A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY720 start with C start with C
Considering the poems in the context of the fascicles, Cameron argues that an essential refusal of choice pervades all aspects of Dickinson's poetry. Because Dickinson never chose whether she wanted her poems read as single lyrics or in sequence (nor is it clear where any fascicle text ends, or even how, in context, a poem is bounded), "not choosing" is a textual issue; it is also a formal issue because Dickinson refused to chose among poetic variants; it is a thematic issue; and, finally, it is a philosophical one, since what is produced by "not choosing" is a radical indifference to difference. Extending the readings of Dickinson offered in her earlier book Lyric Time, Cameron continues to enlarge our understanding of the work of this singular American poet.
Christianity and Comics presents an 80-year history of the various ways that the comics industry has drawn from biblical source material. It explores how some publishers specifically targeted Christian audiences with titles like Catholic Comics, books featuring heroic versions of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, and special religious-themed editions of Archie. But it also considers how popular mainstream comics like Daredevil, The Sandman, Ghost Rider, and Batman are infused with Christian themes and imagery.
Comics scholar Blair Davis pays special attention to how the medium’s unique use of panels, word balloons, captions, and serialized storytelling have provided vehicles for telling familiar biblical tales in new ways. Spanning the Golden Age of comics to the present day, this book charts how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans’ changing attitudes towards religion.
This book—the first full-length study of the “last and most beautiful” apology against paganism, Theodoret’s Therapeutic for Hellenic Maladies—combines close readings of the text with detailed analysis of Theodoret’s arguments against Greek religion, philosophy, and culture and the ways in which that Greek influence interacts with other diverse ideas, practices, and developments in the fifth-century Roman empire.
The book’s larger underlying themes—the continuing debate between Christianity and Hellenism, and the relationship between classical and Christian literature—offer insights into more general late Roman and early Byzantine religious and cultural attitudes and issues, including the relations between pagan and Christian paideia, the cult of the martyrs, and the role of Christianity in the Roman empire.
When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production.
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,
Readers do not always take into account how books that combine image and text make their meanings. But for the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, such considerations were central.
Christina Rossetti and Illustration maps the production and reception of Rossetti’s illustrated poetry, devotional prose, and work for children, both in the author’s lifetime and in posthumous twentieth-century reprints.
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s reading of Rossetti’s illustrated works reveals for the first time the visual-verbal aesthetic that was fundamental to Rossetti’s poetics. Her exhaustive archival research brings to light new information on how Rossetti’s commitment to illustration and attitudes to copyright and control influenced her transactions with publishers and the books they produced. Janzen Kooistra also tracks the poet’s reception in the twentieth century through a complex web of illustrated books produced for a wide range of audiences.
Analyzing an impressive array of empirical data, Janzen Kooistra shows how Rossetti’s packaging for commodity consumption—by religious presses, publishers of academic editions and children’s picture books, and makers of erotica and collectibles—influenced the reception of her work and her place in literary history.
Christina Rossetti was considered the ideal female poet of her time. Her poetry was devotional, moral, and spoke of frustrated affection.
Dolores Rosenblum presents a fresh reading of Rossetti’s works and places them in the context of her life. Rosenblum shows that what was ostensibly devotional, moral, and loveless, was actually what Luce Irigaray calls “mimetism,” a subtle parody and subversion of the male tradition of literature.
Only with the coming of feminist criticism can Rossetti be meaningfully re-evaluated. Rosenblum calls Rossetti’s works the “poetry of endurance,” stating that it is similar, and at times identical, to the female “sentimental” tradition in literature. Rossetti endured the constraints of the Victorian female artistic spirit by becoming a “watcher.” Within this self-accepted role, Rossetti was able to carefully and deliberately choose artistic self-protection. In her religious poetry, Rossetti transcended, by aesthetic renunciation, the alienation and immobilization forced upon her.
Rossetti’s poetry is full of paradox; it sings about silence, exposes the poet’s oblivion. From the repining Victorian poet, there emerged a “stone woman.” Rosenblum discusses this passively enduring female figure’s alienation from knowledge and power, and how the myth of self strengthened the lyric voice within her. Because she was a woman, she was denied the male use of the lyric “I.”
Rossetti’s work is unified, Rosenblum argues, because she was a deliberate poet, and by accepting the “burden of womanhood,” she played out what men only symbolized as female in their art. By her mimicry and revision of the male tradition of literature, Christina Rossetti engaged the patriarchal tradition in ways that make it usable for the female experience, and that provide a critique of male objectification of women in art.
Solovieva’s survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council of Constance, Lavater’s counter-Enlightenment visions of the afterlife expressd through physiognomy, Dostoevsky’s refashioning of ethical communities, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s attempts to provoke the “scandal” of Jesus’s mission once more in the modern world, and the elaboration of a political theology subordinating democratic dissent to the higher unity of a corporately conceived “unitary executive” in early twenty-first-century America.
Solovieva presents her findings not as an entry into theological or Christological debates but rather as a study in comparative discourse analysis. She demonstrates how these uses of Christ’s body are triggered by moments of epistemological, political, and representational crisis in the history of Western civilization.
Although there have been substantial contributions to Chicana literature and criticism over the past few decades, Chicanas are still underrepresented and underappreciated in the mainstream literary world and virtually nonexistent in the canon. Writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa have managed to find larger audiences and critical respect, but there are legions of Chicana writers and artists who have been marginalized and ignored despite their talent. Even in Chicano anthologies, the focus has tended to be more on male writers. Chicanas have often found themselves without a real home in the academic world.
Tey Diana Rebolledo has been writing about Chicana/Latina identity, literature, discrimination, and feminism for more than two decades. In this collection of essays, she brings together both old and new works to give a state-of-the-moment look at the still largely unanswered questions raised by vigilant women of color throughout the last half of the twentieth century. An intimate introductory essay about Rebolledo's personal experiences as the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Peruvian father serves to lay the groundwork for the rest of the volume. The essays delve into the historical development of Chicana writing and its early narratives, the representation of Chicanas as seen on book covers, Chicana feminism, being a Chicana critic in the academy, Chicana art history, and Chicana creativity. Rebolledo encourages "guerrillera" warfare against academia in order to open up the literary canon to Chicana/Latina writers who deserve validation.
