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Ghostly Figures
Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry
Ann Keniston
University of Iowa Press, 2015
From Sylvia Plath’s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering “bits” to AIDS elegies’ assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe’s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed “scraps,” the condition of being too late is one that haunts post-World War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it literally and figuratively by distorting chronology, boundary, and syntax, by referring to events indirectly, and by binding the condition of lateness to the impossibility of verifying the past. The speakers of these poems often indicate that they are too late by repetitively chronicling distorted events, refusing closure or resolution, and forging ghosts out of what once was tangible.

Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.
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Ghostly Matters
Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Avery F. Gordon
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz

“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

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Ghosts and the Overplus
Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century
Christina Pugh
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Ghosts and the Overplus is a celebration of lyric poetry in the twenty-first century and how lyric poetry incorporates the voices of our age as well as the poetic “ghosts” from the past. Acclaimed poet and award-winning teacher Christina Pugh is fascinated by how poems continually look backward into literary history. Her essays find new resonance in poets ranging from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks to the poetry of the present. Some of these essays also consider the way that poetry interacts with the visual arts, dance, and the decision to live life as a nonconformist. This wide-ranging collection showcases the critical discussions around poetry that took place in America over the first two decades of our current millennium. Essay topics include poetic forms continually in migration, such as the sonnet; poetic borrowings across visual art and dance; and the idiosyncrasies of poets who lived their lives against the grain of literary celebrity and trend. What unites all of these essays is a drive to dig more deeply into the poetic word and act: to go beyond surface reading in order to reside longer with poems. In essays both discursive and personal, Pugh shows that poetry asks us to think differently—in a way that gathers feeling into the realm of thought, thereby opening the mysteries that reside in us and in the world around us.
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Ghosts
Death’S Double And The Phenomena Of Theatre
Alice Rayner
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Making spirits visible has been a part of the theatrical experience since at least the sixteenth century. Instead of illusions, however, ghostly doubles in theatre are materially real and pervasive.

In Ghosts, Alice Rayner examines theatre as a memorial practice that is haunted by the presence of loss, looking at how aspects of stagecraft turn familiar elements into something uncanny. Citing examples from the works of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as the films Vertigo, Gaslight, and The Sixth Sense, she begins by describing time as it is employed by theatre with multiple aspects of presence, duration, and passage. Suggesting that objects connect past to present through the sense of touch, she explores how props are suspended backstage between motion and meaning. Her final chapters consider the curtain as theatre’s means for attempting to divide real and imaginary worlds.

If ghosts hover where secrets—secrets of the past, secrets from oneself, secrets of life and death—are kept, then, according to Rayner, “theatre is where ghosts best make their appearances and let communities and individuals know that we live amid secrets hiding in plain sight.”

Alice Rayner is associate professor of drama at Stanford University and author of, most recently, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action.
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Ghosts of the African Diaspora
Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity
Joanne Chassot
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
The first monograph to investigate the poetics and politics of haunting in African diaspora literature, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity examines literary works by five contemporary writers—Fred D’Aguiar, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Toni Morrison. Joanne Chassot argues that reading these texts through the lens of the ghost does cultural, theoretical, and political work crucial to the writers’ engagement with issues of identity, memory, and history. Drawing on memory and trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, this truly interdisciplinary volume makes an important contribution to the fast-growing field of spectrality studies.
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THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST
LATIN LITERATURE, THE DEAD, AND ROME'S TRANSITION TO A PRINCIPATE
BASIL DUFALLO
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
The ancient Romans quite literally surrounded themselves with the dead: masks of the dead were in the atria of their houses, funerals paraded through their main marketplace, and tombs lined the roads leading into and out of the city. In Roman literature as well, the dead occupy a prominent place, indicating a close and complex relationship between literature and society. The evocation of the dead in the Latin authors of the first century BCE both responds and contributes to changing socio-political conditions during the transition from the Republic to the Empire.
 
To understand the literary life of the Roman dead, The Ghosts of the Past develops a new perspective on Latin literature’s interaction with Roman culture. Drawing on the insights of sociology, anthropology, and performance theory, Basil Dufallo argues that authors of the late Republic and early Principate engage strategically with Roman behaviors centered on the dead and their world in order to address urgent political and social concerns. Republican literature exploits this context for the ends of political competition among the clan-based Roman elite, while early imperial literature seeks to restage the republican practices for a reformed Augustan society.

Calling into question boundaries of genre and literary form, Dufallo’s study will revise current understandings of Latin literature as a cultural and performance practice. Works as diverse as Cicero’s speeches, Propertian elegy, Horace’s epodes and satires, and Vergil’s Aeneid appear in a new light as performed texts interacting with other kinds of cultural performance from which they might otherwise seem isolated.
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Giambattista Marino
Adonis
Thomas E. Mussio
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2019
This is the first complete translation in English of Giambattista Marino’s Adone, a poem of 20 cantos written in Italian and first published in 1623 in Paris. Although Marino’s work has been characterized as a mythological poem with the tragic tale of Venus and Adonis at its core and woven through with retellings of many Greek and Roman myths, it is clear that Marino strove to write more than an Italian version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The highly wrought descriptive passages that permeate the poem, the allusions to contemporary political figures and events, and the rich scientific, philosophical, and theological language of many passages reflect Marino’s particular poetic style, his broad interests, and his engagement with the political and intellectual scene of early seventeenth-century Europe. One of the goals of this translation is to provide a highly accessible version of the whole poem and to expand its readership to include not only students and scholars of the romance epic and the early modern period but also curious general readers. It is hoped that this modern, annotated translation will spur new research on Marino’s poem and bear new assessments of the poem’s relation to its sources, of its influence on later literature, and of its vital connection with key issues of Marino’s time, such as scientific advancement, discovery and exploration, and the power and influence of the Catholic Church.

Translated, with introduction and notes by Thomas E. Mussio.
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The Gift of Active Empathy
Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky
Alina Wyman
Northwestern University Press, 2016
This innovative study brings the early writings of Mikhail Bakhtin into conversation with Max Scheler and Fyodor Dostoevsky to explore the question of what makes emotional co-experiencing ethically and spiritually productive. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin's well-known concept of the dialogical partner expresses what he sees as the potential of human relationships in Dostoevsky's work. But his earlier reflections on the ethical and aesthetic uses of empathy, in part inspired by Scheler's philosophy, suggest a still more fundamental form of communication that operates as a basis for human togetherness in Dostoevsky. Applying this rich and previously neglected theoretical apparatus in a literary analysis, Wyman examines the obstacles to active empathy in Dostoevsky's fictional world, considers the limitations and excesses of empathy, addresses the problem of frustrated love in The Idiot and Notes from Underground, and provides a fresh interpretation of two of Dostoevsky's most iconic characters, Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov.
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The Gift of Correspondence in Classical Rome
Friendship in Cicero's Ad Familiares and Seneca's Moral Epistles
Amanda Wilcox
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

Amanda Wilcox offers an innovative approach to two major collections of Roman letters—Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles—informed by modern cross-cultural theories of gift-giving.
    By viewing letters and the practice of correspondence as a species of gift exchange, Wilcox provides a nuanced analysis of neglected and misunderstood aspects of Roman epistolary rhetoric and the social dynamics of friendship in Cicero’s correspondence. Turning to Seneca, she shows that he both inherited and reacted against Cicero’s euphemistic rhetoric and social practices, and she analyzes how Seneca transformed the rhetoric of his own letters from an instrument of social negotiation into an idiom for ethical philosophy and self-reflection. Though Cicero and Seneca are often viewed as a study in contrasts, Wilcox extensively compares their letters, underscoring Cicero’s significant influence on Seneca as a prose stylist, philosopher, and public figure.

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The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation.
 
This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty.
 
“An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition
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front cover of The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation.
 
This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty.
 
“An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition
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The Gift of Freedom
War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages
Mimi Thi Nguyen
Duke University Press, 2012
In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen develops a new understanding of contemporary United States empire and its self-interested claims to provide for others the advantage of human freedom. Bringing together critiques of liberalism with postcolonial approaches to the modern cartography of progress, Nguyen proposes "the gift of freedom" as the name for those forces that avow to reverence aliveness and beauty, and to govern an enlightened humanity, while producing new subjects and actions—such as a grateful refugee, or enduring war—in an age of liberal empire. From the Cold War to the global war on terror, the United States simultaneously promises the gift of freedom through war and violence and administers the debt that follows. Focusing here on the figure of the Vietnamese refugee as the twice-over target of the gift of freedom—first through war, second through refuge—Nguyen suggests that the imposition of debt precludes the subjects of freedom from escaping those colonial histories that deemed them "unfree." To receive the gift of freedom then is to be indebted to empire, perhaps without end.
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Gifting Translation in Early Modern England
Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship
Kirsten Inglis
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Translation was a critical mode of discourse for early modern writers. Gifting Translation in Early Modern England: Women Writers and the Politics of Authorship examines the intersection of translation and the culture of gift-giving in early modern England, arguing that this intersection allowed women to subvert dominant modes of discourse through acts of linguistic and inter-semiotic translation and conventions of gifting. The book considers four early modern translators: Mary Bassett, Jane Lumley, Jane Seager, and Esther Inglis. These women negotiate the rhetorics of translation and gift-culture in order to articulate political and religious affiliations and beliefs in their carefully crafted manuscript gift-books. This book offers a critical lens through which to read early modern translations in relation to the materiality of early modern gift culture.
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Gifts of Power
The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress
Jean M. Humez
University of Massachusetts Press, 1987
A free black woman in antebellum America, Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795-1871) was an independent itinerant preacher and religious visionary who founded a Shaker community in Philadelphia that survived her death by twenty-five years. Gifts of powers containers her complete extant writings, covering the period 1830 to 1864.
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Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years
Edited by Annette R. Federico, Foreward by Sandra M. Gilbert
University of Missouri Press, 2011

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginationwas hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar’s approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia.

