts of the 1920s and 1930s in novels, travel writing, journalism, and poetry, and presents them in a new light as formulators of modern Western culture and precursors of global culture. Particular focus is placed on the work of Roberto Arlt and Mário de Andrade as exemplars of the movement.
Fernando J. Rosenberg provides a theoretical historiography of Latin American literature and the role that modernity and avant-gardism played in it. He finds significant parallels between the cultural battles of the interwar years in Latin America and current debates over the role of the peripheral nation-state within the culture of globalization. Rosenberg establishes that the Latin American avant-garde evolved on its own terms, in polemic dialogue with the European movements, critiquing modernity itself and developing a global geopolitical awareness. In the process these writers created a bridge between postcolonial and postmodern culture, forming a distinct movement that continues its influence today.
The remarkable story of seven contemporary Russian-language poets whose experimental work anchors a thriving dissident artistic movement opposed to both Putin’s regime and Western liberalism.
What does leftist art look like in the wake of state socialism? In recent years, Russian-language avant-garde poetry has been seeking the answers to this question. Marijeta Bozovic follows a constellation of poets at the center of a contemporary literary movement that is bringing radical art out of the Soviet shadow: Kirill Medvedev, Pavel Arseniev, Aleksandr Skidan, Dmitry Golynko, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov, and Galina Rymbu. While their formal experiments range widely, all share a commitment to explicitly political poetry. Each one, in turn, has become a hub in a growing new-left network across the former Second World.
Joined together by their work with the Saint Petersburg–based journal [Translit], this circle has staunchly resisted the Putin regime and its mobilization of Soviet nostalgia. At the same time, the poets of Avant-Garde Post– reject Western discourse about the false promises of leftist utopianism and the superiority of the liberal world. In opposing both narratives, they draw on the legacies of historical Russian and Soviet avant-gardes as well as on an international canon of Marxist art and theory. They are also intimately connected with other artists, intellectuals, and activists around the world, collectively restoring leftist political poetry to global prominence.
The avant-garde, Bozovic shows, is not a relic of the Soviet past. It is a recurrent pulse in Russophone—as well as global—literature and art. Charged by that pulse, today’s new left is reimagining class-based critique. Theirs is an ongoing, defiant effort to imagine a socialist future that is at once global and egalitarian.
The Avant-Postman explores a broad range of innovative postwar writing from France, Britain, and the United States. Taking James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a joint starting point, David Vichnar draws genealogical lines from there through the work of more than fifty writers up to very recent years, including William Burroughs, B. S. Johnson, Ian Sinclair, Kathy Acker, Alan Moore, David Foster Wallace, and many others. Centering the exploration around five strategies employed by Joyce—narrative parallax, stylistic metempsychosis, concrete writing, forgery, and neologizing the logos—the book reveals the striking continuities and developments from Joyce’s day to our own.
Cities both near and far communicate in a variety of ways. Travel between, through, and among urban centers initiates contact, and cities themselves are sites of ever-changing cultural and historical encounters. Predictable and surprising challenges and opportunities arise when city borders are crossed, voices meet, and artistic traditions find their counterparts. Using the Latin word for “translation,” translatio, or “to carry across,” as a point of departure, Avenues of Translation explores how translation perpetuates, diversifies, deepens, and expands the literary production of cities in their greater cultural context, and how translation shapes an understanding of and access to a city's past and present literary and cultural practices. Thinking about translation and the city is a way to tell the backstories of the cities, texts, and authors that are united by acts of translation.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
A comprehensive volume on the life and work of renowned Chicana author Sandra Cisneros.
Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. ¡Ay Tú! is the first book to offer a comprehensive, critical examination of her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new longform interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.
As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation, situating her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.
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