As Krostenko demonstrates, a key feature of this language is its capacity to express both approval and disdain—an artifact of its origins at a time when the "style" and "charm" of imported Greek cultural practices were greeted with both enthusiasm and hostility. Cicero played on that ambiguity, for example, by chastising lepidus ("fine") boys in the "Second Oration against Catiline" as degenerates, then arguing in his De Oratore that the successful speaker must have a certain charming lepos ("wit"). Catullus, in turn, exploited and inverted the political subtexts of this language for innovative poetic and erotic idioms.
The most important literary dispute of the Renaissance pitted those writers of Neo-Latin who favored imitation of Cicero alone, as the single best exemplar of Latin prose, against those who preferred to follow an eclectic array of literary models. This Ciceronian controversy is the subject of the texts collected for the first time in this volume: exchanges of letters between Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi; between Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Pietro Bembo; and between Giovambattista Giraldi Cinzio and his mentor Celio Calcagnini. A postscript by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi and writings by Antonio Possevino comment further on this correspondence.
Because they address some of the most fundamental aspects of literary production, these quarrels shed light on similar debates about vernacular literature, which also turned on imitation and the role of the author. The Ciceronian controversy can also be seen as part of larger cultural movements, such as the choice of vernacular language over Latin, the development of Jesuit pedagogy, and the religious conflicts that characterized much of the Renaissance.
Cien años de identidad: Introducción a la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX [One Hundred Years of Identity: Introduction to Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature] is an advanced Spanish textbook and Latin American literature anthology, guiding students through the critical analysis of fourteen literary and filmic texts published between 1889 and 1995, including works from Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez that represent some of the seminal works of Latin America. The textbook is designed to introduce students to the richness of twentieth-century Latin American literature and culture while building their skills in textual analysis through an examination of the theme of identity. The featured texts examine the complex and multifaceted topic of identity as the authors and protagonists struggle to understand themselves, determine their relationship to the world and others, and give meaning and significance to their existence. The textbook guides students step-by-step through critical analysis by presenting a range of tools and progressing from simple to more complex exercises and activities throughout the book. It is divided into four units based on various types of identity formation: (1) racial, ethnic, gender, and class identity; (2) existential(ist) identity; (3) temporal and spatial identity; (4) political and sexual identity. Serving as both a Latin American literature anthology and an upper-level Spanish textbook, Cien años de identidad aims to hone reading and interpretive strategies while also improving Spanish vocabulary and comprehension, oral and written communication, and cultural competency.
Features:
•Complete unabridged works from the following authors: Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Rosario Castellanos, Julio Cortázar, Rubén Darío, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, José Martí, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Sergio Vodanovic•Complete pedagogy included for the novel El beso de la mujer araña by Manuel Puig and the film Fresa y chocolate by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, although these two works are not anthologized in the textbook•Additional cultural contexts and author biographies for each text, as well as appropriate glosses and numbered lines for easy reference in class discussions•Four end-of-unit chapters focused on comparative literature strategies that are designed to coach students on how to compare authors and texts across common themes and further improve critical analysis strategies•Seventeen post-reading quizzes or homework assignments as well as a final examination, available to instructors only through the publisher's website
“More than fifteen years ago,” Jacques Derrida writes in the prologue to this remarkable and uniquely revealing book, “a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me. . . . It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: ‘cinders there are’ (il y a là cendre). . . . I had to explain myself to it, respond to it—or for it.”
In Cinders Derrida ranges across his work from the previous twenty years and discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. For Derrida, cinders or ashes—at once fragile and resilient—are “the better paradigm for what I call the trace—something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself.”
In a style that is both highly condensed and elliptical, Cinders offers probing reflections on the relation of language to truth, writing, the voice, and the complex connections between the living and the dead. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust (both a word—from the Greek hólos, “whole,” and kaustós, “burnt”—and a historical event that invokes ashes) in contemporary poetry and philosophy. In turning from the texts of other philosophers to his own, Cinders enables readers to follow the trajectory from Derrida’s early work on the trace, the gramma, and the voice to his later writings on life, death, time, and the spectral.
Among the most accessible of this renowned philosopher’s many writings, Cinders is an evocative and haunting work of poetic self-analysis that deepens our understanding of Derrida’s critical and philosophical vision.
Engaging in fresh ways with revelatory special effects in the history of cinematic storytelling—from Buster Keaton’s breaching of the film screen in Sherlock Jr. to the pixel disintegration of a remotely projected hologram in Blade Runner 2049—Stewart’s book puts unprecedented emphasis on technique in moving image narrative. Complicating and revising the discourse on historical screen processes, Cinemachines will be crucial reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the movies from a celluloid to a digital medium.
Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.
Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.
Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives
The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life.
Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences.
Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language.
The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the state of our democracy. Classrooms, newspapers, magazines, Internet forums, and many other places grant citizens a place to hold public discourses—and claim a voice on national artistic matters.
Rosa A. Eberly looks at four censorship controversies where professionals asserted their authority to deny citizen critics a voice—and effectively removed discussion of literature from the public sphere. Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho and Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates—and undercut the authority of citizen critics—by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity.
Among the many questions Julia Reinhard Lupton attempts to answer under the rubric of the citizen-saint are: how did states of emergency, acts of sovereign exception, and Messianic anticipations lead to new forms of religious and political law? What styles of universality were implied by the abject state of the pure creature, at sea in a creation abandoned by its creator? And how did circumcision operate as both a marker of ethnicity and a means of conversion and civic naturalization?
Written with clarity and grace, Citizen-Saints will be of enormous interest to students of English literature, religion, and early modern culture.
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women–the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere.
Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home.
Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families.
In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity.
Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In addition to acknowledging familiar themes in the interpretation of the Republic—the sincerity of its utopianism, the justice of the philosopher's return to the Cave—Ferrari provocatively engages secondary literature by Leo Strauss, Bernard Williams, and Jonathan Lear. With admirable clarity and insight, Ferrari conveys the relation between the city and the soul and the choice between tyranny and philosophy. City and Soul in Plato's Republic will be of value to students of classics, philosophy, and political theory alike.