These contributions represent both the diversity of today’s feminist criticism and the tremendous expansion of the nineteenth-century canon. The authors take as their subjects specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, the state of feminist theory and pedagogy, genre studies, film, race, and postcolonialism, with approaches ranging from ecofeminism to psychoanalysis. And although each essay opens Madwoman to a different page, all provocatively circle back—with admiration and respect, objections and challenges, questions and arguments—to Gilbert and Gubar's groundbreaking work.

The essays are as diverse as they are provocative. Susan Fraiman describes how Madwoman opened the canon, politicized critical practice, and challenged compulsory heterosexuality, while Marlene Tromp tells how it elegantly embodied many concerns central to second-wave feminism. Other chapters consider Madwoman’s impact on Milton studies, on cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, and on reassessments of Ann Radcliffe as one of the book’s suppressed foremothers.
In the thirty years since its publication, The Madwoman in the Attic has potently informed literary criticism of women’s writing: its strategic analyses of canonical works and its insights into the interconnections between social environment and human creativity have been absorbed by contemporary critical practices. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.
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Girls Who Wore Black
Women Writing the Beat Generation
Johnson, Ronna C
Rutgers University Press, 2002
What do we know about the women who played an important role in creating the literature of the Beat Generation? Until recently, very little. Studies of the movement have effaced or excluded women writers, such as Elise Cowen, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Hettie Jones, and Diane Di Prima, each one a significant figure of the postwar Beat communities. Equally free-thinking and innovative as the founding generation of men, women writers, fluent in Beat, hippie, and women's movement idioms, partook of and bridged two important countercultures of the American mid-century. Persistently foregrounding female experiences in the cold war 1950s and in the counterculture 1960s and in every decade up to the millennium, women writing Beat have brought nonconformity, skepticism, and gender dissent to postmodern culture and literary production in the United States and beyond.
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The Given and the Made
Strategies of Poetic Redefinition
Helen Vendler
Harvard University Press, 1995

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate.

Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose.

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Giving Their Word
Conversations with Contemporary Poets
Steven Ratiner
University of Massachusetts Press, 2004
Based on a three-year series of interviews conducted by Steven Ratiner for the Christian Science Monitor, this book offers extended conversations with twelve of the most influential poets writing today. Their comments are wonderfully detailed, refreshingly honest, and provide the sort of intimate introduction to both poet and text that readers are rarely privileged to enjoy. Included are conversations with William Stafford, Mary Oliver, John Montague, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Forché, Martín Espada, Marge Piercy, Rita Dove, and Bei Dao. In the book's closing interview, Steven Ratiner makes a return visit to Donald Hall's New Hampshire farm shortly before the publication of Hall's collection Without, which focused on the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon.

Giving their word is what poets do; it is their stock-in-trade, their daily bread. In the hands of the most accomplished, a poet's words are transformed into a kind of window: looking inward toward the territory of memory, dream, personal mythology and opening out onto the landscape of the shared world where life and work are rooted. For each poet there is an intricate relationship between these two realms and poetry's third domain, the language that bridges both experiences and becomes the body of the poem. Giving Their Word shows us that the poet's fidelity to that relationship sustains his or her development over time, urges the writing toward new levels of discovery, and bestows on readers that most prized of commodities: a feeling of the authentic.

For poets, students of poetry, and that far-flung community of readers for whom the contemporary poem still provides a journey worth taking, this book will present a host of pleasures. Giving Their Word enlarges the frame through which we view the poet's text and yields significant insights into the craft and character of each of these writers.
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Giving Voice to Stones
Place and Identity in Palestinian Literature
By Barbara McKean Parmenter
University of Texas Press, 1994

"A struggle between two memories" is how Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish describes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Within this struggle, the meanings of land and home have been challenged and questioned, so that even heaps of stones become points of contention. Are they proof of ancient Hebrew settlement, or rubble from a bulldozed Palestinian village? The memory of these stones, and of the land itself, is nurtured and maintained in Palestinian writing and other modes of expression, which are used to confront and counter Israeli images and rhetoric. This struggle provides a rich vein of thought about the nature of human experience of place and the political uses to which these experiences are put.

In this book, Barbara McKean Parmenter explores the roots of Western and Zionist images of Palestine, then draws upon the work of Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and other writers to trace how Palestinians have represented their experience of home and exile since the First World War. This unique blending of cultural geography and literary analysis opens an unusual window on the struggle between these two peoples over a land that both divides them and brings them together.

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Glancing Visions
Surface and Depth in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Zachary Tavlin
University of Alabama Press, 2023
How the “glance” rather than the “gaze” in nineteenth-century literature and art anticipates the turn to modernism
 
The sweeping vantages that typify American landscape painting from the nineteenth century by Thomas Cole and other members of the Hudson River School are often interpreted for their geopolitical connotations, as visual attempts to tame the wild, alleviating fears of a savage frontier through views that subdue the landscape to the eye. But many literary figures of the era display a purposeful disdain for the “possessive gaze,” signaling a preference for subtle glances, often informed by early photography, Impressionism, new techniques in portraiture, and, soon after, the dawn of cinema. The visual subjectivities and contingencies introduced by these media made room for a visual counternarrative, one informed by a mode of seeing that moves fast and lightly across the surface of things.

Tavlin probes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s theory of the imagination at a turning point in the history of photography, when momentary glances take on new narrative potentials. The poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper toggles between gazes and glances, unsettling two competing forms of racialized seeing as they pertain to nineteenth-century Black life and racial hierarchies—the sentimental gaze and the slave trader’s glance—highlighting the life-and-death stakes of looking and looking away. Emily Dickinson’s syntactical oddities and her lifelong process of stitching and unstitching the poems that constitute her corpus all derive from a commitment to immanence associated with animal perception. Tavlin investigates, as well, Henry James’s vexed relationship to painterly Impressionism and William Carlos Williams’s imagist poetics as a response to early cinema’s use of the cut as the basis for a new visual grammar.

Each of these literary artists—via their own distinctive sensibilities and the artistic or technological counterparts that informed them—refuse the authoritative, all-possessive gaze in favor of the glance, a mode of seeing, thinking, and being that made way for the twentieth century’s twist on modernity. Glancing Visions will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and literary history, visual culture, visual theory, aesthetic philosophy, and phenomenology.
 
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Glanz und Abglanz
Two Centuries of German Studies in the University of London
Edited by John L. Flood and Anne Simon
University of London Press, 2017
In 1943, in the midst of a London still reeling from the Blitz, initial plans were laid for an Institute devoted to rebuilding relations between English and German scholars and academics once hostilities had ceased. Established in 1950, the Institute served for more than half a century as a research centre and focal point for researchers the world over. However, German Studies in London have a much older tradition which goes back almost two centuries. Glanz und Abglanz tells the fascinating tale of German Studies in London from its beginnings at the ‘godless institution of Gower Street’, and the remarkable personalities whose energy and commitment ensured that the discipline flourished. The story is told through two essays: ‘Taught by Giants’ outlining the history of the subject in London from 1826, and ‘“Sehr schön, Piglet?” “Ja, Pooh.”’ following the development of the Institute of Germanic Languages and Literatures and showcasing its remarkable library. The volume is rounded off with an account of the magnificent collection of rare books assembled by two of the personalities, Robert Priebsch (1866–1935) and August Closs (1898–1990). John L. Flood has been associated with the University of London for more than fifty years, having taught German at King’s College from 1965 until 1979, when he was appointed Deputy Director of the Institute of Germanic Studies. Since his retirement in 2002, Professor Flood has been an Honorary Fellow of the Institute. Anne Simon took her PhD at the University of London, then became Lecturer in Medieval German at the University of Bristol from 1992 to 2011. She held a temporary Lectureship at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, London, in 2012–13, and is now an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Modern Languages Research.
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The Glass Anvil
Andrew Hudgins
University of Michigan Press, 1997
In this highly accessible volume, poet Andrew Hudgins puts himself under the eye of scrutiny, spanning his career from a beginning writer seriously committed to his art to a mature author ready to reflect upon his role as a poet. The transition from one to the other comprises a rich lode of personal experiences, which Hudgins honestly and humorously details in essays ranging from his fascination with imagined worlds created by books to his appreciation of the works of nineteenth-century poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and contemporary poet Galway Kinnell.
Finally coming to rest on an examination of his own autobiography, The Glass Hammer, Hudgins reveals some of the ways he lied in that book--and some of the reasons for doing so. In a lighthearted manner, he manages to throw both light--and shadow--on the autobiography as a literary form. Amid charming anecdotes of his Southern upbringing, The Glass Anvil vividly records the depth of Hudgins's fascination with language, particularly as it mingles with the important issues of his life--religion, racism, Southern literature, and narrative poetry. This fascination is further documented in a free-wheeling interview which closes the book.
Engaging and amusing reading, The Glass Anvil will appeal to readers interested in contemporary poetry and Southern literature.
Andrew Hudgins's books include The Never Ending, After the Lost War: A Narrative, Saints and Strangers, and most recently The Glass Hammer. He is Professor of English, University of Cincinnati.
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The Glass House
The Life of Theodore Roethke
Allan Seager
University of Michigan Press, 1991
This exquisitely written biography of major American poet Theodore Roethke by his close friend and fellow writer Allan Seager was greeted with great enthusiasm in the literary community when it originally appeared in 1968. Kirkus Reviews found The Glass House “finely wrought, compassionate, intimate, and bound to be of inestimable value to all future Roethke scholars” in its exploration of Roethke’s life and its relationship to his art; critic Hugh Kenner called it “simply the best American biography.”
 