When a self-proclaimed "lazy scholar" embarks on a trip through his life's influences--as diverse as girl-group doo-wop, Yeats, and Van Gogh--readers are in for an illuminating ride. This collection of essays from cultural critic Di Piero veers from his early years as the son of immigrants in Philadelphia to his working life in art, film, music, and poetry. Along with a few choice essays reprinted from out-of-print collections, Di Piero's new work shows him to be insightful about himself and his work despite his protestations against the "boosterism" of autobiography. Through the lens of his sharp artistic analysis, readers see his story--an immigrant story filled with the music and mystery of a multilingual family, the men of his neighborhood wearing so many hats as they worked--as the auspicious beginning for his life of observation and revelation. His prose sings along, tripping across slang, poetry, and painters with the same precision that allows him to nearly dance about architecture. Though Di Piero would claim that his life's path "lurches and swerves," his essays prove that he has wandered expansively and with purpose--a city dog trotting across continents, along pages, and through galleries.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
A Church Father’s theological citadel.
Aurelius Augustine (AD 354–430), one of the most important figures in the development of western Christianity and philosophy, was the son of a pagan, Patricius of Tagaste, and his Christian wife, Monnica. While studying to become a rhetorician, he plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts, leading him to Manichaeism. In 383 he moved to Rome and then Milan to teach rhetoric. Despite exploring classical philosophical systems, especially skepticism and Neoplatonism, his studies of Paul’s letters with his friend Alypius, and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose, led in 386 to his momentous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. He soon returned to Tagaste and founded a religious community, and in 395 or 396 became bishop of Hippo.
From Augustine’s large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions (in two volumes); On the City of God (seven volumes), which unfolds God’s action in the progress of the world’s history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over pagan in adversity; and a selection of Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical theologians.
Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.
The stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.
Contributors:
Lieven Ameel, Juliane Borosch, Barbara Buchenau, Florian Deckers, Barbara Eckstein, Kornelia Freitag, Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Jens Martin Gurr, Elisabeth Haefs, Chris Katzenberg, Johannes Maria Krickl, Renee M. Moreno, Hanna Rodewald, Julia Sattler, Maria Sulimma, James A. Throgmorton, Michael Wala, Katharina Wood
This richly suggestive book examines the common bonds of thought and shared manner of expression that unite Jewish writers working in America, Eastern Europe, and Israel. Murray Baumgarten shows how Jewish traditions are reflected in the themes and narrative style of a diverse group of writers, including Saul Bellow, Henry Roth, Sholom Aleichen, Isaac Babel, and S.Y. Agnon.
Baumgarten finds in these writers a distinctive and symbolic use of the urban scene arid style of life—whether the city is Brooklyn, Chicago, Vienna, Warsaw, Odessa, or Jerusalem. He examines the pariah stance, and the different kinds of tension between freedom from communal ties and the pull of traditional culture. He demonstrates how Yiddish can flavor and inflect the syntax, how scripture can permeate the thinking and narrative devices, in writers of various nationalities.
Jazz music, Clark argues, demonstrates how this aesthetic rhetoric of identification can bind people together through their shared experience in a common project. While such shared experience does not demand agreement—indeed, it often has an air of competition—it does align people in practical effort and purpose. Similarly, Clark shows, Burke considered Americans inhabitants of a persistently rhetorical situation, in which each must choose constantly to identify with some and separate from others. Thought-provoking and path-breaking, Clark’s harmonic mashup of music and rhetoric will appeal to scholars across disciplines as diverse as political science, performance studies, musicology, and literary criticism.
Citizenship defines the U.S. political experiment, but the modern legal category that it now names is a relatively recent invention. There was no Constitutional definition of citizenship until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, almost a century after the Declaration of Independence. Civic Longing looks at the fascinating prehistory of U.S. citizenship in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, when the cultural and juridical meaning of citizenship—as much as its scope—was still up for grabs. Carrie Hyde recovers the numerous cultural forms through which the meaning of citizenship was provisionally made and remade in the early United States.
Civic Longing offers the first historically grounded account of the formative political power of the imaginative traditions that shaped early debates about citizenship. In the absence of a centralized legal definition of citizenship, Hyde shows, politicians and writers regularly turned to a number of highly speculative traditions—political philosophy, Christian theology, natural law, fiction, and didactic literature—to authorize visions of what citizenship was or ought to be. These speculative traditions sustained an idealized image of citizenship by imagining it from its outer limits, from the point of view of its “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects.
By recovering the strange, idiosyncratic meanings of citizenship in the early United States, Hyde provides a powerful critique of originalism, and challenges anachronistic assumptions that read the definition of citizenship backward from its consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century as jus soli or birthright citizenship.
Michael J. Lazzara boldly argues that today's Chile is a product of both complicity and complacency. Combining historical analysis with deft literary, political, and cultural critique, he scrutinizes the post-Pinochet rationalizations made by politicians, artists, intellectuals, bystanders, former revolutionaries-turned-neoliberals, and common citizens. He looks beyond victims and perpetrators to unveil the ambiguous, ethically vexed realms of memory and experience that authoritarian regimes inevitably generate.
The struggle that ended the Roman Republic.
Caesar (C. Iulius, 102–44 BC), statesman and soldier, defied the dictator Sulla; served in the Mithridatic wars and in Spain; entered Roman politics as a “democrat” against the senatorial government; was the real leader of the coalition with Pompey and Crassus; conquered all Gaul for Rome; attacked Britain twice; was forced into civil war; became master of the Roman world; and achieved wide-reaching reforms until his murder. We have his books of commentarii (notes): eight on his wars in Gaul from 58–52 BC, including the two expeditions to Britain in 55–54, and three on the civil war of 49–48. They are records of his own campaigns (with occasional digressions) in vigorous, direct, clear, unemotional style and in the third person, the account of the civil war being somewhat more impassioned.
This edition of the Civil War replaces the earlier Loeb Classical Library edition by A. G. Peskett (1914) with new text, translation, introduction, and bibliography. In the Loeb Classical Library edition of Caesar, Volume I is his Gallic War; Volume III consists of Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War, commonly ascribed to Caesar by our manuscripts but of uncertain authorship.
As a subgenre of war literature, the Civil War nurse narrative offered realistic reportage of medical experiences and declined to engage with military strategies or Congressional politics. Instead, nurse narrators chronicled the details of attending wounded soldiers in the hospital, where a kind of microcosm of US democracy-in-progress emerged. As the war reshaped the social and political ideologies of the republic, nurses labored in a workplace that reflected cultural changes in ideas about gender, race, and class. Through interactions with surgeons and other officials they tested women’s rights convictions, and through interactions with formerly enslaved workers they wrestled with the need to live up to their own often abolitionist convictions and support social equality.
By putting these accounts in conversation with each other, Civil War Nurse Narratives productively explores a developing genre of war literature that has rarely been given its due and that offers refreshing insights into women’s contributions to the war effort. Taken together, these stories offer an impressive and important addition to the literary history of the Civil War.
Epic history.
Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus, AD 39–65), son of wealthy M. Annaeus Mela and nephew of Seneca, was born at Corduba (Cordova) in Spain and was brought as a baby to Rome. In AD 60 at a festival in Emperor Nero’s honor Lucan praised him in a panegyric and was promoted to one or two minor offices. But having defeated Nero in a poetry contest he was interdicted from further recitals or publication, so that three books of his epic The Civil War were probably not issued in 61 when they were finished. By 65 he was composing the tenth book but then became involved in the unsuccessful plot of Piso against Nero and, aged only twenty-six, by order took his own life.
Quintilian called Lucan a poet “full of fire and energy and a master of brilliant phrases.” His epic stood next after Virgil’s in the estimation of antiquity. Julius Caesar looms as a sinister hero in his stormy chronicle in verse of the war between Caesar and the Republic’s forces under Pompey, and later under Cato in Africa—a chronicle of dramatic events carrying us from Caesar’s fateful crossing of the Rubicon, through the Battle of Pharsalus and death of Pompey, to Caesar victorious in Egypt. The poem is also called Pharsalia.
Caesar (C. Iulius, 10244 BCE), statesman and soldier, defied the dictator Sulla; served in the Mithridatic wars and in Spain; pushed his way in Roman politics as a 'democrat' against the senatorial government; was the real leader of the coalition with Pompey and Crassus; conquered all Gaul for Rome; attacked Britain twice; was forced into civil war; became master of the Roman world; and achieved wide-reaching reforms until his murder. We have his books of Commentarii (notes): eight on his wars in Gaul, 5852 BC, including the two expeditions to Britain 5554, and three on the civil war of 4948. They are records of his own campaigns (with occasional digressions) in vigorous, direct, clear, unemotional style and in the third person, the account of the civil war being somewhat more impassioned.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Caesar is in three volumes. Volume I is his Gallic War. The Alexandrian War, the African War and the Spanish War, commonly ascribed to Caesar by our manuscripts but of uncertain authorship, are collected in Volume III.
Honorable Mention for the 2019 Sonya Rudikoff Prize, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association
Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism.
In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others.
Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.
The author views the clambake as a unique American folk tradition with interesting connections and rich resonances with other aspects of American culture and history.
A data-driven deep dive into a legendary comics author’s subversion of gender norms within the bestselling comic of its time.
By the time Chris Claremont’s run as author of Uncanny X-Men ended in 1991, he had changed comic books forever. During his sixteen years writing the series, Claremont revitalized a franchise on the verge of collapse, shaping the X-Men who appear in today’s Hollywood blockbusters. But, more than that, he told a new kind of story, using his growing platform to articulate transgressive ideas about gender nonconformity, toxic masculinity, and female empowerment.
J. Andrew Deman’s investigation pairs close reading and quantitative analysis to examine gender representation, content, characters, and story structure. The Claremont Run compares several hundred issues of Uncanny X-Men with a thousand other Marvel comics to provide a comprehensive account of Claremont’s sophisticated and progressive gender politics. Claremont’s X-Men upended gender norms: where female characters historically served as mere eye candy, Claremont’s had leading roles and complex, evolving personalities. Perhaps more surprisingly, his male superheroes defied and complicated standards of masculinity. Groundbreaking in their time, Claremont’s comics challenged readers to see the real world differently and transformed pop culture in the process.
These essays examine the multifaceted work of the Central American author whom Latin American literary historians consider precursor of “cultural dialogism” in poetry and fiction. As poet, essayist, journalist, novelist, and writer of “quasi–testimonio,” Alegría’s multiple discourses transgress the boundaries between traditional and postmodern political theories and practices. Her work reveals an allegory of relation and negotiation between “intelligentsia” and subaltern peoples as well as the need for a more socially extensive literature, not exclusive of more elite “magical literatures.”
The essays in the fist section frame Alegría’s discourses within sociohistorical, political, and literary contexts in order to illuminate the author’s singular place in the literary and political history of Central America. The essays in the second section engage in a feminist dialogic in which the reader encounters various critical validations and valorizations of Alegría’s many female voices. The third section involves the reader in the pursuit of extratextual or extraliterary resonances in Alegría’s work.
What is lost in translation may be a war, a world, a way of life. A unique look into the nineteenth-century clash of empires from both sides of the earthshaking encounter, this book reveals the connections between international law, modern warfare, and comparative grammar--and their influence on the shaping of the modern world in Eastern and Western terms.
The Clash of Empires brings to light the cultural legacy of sovereign thinking that emerged in the course of the violent meetings between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Lydia Liu demonstrates how the collision of imperial will and competing interests, rather than the civilizational attributes of existing nations and cultures, led to the invention of "China," "the East," "the West," and the modern notion of "the world" in recent history. Drawing on her archival research and comparative analyses of English--and Chinese--language texts, as well as their respective translations, she explores how the rhetoric of barbarity and civilization, friend and enemy, and discourses on sovereign rights, injury, and dignity were a central part of British imperial warfare. Exposing the military and philological--and almost always translingual--nature of the clash of empires, this book provides a startlingly new interpretation of modern imperial history.
With chapters on James Lane Allen’s The Reign of Law, Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, William Dean Howells’s The Leatherwood God, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith and Elmer Gantry, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, and James Scott Bell’s The Darwin Conspiracy, Tricomi offers new readings emphasizing how this canon represents science and religion as in deep, if not irreconcilable, conflict. Tricomi’s sweeping study, with its emphasis on the twentieth century, thus reveals from several directions the processes of secularism even as it identifies the emergence of what some have come to describe as the current “postsecular” moment in America.
Class, by Andrea Cavalletti, is a striking montage of diverse materials—Marx and Jules Verne, Benjamin and Gabriel Tarde. In it, Cavalletti asks whether the untimely concept of class is once again thinkable. Faced with new pogroms and state racism, he challenges us to imagine a movement that would unsettle and eventually destroy the crowd.
With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion.
Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.
The literary epic and critical theories about the epic tradition are traced from Aristotle and Callimachus through Apollonius, Virgil, and their successors such as Chaucer and Milton to Eisenstein, Tolstoy, and Thomas Mann. Newman's revisionist critique will challenge all scholars, students, and general readers of the classics, comparative literature, and western literary traditions.