Biographer Allan Seager interviewed a number of Roethke’s friends and fellow writers, and he had access to the voluminous notes the poet left behind. Seager reveals the Theodore Roethke who existed behind the public persona – a complex, self-contradictory, gentle, often disturbed mysterious, and ruthlessly honest man. One of the book’s most moving passages is the defense of the poet’s role within the university, written by a colleague when Roethke was faced with the threat of dismissal. A committed teacher himself, Seager succeeds in doing justice to an often neglected aspect of Roethke’s achievement, his remarkable power as a teacher, and his unusual and committed teaching style.
 
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Glass, Light, and Electricity
Essays
Shena McAuliffe
University of Alaska Press, 2020
Fleet-footed and capricious, the essays in Glass, Light & Electricity wander through landscapes both familiar and unfamiliar, finding them equal parts magical and toxic. They explore and merge public and private history through lyric meditations that use research, association, and metaphor to examine subjects as diverse as neon signs, scalping, heartbreak, and seizures. The winner of the 2019 Permafrost Prize in nonfiction, Shena McAuliffe expands the creative possibilities of form.
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Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!
A Paul Scheerbart Reader
Paul Scheerbart
University of Chicago Press, 2014
German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others a visionary political thinker in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon.

Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart’s multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour-de-force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a fiction—albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and filmmakers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart’s importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture.
 
Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master.
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The Glass Slipper
Women and Love Stories
Susan Ostrov Weisser
Rutgers University Press, 2013

Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our “postfeminist” age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women’s nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today’s media, with profound implications for women.

More than a book about romance in fiction and media, The Glass Slipper illustrates how traditional stories about women’s sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives—historical and contemporary from high literature and “low” genres—discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women’s magazines, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women’s beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser’s goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

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Glissant and the Middle Passage
Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss
John E. Drabinski
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A reevaluation of Édouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness

 

While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe’s traumatic history, the field has not shown the same attention to the catastrophe known as the Middle Passage. It is a history that requires its own ideas that emerge organically from the societies that experienced the Middle Passage and its consequences firsthand. Glissant and the Middle Passage offers a new, important approach to this neglected calamity by examining the thought of Édouard Glissant, particularly his development of Caribbeanness as a critical concept rooted in the experience of the slave trade and its aftermath in colonialism.

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma—including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies—Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.

Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant’s proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage.

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The Global Frontier
Postwar Travel in American Literature
Eric Strand
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Americans often associate travel with luxury, a cosmopolitan lifestyle, and relaxation. They travel to “get away from it all.” Most fail to consider that modern American travel began in the straitened circumstances of the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged citizens to tour the United States so as to stimulate the economy. The Federal Writers’ Project composed guidebooks for each state, and tourism became a form of national solidarity.

After World War II, the Western frontier of self-reinvention and spatial expansion opened up through the explosion of the global travel industry. The Global Frontier shows that a variety of postwar literary travelers sought personal freedom and cultural enrichment outside their nation’s borders, including Black, female, and queer writers. But the price of incorporation into a transnational leisure class was complicity in postwar American imperialism and the rejection of 1930s social commitments. Eric Strand argues that capitalist globalization has enabled creative expression for marginalized identities, and that present-day humanists are the descendants of writers such as William S. Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, and Elizabeth Bishop. Yet this personal liberation has accompanied a vast growth of social inequality, which can only be addressed by reorienting toward progressive nationalism and an activist state.
 
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Global Russian Cultures
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when "Russian" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic "home" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and cultural life of Russians who in successive waves of migration have dispersed to the United States, Europe, and Israel, or who remained after the collapse of the USSR in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Central Asian states.

The volume's internationally renowned contributors treat the many different global Russian cultures not as "displaced" elements of Russian cultural life but rather as independent entities in their own right. They describe diverse forms of literature, music, film, and everyday life that transcend and defy political, geographic, and even linguistic borders. Arguing that Russian cultures today are many, this volume contends that no state or society can lay claim to be the single or authentic representative of Russianness. In so doing, it contests the conceptions of culture and identity at the root of nation-building projects in and around Russia.
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The Global White Snake
Liang Luo
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The Global White Snake examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism.
 
The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations. 
 
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The Global Wordsworth
Romanticism Out of Place
Bergren, Katherine
Bucknell University Press, 2019
The Global Wordsworth charts the travels of William Wordsworth’s poetry around the English-speaking world. But, as Katherine Bergren shows, Wordsworth’s afterlives reveal more than his influence on other writers; his appearances in novels and essays from the antebellum U.S. to post-Apartheid South Africa change how we understand a poet we think we know. Bergren analyzes writers like Jamaica Kincaid, J. M. Coetzee, and Lydia Maria Child who plant Wordsworth in their own writing and bring him to life in places and times far from his own—and then record what happens. By working beyond narratives of British influence, Bergren highlights a more complex dynamic of international response, in which later writers engage Wordsworth in conversations about slavery and gardening, education and daffodils, landscapes and national belonging. His global reception—critical, appreciative, and ambivalent—inspires us to see that Wordsworth was concerned not just with local, English landscapes and people, but also with their changing place in a rapidly globalizing world. This study demonstrates that Wordsworth is not tangential but rather crucial to our understanding of Global Romanticism. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Globalizing American Studies
Edited by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar offer a new standard for the field’s transnational aspiration with Globalizing American Studies.

The essays here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The essays elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide vivid accounts of post–Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others.

Bringing together established scholars already associated with the global turn in American studies with contributors who specialize in African studies, East Asian studies, Latin American studies, media studies, anthropology, and other areas, Globalizing American Studies is an original response to an important disciplinary shift in academia.

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Globalizing Race
Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture
Dorian Bell
Northwestern University Press, 2018

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

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Glorious Bodies
Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature
Colby Gordon
University of Chicago Press, 2024
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.
 
In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
 
In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
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A Glossary of John Dryden’s Critical Terms
H. James Jensen
University of Minnesota Press, 1969

A Glossary of John Dryden's Critical Terms was first published in 1969. 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.

Although John Dryden is, as Samuel Johnson described him, the father of modern criticism, his critical writings are difficult for twentieth-century readers to understand and appreciate. Part of the problem lies in the fact that many of the critical terms which Dryden used have changed or expanded in meaning since his time. By providing a series of glosses of seventeenth-century critical terms, this volume clarifies and illuminates Dryden's work for modern readers and scholars.

Professor Jensen has catalogued every important word that Dryden used in discussing critical matters, whether about art, literature, or music. In addition to covering all of Dryden's works, the glossary encompasses works of other important seventeenth century critics, among them, John Milton, Ben Johnson, and Thomas Rymer.

The structure of the glossary is simple: under each word there is a general definition and, if needed, an essay on the word's origin, history, and general usage. Then the various particular meanings of the word are given, and under each definition are listed the critics, the works, the editions, and the page numbers where the word is used with that particular meaning. Selected quotations abound, substantiating the text.

The book will be useful for students and teachers in seventeenth and eighteenth-century literature courses and for scholars doing advanced research. Students will gain an understanding of the development of critical though by reading the essays in the Glossary. Modern scholars of Restoration literature will find new ideas here as well as confirmation of some older conjectures about Dryden.

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Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird
Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76
Donald Hall
University of Michigan Press, 1978
These essays and interviews from 1970-76 are lively, pointed, often polemical. They derive from a unified point of view about creativity and about the function of poetry. For the interested reader they can provide a key to the universe of the contemporary poet. In this work, Donald Hall speaks in a conversational way about his poetry and about his poetic wishes, endeavors, failures, and successes.
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God In The Street
New York Writing from The Penny Press to Melville
Hans Bergmann
Temple University Press, 1995

In the fast changing culture of antebellum New York, writers of every stripe celebrated "the City" as a stage for the daily urban encounter between the familiar and the inexplicable. Probing into these richly varied texts, Hans Bergmann uncovers the innovations in writing that accompanied the new market society— the penny newspapers' grandiose boastings, the poetic catalogues of Walt Whitman, the sentimental realism of charity workers, the sensationalism of slum visitors, and the complex urban encounters of Herman Melville's fiction.

The period in which New York, the city itself, became firmly established as a subject invented a literary form that attempts to capture the variety of the teeming city and the flaneur, the walking observer. But Bergmann does not simply lead a parade of images and themes; he explores the ways in which these observers understood what was happening around them and to them, always attentive to class struggle and race and gender issues.

God in the Street shows how the penny press and Whitman's New York poetry create a new mass culture hero who interprets and dignifies the city's confusions. New York writers, both serious and sensationalist, meditate upon street encounters with tricksters and confidence-men and explore the meanings of encounters. Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrinever" underlines the unrelenting isolation and inability to control the interpreter. Bergmann reinterprets Melville's The Confidence Man as an example of how a complex literary form arises directly from its own historical materials and is itself socially symbolic. Bergmann sees Melville as special because he recognizes his inability to make sense of the surface of chaotic images and encounters. In mid-century New York City, Melville believes God is in the street, unavailable and unrecognizable, rather than omnipresent and guiding.