Many dogmas regarding Greek theatre were established by researchers who lacked experience in the mounting of theatrical productions. In his wide-ranging and provocative study, Clifford Ashby, a theatre historian trained in the practical processes of play production as well as the methods of historical research, takes advantage of his understanding of technical elements to approach his ancient subject from a new perspective. In doing so he challenges many long-held views.
Archaeological and written sources relating to Greek classical theatre are diverse, scattered, and disconnected. Ashby's own (and memorable) fieldwork led him to more than one hundred theatre sites in Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, and Albania and as far into modern Turkey as Hellenic civilization had penetrated. From this extensive research, he draws a number of novel revisionist conclusions on the nature of classical theatre architecture and production.
The original orchestra shape, for example, was a rectangle or trapezoid rather than a circle. The altar sat along the edge of the orchestra, not at its middle. The scene house was originally designed for a performance event that did not use an up center door. The crane and ekkyklema were simple devices, while the periaktoi probably did not exist before the Renaissance. Greek theatres were not built with attention to Vitruvius' injunction against a southern orientation and were probably sun-sited on the basis of seasonal touring. The Greeks arrived at the theatre around mid-morning, not in the cold light of dawn. Only the three-actor rule emerges from this eclectic examination somewhat intact, but with the division of roles reconsidered upon the basis of the actors' performance needs. Ashby also proposes methods that can be employed in future studies of Greek theatre. Final chapters examine the three-actor production of Ion, how one should not approach theatre history, and a shining example of how one should.
Ashby's lengthy hands-on training and his knowledge of theatre history provide a broad understanding of the ways that theatre has operated through the ages as well as an ability to extrapolate from production techniques of other times and places.
Back in print after 17 years, this is a concise history of rhetoric as it relates to structure, genre, and style, with special reference to English literature and literary criticism from Ancient Greece to the end of the 18th century.
The core of the book is a quite original argument that the figures of rhetoric were not mere mechanical devices, were not, as many believed, a "nuisance, a quite sterile appendage to rhetoric to which (unaccountably) teachers, pupils, and writers all over the world devoted much labor for over 2,000 years." Rather, Vickers demonstrates, rhetoric was a stylized representation of language and human feelings.
Vickers supplements his argument through analyses of the rhetorical and emotional structure of four Renaissance poems. He also defines 16 of the most common figures of rhetoric, citing examples from the classics, the Bible, and major English poets from Chaucer to Pope.
In Classicism of the Twenties, Theodore Ziolkowski offers a compelling account of that movement. Giving equal attention to music, art, and literature, and focusing in particular on the works of Stravinsky, Picasso, and T. S. Eliot, he shows how the turn to classicism manifested itself. In reaction both to the excesses of neoromanticism and early modernism and to the horrors of World War I—and with respectful detachment—artists, writers, and composers adapted themes and forms from the past and tried to imbue their own works with the values of simplicity and order that epitomized earlier classicisms.
By identifying elements common to all three arts, and carefully situating classicism within the broader sweep of modernist movements, Ziolkowski presents a refreshingly original view of the cultural life of the 1920s.
Late antique court poetry.
Claudius Claudianus, Latin poet of great affairs, flourished during the joint reigns (AD 394–5 onwards) of the brothers Honorius (Emperor in the West) and Arcadius (in the East). Apparently a native of Greek Alexandria in Egypt, he was, to judge by his name, of Roman descent, though his first writings were in Greek, and his pure Latin may have been learned as a foreign language. About AD 395 he moved to Italy (Milan and Rome) and though really a pagan, became a professional court poet composing for Christian rulers works which give us important knowledge of Honorius’ time.
A panegyric on the brothers Probinus and Olybrius (consuls together in 395) was followed in the subsequent ten years by other poems (mostly epics in hexameters): in praise of consulships of Honorius (AD 395, 398, 404); against the Byzantine ministers Rufinus (396) and Eutropius (399); in praise of the consulship (400) of Stilicho (Honorius’ guardian, general, and minister); in praise of Stilicho’s wife Serena; mixed metres on the marriage of Honorius to their daughter Maria; on the war with the rebel Gildo in Africa (398); on the Getic or Gothic war (402); on Stilicho’s success against the Goth Alaric (403); on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399); and on the wedding of Palladius and Celerina. He also composed non-official poems such as the three books of a mythological epic on the Rape of Proserpina, unfinished as was also a Battle of Giants (in Greek). Noteworthy are Phoenix, Senex Veronensis, elegiac prefaces, and the epistles, epigrams, and idylls.
Through the patronage of Stilicho or through Serena, Claudius in 404 married well in Africa and was granted a statue in Rome. Nothing is known of him after 404. In his works can be found true poetic as well as rhetorical skill, command of language, polished style, diversity, vigor, satire, dignity, bombast, artificiality, flattery, and other virtues and faults of the age.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Claudian is in two volumes.
Late antique court poetry.
Claudius Claudianus, Latin poet of great affairs, flourished during the joint reigns (AD 394–5 onwards) of the brothers Honorius (Emperor in the West) and Arcadius (in the East). Apparently a native of Greek Alexandria in Egypt, he was, to judge by his name, of Roman descent, though his first writings were in Greek, and his pure Latin may have been learned as a foreign language. About AD 395 he moved to Italy (Milan and Rome) and though really a pagan, became a professional court poet composing for Christian rulers works which give us important knowledge of Honorius’ time.
A panegyric on the brothers Probinus and Olybrius (consuls together in 395) was followed in the subsequent ten years by other poems (mostly epics in hexameters): in praise of consulships of Honorius (AD 395, 398, 404); against the Byzantine ministers Rufinus (396) and Eutropius (399); in praise of the consulship (400) of Stilicho (Honorius’ guardian, general, and minister); in praise of Stilicho’s wife Serena; mixed metres on the marriage of Honorius to their daughter Maria; on the war with the rebel Gildo in Africa (398); on the Getic or Gothic war (402); on Stilicho’s success against the Goth Alaric (403); on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399); and on the wedding of Palladius and Celerina. He also composed non-official poems such as the three books of a mythological epic on the Rape of Proserpina, unfinished as was also a Battle of Giants (in Greek). Noteworthy are Phoenix, Senex Veronensis, elegiac prefaces, and the epistles, epigrams, and idylls.
Through the patronage of Stilicho or through Serena, Claudius in 404 married well in Africa and was granted a statue in Rome. Nothing is known of him after 404. In his works can be found true poetic as well as rhetorical skill, command of language, polished style, diversity, vigor, satire, dignity, bombast, artificiality, flattery, and other virtues and faults of the age.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Claudian is in two volumes.
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian Londonexplores not only the challenges faced by reformers as they strove toclean up an increasingly filthy city but the resistance to their efforts.Beginning in the 1830s, reform-minded citizens, under the banner of sanitaryimprovement, plunged into London’s dark and dirty spaces and returned withthe material they needed to promote public health legislation and magnificentprojects of sanitary engineering. Sanitary reform, however, was not alwaysmet with unqualified enthusiasm. While some improvements, such as slumclearances, the development of sewerage, and the embankment of the Thames,may have made London a cleaner place to live, these projects also destroyedand reshaped the built environment, and in doing so, altered the meanings andexperiences of the city.
From the novels of Charles Dickens and George Gissing to anonymous magazinearticles and pamphlets, resistance to reform found expression in the nostalgicappreciation of a threatened urban landscape and anxiety about domestic autonomyin an era of networked sanitary services. Cleansing the City emphasizes the disruptions and disorientation occasioned by purification—a process we are generally inclined to see as positive. By recovering these sometimes oppositional, sometimes ambivalent responses, Michelle Allen elevates a significant undercurrent of Victorian thought into the mainstream and thus provides insight into the contested nature of sanitary modernization.
Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the negritude writers Léon Damas, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Edouard Glissant, among others. John argues that by incorporating what she calls folk groundings—such as poems, folktales, proverbs, and songs—into their work, Afro-Caribbean writers invoke a psychospiritual consciousness which combines old and new strategies for addressing the ongoing postcolonial struggle.
A scholarly evangelist.
Clement of Alexandria, famous Father of the Church, is known chiefly from his own works. He was born, perhaps at Athens, about AD 150, son of non-Christian parents; he converted to Christianity probably in early manhood. He became a presbyter in the Church at Alexandria and there succeeded Pantaenus in the catechetical school; his students included Origen and Bishop Alexander. He may have left Alexandria in 202, was known at Antioch, was alive in 211, and was dead before 220.
We have Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks to give up gods for God and Christ; Tutor (3 books), wherein Clement instructs Christians on how to act in keeping with Christ’s teachings; Stromateis (Patchwork, 8 books), intending to stress the true nature of the Christian Gnostic; and Who Is the Man Who Is Saved? (an exposition of Mark 10:17–31). This volume contains the Exhortation to the Greeks, the treatise on the rich man, and an exhortation To the Newly Baptized. Clement was an eclectic philosopher of a neo-Platonic kind who later found a new philosophy in Christianity, and studied not only the Bible but the beliefs of Christian heretics.
In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world making. Menely’s central archive is English poetry written between John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807)—a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the “system . . . entire.” Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain’s epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the prehistory of the Anthropocene.
Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events.
The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.
Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.
The phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it.
Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.
Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.
Close Encounters was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Offers new critical approaches to science fiction as represented in film, television, fan culture, and other non-literary media. Addresses the way conventional notions of sexual difference are reworked by science fiction film. Includes the complete script of Peter Wollen's 1987 film Friendship's Death.
Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Janet Bergstrom, Roger Dadoun, Harvey R. Greenberg, M.D., Henry Jenkins III, Enno Patalas, Constance Penley, Vivian Sobchak, Lynn Spigel, and Peter Wollen.
From a 1938 essay by John Crowe Ransom through the work of contemporary scholars, Close Reading highlights the interplay between critics—the ways they respond to and are influenced by others’ works. To facilitate comparisons of methodology, the collection includes discussions of the same primary texts by scholars using different critical approaches. The essays focus on Hamlet, “Lycidas,” “The Rape of the Lock,” Ulysses, Invisible Man, Beloved, Jane Austen, John Keats, and Wallace Stevens and reveal not only what the contributors are reading, but also how they are reading.
Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s collection is an essential tool for teaching the history and practice of close reading.
Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Roland Barthes, Homi Bhabha, R. P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Andrew DuBois, Stanley Fish, Catherine Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Stephen Greenblatt, Susan Gubar, Fredric Jameson, Murray Krieger, Frank Lentricchia, Franco Moretti, John Crowe Ransom, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Helen Vendler
In Closed Circuits, Garrett Stewart analyzes a broad spectrum of films, from M and Rear Window through The Conversation to Déjà Vu, Source Code, and The Bourne Legacy, in which cinema has articulated—and performed—the drama of inspection’s unreturned look. While mainstays of the thriller, both the act and the technology of surveillance, Stewart argues, speak to something more foundational in the very work of cinema. The shared axis of montage and espionage—with editing designed to draw us in and make us forget the omnipresence of the narrative camera—extends to larger questions about the politics of an oversight regime that is increasingly remote and robotic. To such a global technopticon, one telltale response is a proliferating mode of digitally enhanced “surveillancinema.”
Closed Encounters was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
It's committed. It's political. It's socially engaged. It's academic criticism in the nineties. But what does it achieve? In a provocative and fair-minded look at current critical practices and the future of the academy, Jeffrey Wallen draws a disturbing picture of public intellectuals in search of a public and cultural critics unable to enter a dialogue with others.
Wallen argues that literary politics is no substitute for debate on genuine political issues. Taking up several of the most influential critics of recent years-Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Bérubé, Gerald Graff, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and many others-Wallen asks: Can their desire to persuade an audience beyond the classroom be fulfilled? And can cultural critics realize their ambitious social and institutional goals for change? In a work that is neither of the Left nor of the Right, but likely to unsettle both, Wallen argues that literary criticism actually undermines the prospects for the dialogue it calls out for.
In addition, Wallen argues that the institutionalization of critiques of truth and difference-critiques that appear to liberate us by revealing that knowledge and values are constructed, and can therefore be transformed-often leads to a further constraining of thought and narrowing of outlooks. In his analysis of the administration of conflict, Wallen describes the troubled state of academic freedom and points to a shift from the institutional protection of dissenting views to the institutional protection from views one finds unpleasant.
Yet the prospects are not bleak: Wallen emphasizes that academic critics continue to play a crucial role in crafting what we expect from discussion. In this spirit, Closed Encounters lays the groundwork for fashioning a truly public, socially engaged criticism.