 
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God is Change
Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler
Edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby
Temple University Press, 2021

Throughout her work, Octavia E. Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. Her prescient thoughts on the synergy between politics and religion in America are evident in her 1993 dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. They explored, respectively, what happens during a divisive “cultural war” that unjustly impacts the disenfranchised, and the rise of a fascistic president, allied with white fundamentalist Christianity, who chants the slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler’s thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler’s work—especially the Parable and Xenogenesis series—offers resources for healing and community building. Essays consider the role of spirituality in Butler’s canon and the themes of confronting trauma as well as experiencing transformation and freedom. God Is Change meditates on alternate religious possibilities that open different political and cultural futures to illustrate humanity’s ability to endure change and thrive.

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God of Many Names
Play, Poetry and Power in Hellenic Thought, From Homer to Aristotle
Mihai I. Spariosu
Duke University Press, 1991
Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu’s perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time.
Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus—the “God of many names,” of both poetic play and sacred power—as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides’ Bacchae, Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Plato’s Republic and Laws, and Aristotle’s Poetics and Politics.
Spariosu’s model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics.
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A God Torn to Pieces
The Nietzsche Case
Giuseppe Fornari
Michigan State University Press, 2013

Giuseppe Fornari’s groundbreaking inquiry shows that Friedrich Nietzsche’s neglected importance as a religious thinker and his “untimeliness” place him at the forefront of modern thought. Capable of exploiting his own failures as a cognitive tool to discover what other philosophers never wanted to see, Nietzsche ultimately drove himself to mental collapse. Fornari analyzes the tragic reports of Nietzsche’s madness and seeks out the cause of this self-destructive destiny, which, he argues, began earlier than his rivalry with the composer and polemicist Richard Wagner, dating back to the premature loss of Nietzsche’s father. Dramatic experience enabled Nietzsche to detect a more general tendency of European culture, leading to his archaeological and prophetic discovery of the death of God, which he understood as a primordial assassination from which all humankind took its origin. Fornari concludes that Nietzsche’s fatal rebellion against a Christian awareness, which he identified as the greatest threat to his plan, led him to become one and the same not only with Dionysus but also with the crucified Christ. His effort, Fornari argues, was a dramatic way to recognize the silent, inner meaning of Christ’s figure, and perhaps to be forgiven.

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Goddesses and Monsters
Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture
Jane Caputi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

The essays in Goddesses and Monsters recognize popular culture as a primary repository of ancient mythic energies, images, narratives, personalities, icons, and archetypes.  Together, they take on the patriarchal myth, where serial killers are heroes, where goddesses—in the form of great white sharks, femmes fatales, and aliens—are ritually slaughtered, and where pornography is the core story underlying militarism, environmental devastation, and racism.  They also point to an alternative imagination of female power that still can be found behind the cult devotion given to Princess Diana and animating all the goddesses disguised as popular monsters, queen bitches, mammies, vamps, cyborgs, and sex bombs.

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God's Poems
The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination
John Poch
St. Augustine's Press, 2021
Poetry is exciting, but elusive to most. This is troublesome for Christians because the Bible, John Poch reminds us, is largely composed of poetical verse. In God’s Poems, Poch re-introduces sacred text as purposefully poetic, and explains what that means and invites the reader to with this insight live more thoughtfully and beautifully. 

But that is not all. Poch as a well-established and regarded poet, turns his eye to contemporary poetry and vindicates its function in a “created and creative world.” Today many have abandoned the genre as a wasteland of misguided voice that really has nothing to say. The poet is a truth-teller, and Poch as devoted writer, teacher, and believer sends out a renewed call to turn to verse as a means of seeing oneself as God’s poeima, or poem (Letter to Ephesians). The depth of self-knowing relates directly to an aptitude to engage the category of poetry at some level. A tragic void is filled with Poch’s effort to exhort the reader to patiently reconnect with poetry even though it has been hijacked by persons who want to be heard more than speak well. (This book is essential, therefore, for aspiring poets.)

For faithful readers or those seeking to return, Poch is a place to begin to understand contemporary writers worth knowing and which poets of the past must remain with us. In Virgilian fashion, he can see the panorama behind him and that which lies immediately ahead and instills a recovered love of an eternal medium that will be restored to a state of coherency and enlightened perspective. If Poch has faith in poetry it is because poetry is indeed a source of faith. If Justin Martyr claimed that everything that is true belongs to Christians, Poch shows us that everyone who speaks truth is to some degree a poet. Even God with his revealed wisdom chooses poetry as medium par excellence. It is essential to know how poetry works. “Great poems that we consider literature give us what we never expected. They go beyond the usefulness of conveying a feeling and unveiling beauty; and they tell us who we are.” 
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God's Scrivener
The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very
Clark Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A biography of a long-forgotten but vital American Transcendentalist poet.
 
In September of 1838, a few months after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his controversial Divinity School address, a twenty-five-year-old tutor and divinity student at Harvard named Jones Very stood before his beginning Greek class and proclaimed himself “the second coming.” Over the next twenty months, despite a brief confinement in a mental hospital, he would write more than three hundred sonnets, many of them in the voice of a prophet such as John the Baptist or even of Christ himself—all, he was quick to claim, dictated to him by the Holy Spirit.
 
Befriended by the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, Very strove to convert, among others, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and most significantly, Emerson himself. Though shocking to some, his message was simple: by renouncing the individual will, anyone can become a “son of God” and thereby usher in a millennialist heaven on earth. Clark Davis’s masterful biography shows how Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emersonian ideals and the trap of isolation and emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete transcendence.
 
God’s Scrivener tells the story of Very’s life, work, and influence in depth, recovering the startling story of a forgotten American prophet, a “brave saint” whose life and work are central to the development of poetry and spirituality in America.
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Goethe
A Critical Introduction
Henry Caraway Hatfield
Harvard University Press, 1964

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Goethe and His Publishers
Siegfried Unseld
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Goethe's ranging literary genius, nimble yet luminous, resists simple classification. Poet and natural philosopher, critic and raconteur, Goethe was the most commanding literary presence of his time.

Goethe and His Publishers organizes for the first time the myriad details of Goethe's career in print. Director of the German publishing company Suhrkamp Verlag, Siegfried Unseld brings a singular perspective to this biography, focusing our attention on an essential component of Goethe's literary endeavors: his relationship to his publishers. Carefully examining each work, Unseld covers the range of Goethe's oeuvre, from first anonymous publications to eventual monumental editions brought out by Johann Friedrich Cotta, the most renowned publisher of his day.

Unseld sifts through the rich correspondence between Goethe and his publishers, as well as letters to and from friends, colleagues, and contemporaries. Analyzing publishing contracts, draft contracts, and historical documents, Unseld reveals the tremendous energy Goethe exerted on behalf of his manuscripts. During negotiations he was sometimes circumspect and reserved, other times demanding and assertive. These exchanges not only shed new light on Goethe's complex character but also show how he changed the author's role in the publishing process. Thus, this work offers a penetrating study on the intricate and many-tiered relations between author and publisher, then and today.

Goethe and His Publishers celebrates Goethe's works, his life, and his times, from the viewpoint of a publisher today. Written by an individual who has devoted much of his life to the study of the poet whom he reveres, such a personal approach not only forms an excellent introduction to Goethe's work but helps restore Goethe to his rightful place in the world of letters.

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Goethe and Judaism
The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature
Karin Schutjer
Northwestern University Press, 2015
 In Goethe and Judaism, Schutjer aims to provide a broad, though by no means exhaustive, literary study that is neither apologetic nor reductive, that attends to the complexity and irony of Goethe’s literary work but takes his representations of Judaism seriously as an integral part of his thought and writing. She is thus concerned not simply with accusing or acquitting Goethe of prejudice but rather with discerning the function and logic of his relationship to Judaism, as seen within his work. Her premise is that Goethe’s conception of modernity—his anxieties as well as his most affirmative vision concerning the trajectory of his age—are deeply entwined with his conception of Judaism. Schutjer argues that behind his very mixed representations of Jews and Judaism stand crucial tensions within his own thinking and a distinct anxiety of influence. Indeed, Goethe, she contends, paradoxically wrestles against precisely those impulses in Judaism for which he feels the greatest affinity, which most approach his own vision of modernity. The discourse of wandering in Goethe’s work serves as a key site where Judaism and modernity meet.
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Goethe and the Ginkgo
A Tree and a Poem
Siegfried Unseld
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In 1815, Goethe gave symbolic expression to his intense relationship with Marianne Willemer, a recently married woman thirty-five years his junior. He gave her a leaf from the ginkgo tree, explaining that, like its deeply cleft yet still whole leaf, he was "single yet twofold." Although it is not known if their relationship was ever consummated, they did exchange love poetry, and Goethe published several of Marianne's poems in his West-East Divan without crediting her authorship.

In this beautiful little book, renowned Goethe scholar Siegfried Unseld considers what this episode means to our estimation of a writer many consider nearly godlike in stature. Unseld begins by exploring the botanical and medical lore of the ginkgo, including the use of its nut as an aphrodisiac and anti-aging serum. He then delves into Goethe's writings for the light they shed on his relationship with Marianne. Unseld reveals Goethe as a great yet human being, subject, as any other man, to the vagaries of passion.
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Gogol's Afterlife
The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia
Caryl Emerson
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Gogol's claim to the title of national literary classic is incontestable. An exemplar of popular audiences no less than for the intelligentsia, Gogol was pressed into service under the tsarist and Soviet regimes for causes both aesthetic and political, official and unofficial. In Gogol's Afterlife, Stephen Moeller-Sally explores how he achieved this peculiar brand of cultural authority and later maintained it, despite dramatic shifts in the organization of Russian literature and society.