The significant archive of writing that came out of the women’s liberation movement in the United States, from 1965 to 1980, speaks to the value activists placed on reading as an act that is at once personal and yet also about the collective good. Yung-Hsing Wu examines the importance of reading—personal, professional, vocational, aesthetic, and always political—and how the act itself brought a host of women, each with their own history with the movement, into relation, and into a belief in that relation. The value given to reading can be seen in the ways feminists pursued media representation; in consciousness-raising (CR) groups including shared reading in their meetings; in women opening bookstores, developing newsletters, establishing journals, and starting presses; and in corporate publishers pursuing feminist fiction.
Closely and Consciously crisscrosses distinct print spheres, including newsletters and periodicals produced by feminist cells and consciousness-raising groups, feminist presses seeking to articulate their visions for women’s writing, the emergence of feminist literary criticism in first-time monographs and newly established journals, personal and editorial correspondence, press records, and the publishing histories of bestsellers that testified to the increasingly broad popularity of women’s writing. Uniting all these disparate activists and media outlets, and providing crucial relationality, was reading. With a mix of close readings and archival research, Wu unpacks and interprets this central act of reading and why it matters during a crucial moment of feminist history.
Roger Sale invites us to look afresh at five English authors: Jane Austen, Wordsworth, and—famous in their time but half forgotten today—George Crabbe, William Cobbett, and John Clare. The five differ greatly in style, tone, temper, subject, and genre. What they have in common is the importance they attach to place: not the generalized places of Renaissance literature, nor the pictorially composed scenery of the landscape poets, but specific localities that have a profound effect on their own lives or those of their characters.
Sale is a perceptive critic, with the gift of empathy. We are caught up in his account of Crabbe's Peter Grimes, condemned to his ghastly mudflats and marshes, projecting onto the river the emblems of his guilt. So too with Clare's evocations of his beloved countryside as it once had been but was no more, and Cobbett's shrewd perceptions of rural life; with Wordsworth's creation of two distinct Lake Districts, the one of his maturity and the one of his haunted childhood; with Austen's heroines achieving freedom by accepting the challenge of living in their confined space.
The distinctive qualities of each of these writers and their places are conveyed with imaginative sympathy. To read these chapters is to come to know, or know better, five writers worth knowing. And to go with Sale to Crabbe's Aldeburgh, Austen's Mansfield and Highbury, Cobbett's rural routes, Clare's Helpston, and Wordsworth's Lakes region is to experience these special places as well. It is a rewarding excursion.
Through startling rereadings of works ranging from the devotional verse of the metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne) to photographer Andres Serrano’s controversial “Piss Christ,” from Renaissance religious iconography to contemporary gay porn, Rambuss uncovers the highly charged erotic imagery that suffuses religious devotional art and literature. And he explores one of Christian culture’s most guarded (and literal) closets—the prayer closet itself, a privileged space where the vectors of same-sex desire can travel privately between the worshiper and his or her God.
Elegantly written and theoretically astute, Closet Devotions illuminates the ways in which sacred Christian devotion is homoeroticized, a phenomenon that until now has gone unexplored in current scholarship on religion, the body, and its passions. This book will attract readers across a wide array of disciplines, including gay and lesbian studies, literary theory and criticism, Renaissance studies, and religion.
In Closet Writing/Gay Reading, Creech shows how a literary critic can be receptive to implicit and closeted sexual content. Forcefully advocating a tactic of identification and projection in literary analysis, he lends renewed currency to the kind of "sentimental" response to literature that continental theory—particularly deconstruction—has sought to discredit.
In the second half of his book, Creech sets out to analyze what he considers the exemplary novel of the nineteenth-century closet, Melville's Pierre, or: The Ambiguities. By approaching Pierre as the gay man Melville longed to have as its reader, Creech is able to decipher the novel's "encrypted erotics" and to reveal that Melville's apparent tale of incest is actually a homosexual novel in disguise. The closeted "address" to queer-sensitive readers that Pierre disseminates finally receives a critical reading that strives to be explicit, shareable, and public.
Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression. Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers’ magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of literary self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to “hands” whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in the many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.
The master of Old Comedy.
Aristophanes of Athens, one of the world’s greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. The Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in four volumes.
The Introduction to the edition is in Volume I. Also in the first volume is Acharnians, in which a small landowner, tired of the Peloponnesian War, magically arranges a personal peace treaty; and Knights, perhaps the most biting satire of a political figure (Cleon) ever written.
Three plays are in Volume II. Socrates’ “Thinkery” is at the center of Clouds, which spoofs untraditional techniques for educating young men. Wasps satirizes Athenian enthusiasm for jury service. In Peace, a rollicking attack on war-makers, the hero travels to heaven on a dung beetle to discuss the issues with Zeus.
The enterprising protagonists of Birds create a utopian counter-Athens ruled by birds. Also in Volume III is Lysistrata, in which our first comic heroine organizes a conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Women again take center stage in Women at the Thesmophoria, this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked.
Frogs, in Volume IV, features a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, yielding both sparkling comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In Assemblywomen Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance—with raucously comical results. Here too is Wealth, whose gentle humor and straightforward morality made it the most popular of Aristophanes’ plays from classical times to the Renaissance.
Using a number of critical approaches, Michael Skau examines Gregory Corso's complex imagination, his humor, and his poetic techniques in dealing with America, the Beat generation, and death.
Skau covers the complete works of Corso, one of the four major Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs) who attempted to provide an alternative to what they saw as the academic forms of literature dominating American writing through the 1940s and 1950s. The Beat option focused on ordinary people, spurning the cultural pretensions of the intelligentsia and using common language as well as the rhythms of actual speech. Corso, abandoned as a child by his mother, subjected to a variety of foster homes, and imprisoned as an adolescent, became an authentic voice of America's neglected streetwise youth. He embodies much of the tension, confusion, and rebellion that emerged in America after World War II and eventually crested in the 1960s.
Corso emphasizes social issues, yet risks undermining this significance by using wit, wordplay, and humor. While conceding mortality, he is adamant in refusing to acknowledge death's power. Even as he rebels against conventional literature, he still is enchanted by classicism and romanticism, often borrowing their techniques and idioms. Skau examines these complexities and seeming contradictions throughout Corso's career, showing that Corso finds value in inconsistency and vacillation. For him, as illustrated in the poems "Hair" and "Marriage," contradiction and ambivalence suggest the foundations of freedom of imagination.
In spite of Corso's significance as an American poet, Skau's is the first extensive study of his work, including his fiction. Skau also provides the first complete bibliography of Corso's published work in more than thirty years.
This collection of essays offers a variety of fresh perspectives on James's life and writings. Included are reminiscences of those who knew James well and critical essays by eminent scholars. The book is the first to offer a full treatment of James's many contributions to twentieth-century intellectual life.
Clément Marot (1496–1544), a royal poet in Renaissance France who ushered in new verse forms and renewed existing ones, stands as one of the most important literary voices of the first half of the sixteenth century. Clément Marot’s Epistles represents a first attempt to offer a sustained English-language translation and critical edition of what is widely considered his most personal, historically relevant, and crowning verse form. Aiming for integrality and poetic precision, the volume translates and sets to verse all seventy-four of Marot’s epistles, employing the same meter and rhyme scheme used by the poet in the original compositions. Likewise focused on capturing Marot’s poetic voice, thus maintaining idiomatic and literary integrity, the resulting translation is an attempt to relate the playfulness and pathos of Marot’s verse, rendering it accessible to an anglophone public.
Beyond the more traditional verse epistles included in the primary base text, Marot’s authorized complete works from 1538, the volume also offers translations of the introductory prose epistles penned by Marot for his Adolescence clémentine of 1532 and the 1538 edition (Lyon, Dolet), as well as the coq-à-l’âne and other versified satirical epistles, the “artificial epistle” retelling of a popular medieval romance, and more. A robust critical apparatus includes ample footnotes, an extensive introduction, illustrations, a bibliography, a chronological table, and a concordance with the principal modern French-language editions of Marot’s epistles.
The book should appeal to English-speaking historians and literary scholars alike, as well as to poetry lovers, who will appreciate a new acquaintance with this distinctive voice from poetry’s past.
In Codes of Conduct, Karla Holloway meditates on the dynamics of race and ethnicity as they are negotiated in the realms of power. Her uniquely insightful and intelligent analysis guides us in a fresh way through Anita Hill’s interrogation, the assault on Tawana Brawley, the mass murders of Atlanta’s children, the schisms between the personal and public domains of her life as a black professor, and––in a moving epilogue––the story of her son’s difficulties growing up as a young black male in contemporary society. Its three main sections: “The Body Politic,” “Language, Thought, and Culture,” and “The Moral Lives of Children,” relate these issues to the visual power of the black and female body, the aesthetic resonance and racialized drama of language, and our children’s precarious habits of surviving. Throughout, Holloway questions the consequences in African-American community life of citizenship that is meted out sparingly when one’s ethnicity is colored.
This is a book of a culture’s stories––from literature, public life, contemporary and historical events, aesthetic expression, and popular culture––all located within the common ground of African-American ethnicity. Holloway writes with a passion, urgency, and wit that carry the reader swiftly through each chapter. The book should take its place among those other important contemporary works that speak to the future relationships between whites and blacks in this country.
Novelists have individually distinctive ideas of dialogue, Aaron Fogel argues. In this analysis of Conrad's narrative craft he explores--with broad implications--the theory and uses of dialogue.
Conrad's was a distinctive reading of the English language conditioned by his particular idea of forced speech and forced writing. Fogel shows how Conrad shaped ideas and events and interpreted character and institutions by means of dialogues representing not free exchange but various forms of forcing another to respond. He applied this format not only to the obvious political contexts, such as inquisition or spying, but also to seemingly more private relations, such as marriage, commerce, and storytelling. His idea of dialogue shaded the meanings he gave to words even to characters' names. Conrad is particularly interested in scenes in which a speech-forcer is surprised, repudiated, or punished. Fogel concludes that Conrad increasingly saw the punishment of the speech-forcer as classically related to Oedipus inquiries, in which the provoked answers rebound upon and destroy the forcer. This punishment is--as Shakespeare, Scott, and Wordsworth also dramatically intuited--the classical Oedipal dialogue scene.
Fogel's analysis ranges widely over Conrad's fiction but focuses especially on Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. His readings offer a balanced critique of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories about dialogic. Conrad's novels have many of the features Bakhtin identified as dialogical; but he was preoccupied with coercion in dialogue form. Fogel proposes that to understand this form is to begin to reconsider our political and aesthetic assumptions about what dialogue is or ought to be.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, our understanding of the cognition of literature was transformed by scientific discoveries, such as the mirror neuron system and its role in empathy. Addressing questions such as why we care so deeply about fictional characters, what brain activities are sparked when we read literature, and how literary works and scholarship can inform the cognitive sciences, this book surveys the exciting recent developments in the field of cognitive literary studies and includes contributions from leading scholars in both the humanities and the sciences.
Beginning with an overview of the evolution of literary studies, the editors trace the recent shift from poststructuralism and its relativism to a growing interdisciplinary interest in the empirical realm of neuroscience. In illuminating essays that examine the cognitive processes at work when we experience fictional worlds, with findings on the brain’s creativity sites, this collection also explores the impact of literature on self and society, ending with a discussion on the present and future of the psychology of fiction. Contributors include Literature and the Brain author Norman N. Holland, on the neuroscience of metafiction reflected in Don Quixote; clinical psychologist Aaron Mishara on the neurology of self in the hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) state and its manifestations in Kafka’s stories; and literary scholar Brad Sullivan’s exploration of Romantic poetry as a didactic tool, applying David Hartley’s eighteenth-century theories of sensory experience.
Since the 1980s, a peculiar paradox has evolved in American film. Hollywood’s children have grown up, and the adults are looking and behaving more and more like children. In popular films such as Harry Potter, Toy Story, Pocahantas, Home Alone, and Jumanji, it is the children who are clever, savvy, and self-sufficient while the adults are often portrayed as bumbling and ineffective.
Is this transformation of children into "little adults" an invention of Hollywood or a product of changing cultural definitions more broadly? In Coining for Capital, Jyostna Kapur explores the evolution of the concept of childhood from its portrayal in the eighteenth century as a pure, innocent, and idyllic state—the opposite of adulthood—to its expression today as a mere variation of adulthood, complete with characteristics of sophistication, temptation, and corruption. Kapur argues that this change in definition is not a media effect, but rather a structural feature of a deeply consumer-driven society.
Providing a new and timely perspective on the current widespread alarm over the loss of childhood, Coining for Capital concludes that our present moment is in fact one of hope and despair. As children are fortunately shedding false definitions of proscribed innocence both in film and in life, they must now also learn to navigate a deeply inequitable, antagonistic, and consumer-driven society of which they are both a part and a target.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press