Part I charts the historical and cultural currents that shaped Gogol's reputation, devoting particular attention to the models of authorship Gogol himself devised in response to his changing audience and developing authorial mission. Part II takes a panoramic view of the social milieu in which Gogol's status evolved. Finally, Part III examines the place of the classics in Soviet culture, with a focus on Gogol's role in the cultural revolution and his peculiar relationship with state power under Stalinism.
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Gogol's Artistry
Andrei Bely, translated by Christopher Colbath
Northwestern University Press, 2009

When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in Gogol’s Artistry, the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in Gogol’s Artistry. Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely’s thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely’s argument in this book is that Gogol’s earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol’s prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely’s best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism.

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The Goindval Pothis
The Earliest Extant Source of the Sikh Canon
Gurinder S. Mann
Harvard University Press, 1996

This volume explores the earliest available version of the Sikh canon. The book contains the first critical description and partial edition of the Goindval Pothis, a set of proto-scriptural manuscripts prepared in the 1570s. The manuscripts also contain a number of hymns by non-Sikh saints, some of them not found elsewhere.

Through a meticulous analysis of the contents of these rare manuscripts, Gurinder Singh Mann establishes their place and importance in the history of Sikh canon formation.

The book will be of great interest to scholars of comparative canon studies and of medieval Indian literature.

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Going Underground
Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Lara Langer Cohen
Duke University Press, 2023
First popularized by newspaper coverage of the Underground Railroad in the 1840s, the underground serves as a metaphor for subversive activity that remains central to our political vocabulary. In Going Underground, Lara Langer Cohen excavates the long history of this now familiar idea while seeking out versions of the underground that were left behind along the way. Outlining how the underground’s figurative sense first took shape through the associations of literal subterranean spaces with racialized Blackness, she examines a vibrant world of nineteenth-century US subterranean literature that includes Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies. Cohen finds that the undergrounds in this literature offer sites of political possibility that exceed the familiar framework of resistance, suggesting that nineteenth-century undergrounds can inspire new modes of world-making and world-breaking for a time when this world feels increasingly untenable.
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The Golden Age of the Classics in America
Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States
Carl J. Richard
Harvard University Press, 2009

In a masterful study, Carl J. Richard explores how the Greek and Roman classics became enshrined in American antebellum culture. For the first time, knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle class, women, African Americans, and frontier settlers.

The classics shaped how Americans interpreted developments around them. The example of Athens allowed politicians of the democratic age to espouse classical knowledge without seeming elitist. The Industrial Revolution produced a backlash against utilitarianism that centered on the classics. Plato and other ancients had a profound influence on the American romantics who created the first national literature, and pious Christians in an age of religious fervor managed to reconcile their faith with the literature of a pagan culture. The classics supplied both sides of the slavery debate with their chief rhetorical tools: the Aristotelian defense of slavery to Southern slaveholders and the concept of natural law to the Northern abolitionists.

The Civil War led to a radical alteration of the educational system in a way that steadily eroded the preeminence of the classics. They would never regain the profound influence they held in the antebellum era.

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Golden Cynthia
Essays on Propertius
Sharon L. James, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2022

The elegiac poet Propertius responds in his verse to the complex changes that Rome underwent in his period, taking on numerous topics including poetic and sexual rivalry, visual art, violence, inability to control the elusive mistress, imperialism, colonialism, civil war, the radical new shape of the Roman state under the new monarch Augustus, and more. These essays, by well-known scholars of Roman elegy, offer new ways of reading Propertius’ topics, attitudes, and poetics.

This book begins with two distinguished essays by the late Barbara Flaschenriem, whose work on Propertius remains influential. The other contributions, offered in honor of her, are by Diane Rayor, Andrew Feldherr, Ellen Greene, Lowell Bowditch, Alison Keith, and volume editor Sharon L. James. These essays explore topics including Propertian didacticism, dream interpretation, visual art and formalism, sex and violence, Roman imperialism and its connection to the elegiac puella, and Propertius’ engagement, in Book 4, with Vergil’s poetry.

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Goncharov's "Oblomov"
A Critical Companion
Gayla Diment
Northwestern University Press, 1998
No other novel has been used to describe the "Russian mentality" or "Russian soul" as frequently as Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov, first published in 1859. This guide will enable readers to appreciate fully the remarkable talent of the writer and his masterpiece.

All the essays were written specifically for this volume and are published here for the first time. The book also includes an introduction, autobiographical materials, an annotated bibliography, and letters never before translated into English.

Contributors: Galya Diment, John Givens, Beth Holmgren, Karl D. Kramer, Ronald D. LeBlanc, Alexandar Mihailovic, and Brian Thomas Oles.
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Gondal's Queen
A Novel in Verse
By Emily Jane Brontë
University of Texas Press, 1955

In Gondal’s Queen, Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford presents a cycle of eighty-four poems by Emily Jane Brontë, for the first time arranged in logical sequence, to re-create the “novel in verse” which Emily wrote about their beloved mystical kingdom of Gondal and its ruler, Augusta Geraldine Almeda, who brought tragedy to those who loved her.

Thanks to previous publications by Ratchford, the imaginative world of Gondal is well known not only to Brontë scholars but also to general readers. Only in the present book, however, with Emily’s lovely poems restored to the setting which gave them being, can the full impact of this extraordinary literary creation be realized.

The life story of Gondal’s Queen, from portentous birth to tragic death, is set in a world compounded of dark Gothic romance and Byronic extravagance; yet out of it emerges not only a real country of wild moor sheep and piercingly beautiful nights but also the portrait of a real woman, whose doom was wrought not by the stars but by the clashing complications of her own nature.

In A.G.A. (the appellation most usually applied to the Queen), Emily Brontë created a personality, not a puppet reciting lovely lines. And Ratchford, in reconstructing her story, has re-affirmed the dignity, beauty, and richness of Emily’s poetry.

Gondal’s Queen is the end of a long trail of research and literary detection which has led Ratchford to all known Brontë documentary sources. This quest was originally stimulated by curiosity over a tiny booklet signed, “C. Brontë, June 29th, 1837,” in the Wrenn Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Ratchford’s intense and astonishingly fruitful interest in the Brontës had its origin in her attempt to unravel the fascinating puzzle presented by this little book, which seemed to be merely a series of childish vignettes held together by “a shadow of a common character” and a “tendency toward a unified plot.”

Bit by bit, Ratchford assembled clues from manuscripts and obscure publications until the significance of the play world of the Brontë children began to emerge. In spite of the fact that the Brontës had been the subject of the liveliest literary speculation since their deaths, it remained for Ratchford to establish the importance of their juvenile writings to the later writings of Charlotte. In successive publications she presented the accumulating evidence. For a time her curiosity was centered on Charlotte and the group, but it finally became focused on Emily through a manuscript journal fragment which fortunately came to hand.

Unlike Charlotte, Emily left no prose works from her childhood. But it is apparent from journal entries and birthday notes written by Emily and Anne (whose shared creation Gondal was) not only that the two younger Brontës lived in and sustained daily an imaginary world which had evolved from the earlier play of the four children together, but also that they had written separately voluminous histories and “novels” about it. Of Emily’s vast Gondal literature, only a small body of verse has survived, poems originally intended for no eye but her own and possibly Anne’s. But it is clear that Gondal was not only Emily Brontë’s childhood dream world but also the major preoccupation of her adult creative life.

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The Good Brexiteers Guide to English Lit
John Sutherland
Reaktion Books, 2018
What is Nigel Farage’s favorite novel? Why do Brexiteers love Sherlock Holmes? Is Philip Larkin the best Brexit poet ever? Through the politically relevant sideroad of English Literature, writ large, John Sutherland quarries the great literary minds of English history to assemble the ultimate reading list for Brexiteers.

Brexit shook Britain to its roots and sent shockwaves across the world. But despite the referendum victory, Brexit is peculiarly hollow. It is an idea without political apparatus, without sustaining history, without field-tested ideology. As Sutherland argues: it is without thinkers—like Frankenstein waiting for the lightning bolt. In this irreverent, entertaining, and utterly tongue-in-cheek new guide, Sutherland suggests some stuffing for the ideological vacuity at the heart of the Brexit cause. He looks for meaning in the works of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy; in modern classics like The Queen and I and London Fields; and in the British national anthem, school songs, and poetry.

Exploring what Britain meant, means, and will mean, Sutherland subtly shows how great literary works have a shaping influence on the world. Witty and insightful, and with a preface by Guardian columnist and critic John Crace, this book belongs on the shelves of anyone seeking to understand the bragging Brexiteers (and the many diehard Remoaners, too).
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"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Flannery O'Connor
Asals, Frederick
Rutgers University Press, 1993

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is Flannery O'Connor's most famous and most discussed story. O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence, and religious concerns that characterize her fiction.

This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of the story itself, comments and letters by O'Connor about the story, critical essays, and a bibliography. The critical essays span more than twenty years of commentary and suggest several approaches to the story--formalistic, thematic, deconstructionist-- all within the grasp of the undergraduate, while the introduction also points interested students toward still other resources. Useful for both beginning and advanced students, this casebook provides an in-depth introduction to one of America's most gifted modern writers.

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Good Words
Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel
Mark Knight
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
This new study explores how evangelicalism played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel. In contrast to those who see the evangelical movement as trivial to our histories of the novel and part of the losing side in religion’s battle with secularity, Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel examines fiction by major writers of the nineteenth century—Thackeray, Dickens, Wood, MacDonald, Collins, and Butler—and reveals the extent to which the novel was shaped by evangelical thought and practice.
Rather than getting lost in historical and theological rabbit holes, Good Words invites readers to think about why evangelicalism still matters for the stories we tell about fiction in the Victorian period. The result has major implications for our understanding of the Victorian novel, our conception of the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and religion, the way in which we think about evangelical culture in the modern world, and our ideas about the practices and protocols of scholarly reading.
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Goodbye Christ?
Christianity, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance
Peter Kerry Powers
University of Tennessee Press, 2017

Despite the proliferation of criticism on the cultural work of the Harlem Renaissance over the course of the past two decades, surprisingly few critics have focused on the ways in which religious contexts shaped the works of New Negro writers and artists during that time. In Goodbye Christ? Christianity, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance, Peter Kerry Powers fills this scholarly void, exploring how the intersection of race, religion, and gender during the Harlem Renaissance impacted the rhetoric and imagination of prominent African American writers of the early twentieth century.

In order to best understand the secular academic thought that arose during the Harlem Renaissance period, Powers argues, readers must first understand the religious contexts from which it grew. By illustrating how religion informed the New Negro movement, and through his analysis of a range of texts, Powers delineates the ways in which New Negro writers of the early twentieth century sought to loosen the grip of Christianity on the racial imagination, thereby clearing a space for their own cultural work—and for the development of a secular African American intelligentsia generally.

In addition to his examination of well-known authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, Powers also offers an illuminating perspective on lesser-known figures, including Reverdy Ransom and Frederick Cullen. In his exploration of the role of race and religion at the time, Powers employs an intersectional approach to religion and gender, and especially masculinity, that sets the discussion on fertile new ground.

Goodbye Christ? answers the call for a body of work that considers religion as a relevant precursor to the secular intelligentsia that grew during the Harlem Renaissance in the early 1900s. By offering a complete look at the tensions that arose between churches and Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, readers can gain a better understanding of the work that Harlem Renaissance writers undertook during the early decades of the twentieth century.

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The Gothic Family Romance
Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order
Margot Gayle Backus
Duke University Press, 1999
Tales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. Such recurring tropes are examined in this pioneering study by Margot Gayle Backus to show how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children and later descendents of Protestant English settlers in Ireland.
Backus uses contemporary theory, including that of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to analyze texts by authors ranging from Richardson, Swift, Burke, Edgeworth, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary Irish novelists and playwrights.
By charting the changing relations between the family and the British state, she shows how these authors dramatized a legacy of violence within the family cell and discusses how disturbing themes of child sacrifice and colonial repression are portrayed through irony, satire, “paranoid” fantasy, and gothic romance. In a reconceptualization of the Freudian family romance, Backus argues that the figures of the Anglo-Irish gothic embody the particular residue of childhood experiences within a settler colonial society in which biological reproduction represented an economic and political imperative.
Backus’s bold positioning of the nuclear family at the center of post-Enlightenment class and colonial power relations in England and Ireland will challenge and provoke scholars in the fields of Irish literature and British and postcolonial studies. The book will also interest students and scholars of women’s studies, and it has important implications for understanding contemporary conflicts in Ireland.
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Gothic Geoculture
Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the Transamerican Imaginary
Ivonne M. García
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
In the nineteenth century, the island of Cuba was a popular site for US travelers, who wrote dozens of travelogues about their experiences. At the same time, Cuban exiles living in the United States, escaping from Spanish colonial repression, wrote about their island and about their US experiences. Within the trove of writings about Cuba in relation to slavery and a rising US empire in the region, Ivonne M. García’s Gothic Geoculture: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cuba in the Transamerican Imaginary shows how a group of writers, on both sides, used the language of fear to construct gothicizations of the island (and of the United States) through tropes of corruption, doubleness, and monstrosity. García coins the term “gothic geoculture” to show Cuba’s identity in the nineteenth century as existing at the crossroads between colonialism, slavery, and transamericanity. Specifically looking at a period of colonial anxiety between 1830 and 1890, García exposes the ways some writers code Cuba as dangerous and destructive, demonstrating how these transamerican figurations created a series of uncanny simultaneities that expand on and complicate the ways we understand how Cuba and the hemisphere were imagined at that time.
 
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Gothic Passages
Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic
Justin D. Edwards
University of Iowa Press, 2003

This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.

By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic?

The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality.

Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies.

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Gothic Riffs
Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820
DIANE HOEVELER
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 by Diane Long Hoeveler provides the first comprehensive study of what are called “collateral gothic” genres—operas, ballads, chapbooks, dramas, and melodramas—that emerged out of the gothic novel tradition founded by Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe. The role of religion and its more popular manifestations, superstition and magic, in the daily lives of Western Europeans were effectively undercut by the forces of secularization that were gaining momentum on every front, particularly by 1800. It is clear, however, that the lower class and the emerging bourgeoisie were loath to discard their traditional beliefs. We can see their search for a sense of transcendent order and spiritual meaning in the continuing popularity of gothic performances that demonstrate that there was more than a residue of a religious calendar still operating in the public performative realm. Because this bourgeois culture could not turn away from God, it chose to be haunted, in its literature and drama, by God’s uncanny avatars: priests, corrupt monks, incestuous fathers and uncles. The gothic aesthetic emerged during this period as an ideologically contradictory and complex discourse system; a secularizing of the uncanny; a way of alternately valorizing and at the same time slandering the realms of the supernatural, the sacred, the maternal, and the primitive.
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The Gothic World of Anne Rice
Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

This anthology argues for the serious study of the literary oeuvre of Anne Rice, a major figure in today’s popular literature. The essays assert that Rice expands the conventions of the horror genre’s formula to examine important social issues. Like a handful of authors working in this genre, Rice manipulates its otherwise predictable narrative structures so that a larger, more interesting cultural mythology can be developed. Rice searches for philosophical truth, examining themes of good and evil, the influence on people and society of both nature and nurture, and the conflict and dependence of humanism and science.

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The Gothic World of Stephen King
Landscape of Nightmares
Edited by Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987
Stephen King’s popularity lies in his ability to reinterpret the standard Gothic tale in new and exciting ways. Through his eyes, the conventional becomes unconventional and wonderful. King thus creates his own Gothic world and then interprets it for us. This book analyzes King’s interpretations and his mastery of popular literature. The essays discuss adolescent revolt, the artist as survivor, the vampire in popular literature, and much more.
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Gothicka
Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural
Victoria Nelson
Harvard University Press, 2012

The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.

To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.

Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.

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The Governance of Friendship
Law and Gender in the Decameron
Michael Sherberg
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
The Governance of Friendship: Law and Gender in the DECAMERON by Michael Sherberg addresses two related and heretofore unexamined problems in the pages of the Decameron: its theory of friendship and the legal theory embedded in it. Sherberg shows how Aristotle’s Ethics as well as Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica inform these two discourses, at the intersection of which Boccaccio locates the question of gender relations which is one of the book’s central concerns.

Through a series of close readings at all three levels of the text—the author’s statements, the frame narrative, and the stories themselves—Sherberg shows how Boccaccio exposes and explores gender tensions rooted in a notion of the patriarchal household, which finds its own rationale in the natural-law postulate of the inferiority of women. Relying on the writings of the great twentieth-century legal theorist Hans Kelsen, Sherberg demonstrates how through the complex architecture of the Decameron Boccaccio dismantles the logic of natural law, exposing it instead as a rhetoric used by men to justify their control of women.

The Governance of Friendship aims well to advance our understanding of Boccaccio as an intellectual: not only steeped in the key texts of his time, but also at the forefront of critical thinking about such issues as law and gender which will play out over the coming centuries and beyond.
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Grace Paley
Illuminating Dark Lives
By Jacqueline Taylor
University of Texas Press, 1990

Grace Paley is a "writer's writer," admired by both scholars and the reading public for her originality and unique voice. In this first book-length study of her work, Jacqueline Taylor explores the source of Paley's originality, locating it in the way Paley transforms language to create strongly woman-centered stories.

Drawing on interviews with the author, as well as the stories themselves, Taylor emphasizes Paley's awareness that women's voices have been muted and their stories ignored or left untold in our culture's male-oriented dominant discourse. She watches Paley in the process of reshaping language at both the semantic and narrative levels to make it express women's perceptions and experiences. In Paley's stories, it becomes possible to ignore traditional heroic and dramatic themes and instead talk about women and children in such everyday settings as the playground, the kitchen, and the grocery store.

Some of the specific techniques Paley uses to accomplish this include identifying and repudiating sexist language in the dominant discourse and redefining ordinary words from the perspective of women. At the narrative level, Taylor reveals how she draws on women's oral traditions to tell open-ended stories that resist rigid beginning-middle-and-end structuring.

This transformed language enables Paley to construct a social world where woman-centered meanings can flourish. In her nontraditional stories, no single narrator or version of events dominates. Anyone can be a storyteller and no one has the last word.

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Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England
Juliet Fleming
Reaktion Books, 2001

Tattoos and graffiti immediately bring to mind contemporary urban life and its inhabitants. But in fact, both practices date back much further than is generally thought—even by scholars. Drawing on a previously unavailable archive, Juliet Fleming reveals the unknown and disregarded literary arts of sixteenth century England.

            In Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England, Fleming argues that our modern assumptions of what constitutes written expression have limited our access to and understanding of early modern history and writing. Fleming combines detailed historical scholarship with intellectual daring in a work that describes how writing practices have not been limited to the boundaries of the page; instead they have included body surfaces, ceramics, ceilings, walls, and windows.

            Moving beyond what has been preserved in print and manuscript, this book claims the whitewashed wall as the primary textual canvas of the early modern English, explores the tattooing practices of sixteenth-century Europeans, and uncovers the poetics of ceramic cookware. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England will provide a startling new perspective for scholars of early modern literature and cultural history.

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Grafting Helen
The Abduction of the Classical Past
Matthew Gumpert
University of Wisconsin Press, 2001
History is a love story: a tale of desire and jealousy, abandonment and fidelity, abduction and theft, rupture and reconciliation. This contention is central to Grafting Helen, Matthew Gumpert's original and dazzling meditation on Helen of Troy as a crucial anchor for much of Western thought and literature.
Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted,  and coveted once again.
Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
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Graham R.
Rosamund Marriot Watson, Woman of Letters
Linda K. Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2005

Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siècle London and the way in which literary reputations are made—and lost. A participant in aestheticism and decadence, she wrote six volumes of poems noted for their subtle cadence, diction, and uncanny effects. Linda K. Hughes unfolds a complex life in Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters, tracing the poet’s development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant-garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary modernism.

Despite an early first divorce, she won fame writing under a pseudonym, Graham R. Tomson. The influential Andrew Lang announced the arrival of a new poet he assumed to be a man. She was soon hosting a salon attended by Lang, Oscar Wilde, and other 1890s notables. Publishing to widespread praise as Graham R., she exemplified the complex cultural politics of her era. A woman with a man’s name and a scandalous past, she was also a graceful beauty who captivated Thomas Hardy and left an impression on his work. At the height of her success she fell in love with writer H. B. Marriott Watson and dared a second divorce.

Graham R. combines the stories of a gifted poet, of London literary networks in the 1890s, and of a bold woman whose achievements and scandals turned on her unusual history of marriage and divorce. Her literary history and her uncommon experience reveal the limits and opportunities faced by an unconventional, ambitious, and talented woman at the turn of the century.

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The Grain of the Voice
Interviews 1962-1980
Roland Barthes
Northwestern University Press, 2009

This book brings together the great majority of Barthes’s interviews that originally appeared in French in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions—on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism—in his unique voice; here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.

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Grammars of Approach
Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque
Cynthia Wall
University of Chicago Press, 2019
In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of “approach.” In architecture, the term “approach” changed in that period from a verb to a noun, coming to denote the drive from the lodge at the entrance of an estate “through the most interesting part of the grounds,” as landscape designer Humphrey Repton put it.  The shift from the long straight avenue to the winding approach, Wall shows, swung the perceptual balance away from the great house onto the personal experience of the visitor. At the same time, the grammatical and typographical landscape was shifting in tandem, away from objects and Things (and capitalized common Nouns) to the spaces in between, like punctuation and the “lesser parts of speech”. The implications for narrative included new patterns of syntactical architecture and the phenomenon of free indirect discourse. Wall examines the work of landscape theorists such as Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and Thomas Whately alongside travel narratives, topographical views, printers’ manuals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, and the novels of Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Radcliffe, and Austen to reveal a new landscaping across disciplines—new grammars of approach in ways of perceiving and representing the world in both word and image.
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Gramsci in the World
Roberto M. Dainotto and Fredric Jameson, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks have offered concepts, categories, and political solutions that have been applied in a variety of social and political contexts, from postwar Italy to the insurgencies of the Arab Spring. The contributors to Gramsci in the World examine the diverse receptions and uses of Gramscian thought, highlighting its possibilities and limits for understanding and changing the world. Among other topics, they explore Gramsci's importance to Caribbean anticolonial thinkers like Stuart Hall, his presence in decolonial indigenous movements in the Andes, and his relevance to understanding the Chinese Left. The contributors consider why Gramsci has had relatively little impact in the United States while also showing how he was a major force in pushing Marxism beyond Europe—especially into the Arab world and other regions of the Global South. Rather than taking one interpretive position on Gramsci, the contributors demonstrate the ongoing relevance of his ideas to revolutionary theory and praxis.

Contributors. Alberto Burgio, Cesare Casarino, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Kate Crehan, Roberto M. Dainotto, Michael Denning, Harry Harootunian, Fredric Jameson, R. A. Judy, Patrizia Manduchi, Andrea Scapolo, Peter D. Thomas, Catherine Walsh, Pu Wang, Cosimo Zene
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The Grand Continuum
Reflections on Joyce and Metaphysics
David A. White
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983

The assumptions that literary criticism and philosophy are closely linked—and that both disciplines can learn much from each other—lead David White to examine key passages in James Joyce’s novels both as a philosopher and as literary critic.  In so doing, he develops a thesis that Joyce’s attempt to capture the mysterious process whereby perception and consciousness are translated into language entails a fundamental challenge to everyday notions of reality. Joyce’s stylistic brilliance and virtuosity, his destruction of normal syntax and meaning, “shock one into a new reality.” In the book’s final section, White examines the subtle relation between literary language and human consciousness and traces parallels between Joyce’s stylistic experimentation and Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s ideas about language.

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Graphic Borders
Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future
Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González
University of Texas Press, 2016

From the influential work of Los Bros Hernandez in Love & Rockets, to comic strips and political cartoons, to traditional superheroes made nontraditional by means of racial and sexual identity (e.g., Miles Morales/Spider-Man), comics have become a vibrant medium to express Latino identity and culture. Indeed, Latino fiction and nonfiction narratives are rapidly proliferating in graphic media as diverse and varied in form and content as is the whole of Latino culture today.

Graphic Borders presents the most thorough exploration of comics by and about Latinos currently available. Thirteen essays and one interview by eminent and rising scholars of comics bring to life this exciting graphic genre that conveys the distinctive and wide-ranging experiences of Latinos in the United States. The contributors’ exhilarating excavations delve into the following areas: comics created by Latinos that push the boundaries of generic conventions; Latino comic book author-artists who complicate issues of race and gender through their careful reconfigurations of the body; comic strips; Latino superheroes in mainstream comics; and the complex ways that Latino superheroes are created and consumed within larger popular cultural trends. Taken as a whole, the book unveils the resplendent riches of comics by and about Latinos and proves that there are no limits to the ways in which Latinos can be represented and imagined in the world of comics.

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Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement
Reframing History in Comics
By Jorge J. Santos, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 2019

Winner, Charles Hatfield Book Prize, Comic Studies Society, 2020
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2019

The history of America’s civil rights movement is marked by narratives that we hear retold again and again. This has relegated many key figures and turning points to the margins, but graphic novels and graphic memoirs present an opportunity to push against the consensus and create a more complete history. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement showcases five vivid examples of this:

Ho Che Anderson's King (2005), which complicates the standard biography of Martin Luther King Jr.; Congressman John Lewis's three-volume memoir, March (2013–2016); Darkroom (2012), by Lila Quintero Weaver, in which the author recalls her Argentinian father’s participation in the movement and her childhood as an immigrant in the South; the bestseller The Silence of Our Friends, by Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell (2012), set in Houston's Third Ward in 1967; and Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), whose protagonist is a closeted gay man involved in the movement.

In choosing these five works, Jorge Santos also explores how this medium allows readers to participate in collective memory making, and what the books reveal about the process by which history is (re)told, (re)produced, and (re)narrativized. Concluding the work is Santos’s interview with Ho Che Anderson.

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Graphic Migrations
Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora
Kavita Daiya
Temple University Press, 2020

In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape and influence the political and cultural imagination of secularism and contribute to gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and its diasporas.

Daiya analyzes modern literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, advertising, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also uses oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America to draw out the tensions of the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of Partition migrations. 

The precarity generated by modern migration and expressed through public culture prompts a rethinking of how dominant media represents gendered migrants and refugees. Graphic Migrations demands that we redraw the boundaries of how we tell the story of modern world history and the intricately interwoven, intimate production of statelessness and citizenship across the world’s communities.

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Graphic Subjects
Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels
Michael A. Chaney
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Some of the most noteworthy graphic novels and comic books of recent years have been entirely autobiographical. In Graphic Subjects, Michael A. Chaney brings together a lively mix of scholars to examine the use of autobiography within graphic novels, including such critically acclaimed examples as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David Beauchard’s Epileptic, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese.

            These essays, accompanied by visual examples, illuminate the new horizons that illustrated autobiographical narrative creates. The volume insightfully highlights the ways that graphic novelists and literary cartoonists have incorporated history, experience, and life stories into their work. The result is a challenging and innovative collection that reveals the combined power of autobiography and the graphic novel.
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Grasses of the Northeast
A Manual of the Grasses of New England and Adjacent New York
Dennis W. Magee
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
This book is designed to serve as a reference work, classroom textbook, and field manual for botanists, naturalists, and students interested in learning to identify and learn about the distinguishing features of grasses of the northeastern United States. Included are more than 380 species of grasses that have been documented as occurring in the region. The volume contains 246 range maps and 269 line drawings that clarify descriptions used in the keys and illustrate characteristics of the various kinds of grasses. Dennis Magee also provides a description of each genus and species along with synonyms and habitats. For anyone interested in an up-to-date treatment of the grasses of greater New England, this volume will be an invaluable resource. It is the only comprehensive technical guide devoted exclusively to the grasses of this region and presents a wealth of information in a precise, clear format.

The geographic scope of the work extends from the Canadian border south through Long Island and west to the Hudson River. But given the considerable overlap with the grass flora to the adjacent north, south, and west, the book will also be useful beyond New England and the bordering New York counties.

The volume includes an illustrated glossary of essential terms and concepts and a "how to use this manual" section. A CD-ROM with a multiple-entry identification guide, and hundreds of accompanying photographic images of individual species, is provided in a sleeve inside the back cover of the book.
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Gray Matters
Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life
Ellyn Lem
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Winner of the 2021 Excellence in Research and Scholarly Activity Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Finalist for the 2021 American Book Fest Best Book Awards


Aging is one of the most compelling issues today, with record numbers of seniors over sixty-five worldwide. Gray Matters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of Later Life examines a diverse array of cultural works including films, literature, and even art that represent this time of life, often made by people who are seniors themselves. These works, focusing on important topics such as housing, memory loss, and intimacy, are analyzed in dialogue with recent research to explore how “stories” illuminate the dynamics of growing old by blending fact with imagination. Gray Matters also incorporates the life experiences of seniors gathered from over two hundred in-depth surveys with a range of questions on growing old, not often included in other age studies works. Combining cultural texts, gerontology research, and observations from older adults will give all readers a fuller picture of the struggles and pleasures of aging and avoids over-simplified representations of the process as all negative or positive. 
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The Great Beyond
Art in the Age of Annihilation
Philip D. Beidler
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more
 
While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.
 
It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
 
The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.
 
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The Great Derangement
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Amitav Ghosh
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
 
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The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas
Ronald Berman
University of Alabama Press, 2000
Berman examines the intellectual and cultural milieu in which The
Great Gatsby
was created--and challenges accepted interpretations of
Fitzgerald's greatest novel.


"The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas
focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the prevailing ideas and values
that permeated American society in the late teens and early twenties, providing
a vivid portrait of the intellectual and cultural milieu in which The
Great Gatsby
was produced.

This new and original reading of Gatsby discloses
Fitzgerald's remarkable awareness of the issues of his time and his debt
to such philosophers and critics as William James, Josiah Royce, George
Santayana, John Dewey, Walter Lippman, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson.
Ronald Berman's fresh approach considers the meaning of various ideas important
to the novel: for example, those moral qualities governing both social
and individual life. Berman's reading of the text reveals extraordinary
emphases on matters that could productively be described as philosophical
-- the nature of friendship, love, and the good life. But the text of the
novel has many echoes, and the same concern with moral issues -- especially
those issues affecting democratic life - can be found in a number of other
texts of the first quarter of the century. Vigorously debated throughout
Fitzgerald's own lifetime, these texts shed a completely new light on the
idealism of The Great Gatsby and on the penetrating view it has
of life in a new form of American democracy.

A noted Fitzgerald scholar, Berman makes it clear that
accepted interpretations of The Great Gatsby and of Fitzgerald's
work in general must be changed. Berman demonstrates that Fitzgerald wrote
within a vast dialectic, relating the ideas of the twenties to those of
the "old America" described in so many of his works. Gatsby, Nick Carraway,
and the other characters of Fitzgerald's greatest novel all have to consider
not only their relationship to the present but also their distance from
what was once a highly meaningful past.


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Great Gatsby and Modern Times
Ronald Berman
University of Illinois Press, 1994
    "A stunning piece of
        work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,
        it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal
        companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America
        as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."
       
        -- Roger Rosenblatt
      "An impressive study
        that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall
        context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden
        Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
      "Citing films, dates,
        places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,
        the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters
        in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels
        to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,
        photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity
        for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes
        that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."
        -- A. Hirsh, Choice
 
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Great Literary Friendships
Janet Phillips
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022
This volume explores twenty-four literary friendships in succinct, structured entries, from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante.
 
Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. From the poignant schoolgirl relationship between Jane Eyre and Helen Burns to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn’s adventures on the Mississippi, fictional friends have supported, guided, comforted—and at times betrayed—the heroes and heroines of our most popular plays and novels.

This book explores twenty-four literary friendships and together with character studies and publication history, describes how each key relationship influences character, determines the plot, or underlines the theme of each literary work. It shows how authors have by turn celebrated, lamented, or transformed friendships throughout the ages. Some friendships—Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, and even Bridget Jones and pals—have taken on creative lives beyond the bounds of their original narratives.

Including a broad scope of literature from writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Dona Tartt, and Margaret Atwood, this book is the ideal gift for your literature-loving friend.
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The Great Machines
Poems and Songs from the Age of the American Railroad
Robert Hedin
University of Iowa Press, 1996

Here, for the first time, is a feast for anyone who has ever been beguiled by the trains that formerly thrummed through the landscapes of our lives. This entertaining and evocative anthology presents the amazing variety of poems and songs written about the American railroad in the last century and a half. Comprised of selections from both oral and written traditions, the volume celebrates the historical and cultural significance of this marvel of engineering skills. Hedin's anthology allows all readers, from the most avid railroad buff to anyone who has fond memories of train travel, to enjoy the romance of trains.

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The Great Midland
Alexander Saxton
University of Illinois Press, 1997
One of the best novels ever to portray the lives of American Communist activists, The Great Midland is a story of love and radical politics set just before World War II. It was published in 1948, when cold-war hysteria engulfed the United States; the publisher subsequently tried to pretend the book did not exist, and review media and bookstores ignored it.

The book vividly depicts the multiracial and multiethnic alliances that developed as Chicago railroad workers struggled to organize. It presents some of its narrative through the complex consciousness of Stephanie Koviak, a young, first-generation Polish-American.
 
[more]

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The Great Succession
Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne
Robert Emmet Long
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979

The first book devoted to the literary relationship between Henry James and his American predecessor, Nathaniel Hwthorne. Robert Emmet Long demonstrates James’ transformation of Hawthorne’s romantic forms into realism, as one of the significant features of James’ early career. Long shows that Hawthorne provided James ith a native tradition having its own conceptions of American psychological experience.

[more]

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The Great Tales Never End
Essays in Memory of Christopher Tolkien
Edited by Richard Ovenden and Catherine McIlwaine
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022
This collection of essays, family stories, and archival documents sheds new light on Christopher Tolkien’s contributions to the Tolkien legendarium.
 
Over more than four decades, J. R. R. Tolkien’s son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien completed some twenty-four volumes of his father’s work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Thanks to Christopher’s extraordinary publishing efforts and scholarship, readers today can survey and understand the vast landscape of Tolkien’s legendarium.

The Great Tales Never End sheds new light on J. R. R. Tolkien’s work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. Essays by world-renowned scholars and Tolkien family reminiscences offer unique insights into the publication process. What was Tolkien’s intended ending for The Lord of the Rings, and did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience’s response to the first-ever adaptation of The Lord of the Rings—a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC’s archives?

The book is illustrated with color reproductions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s manuscripts, maps, drawings, and letters, as well as photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works. Many of these documents have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers, and fans.
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The Great William
Writers Reading Shakespeare
Theodore Leinwand
University of Chicago Press, 2016
The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes—wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters.

Theodore Leinwand builds impressively detailed accounts of these writers’ experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby, and what Ginsberg meant when referring to the mouth feel of Shakespeare’s verse. From Hughes’s attempts to find a “skeleton key” to all of Shakespeare’s plays to Berryman’s tormented efforts to edit King Lear, Leinwand reveals the palpable energy and conviction with which these seven writers engaged with Shakespeare, their moments of utter self-confidence and profound vexation. In uncovering these intense public and private reactions, The Great William connects major writers’ hitherto unremarked scenes of reading Shakespeare with our own.
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The Greatest Menace
Organized Crime in Cold War America
Lee Bernstein
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
The term Cold War has long been associated with the "red menace" of communism at home and abroad. Yet as Lee Bernstein shows in this illuminating study, during the 1950s the threat posed by organized crime preoccupied Americans at least as much as the fear of communist subversion. At the beginning of the decade, the televised hearings of Senator Estes Kefauver's crime committee, focusing on colorful mob figures such as Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, attracted far more attention than the spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the years that followed, public concern about gangsters and racketeering continued unabated, even after the anticommunist fever of McCarthyism had begun to subside.

Drawing on a broad range of evidence, from government records to films, television shows, and pulp novels, Bernstein explains how the campaign against organized crime, like the crusade against communism, reflected deep social and political anxieties. Just as the inquisitions of Senator McCarthy fed on popular fears of international conspiracy and alien infiltration, the anticrime investigations of the 1950s raised the specter of a foreign-based criminal cartel—the Sicilian Mafia— preying on a vulnerable American public. In both cases, the association of the foreign-born with criminal or un-American activity led to the creation of state and local citizens committees and to calls for new restrictions on immigration. Labor unions also came under attack, particularly after the McClellan Committee and its chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, claimed to have found a link between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by Jimmy Hoffa, and the Mafia.

As Bernstein points out, despite significant changes in the way organized crime actually operated, and despite repeated protests from Italian Americans, the popular image of the sinister gangster persisted, because it served a more profound need. In an era marked by widespread uncertainty and rapid social change, the fight against a common enemy, real or imagined, helped forge a Cold War consensus across shifting lines of race, class, and ethnicity by redefining what it meant to be an American.
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The Greek Anthology, Volume I
Book 1: Christian Epigrams. Book 2: Christodorus of Thebes in Egypt. Book 3: The Cyzicene Epigrams. Book 4: The Proems of the Different Anthologies. Book 5: The Amatory Epigrams. Book 6: The Dedicatory Epigrams
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

The Greek Anthology (“Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called “Stephanus”, wreath or garland) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BCE) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century CE), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the “Circle”, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’s compilation.

The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.

The Loeb Classical Library edition is in five volumes.

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The Greek Anthology, Volume I
Books 1–5
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

A gathering of poetic blossoms.

The Greek Anthology contains some 4,500 short Greek poems in the sparkling and diverse genre of epigram, written by more than a hundred poets and collected over many centuries. To the original collection, called the Garland (Stephanus) by its contributing editor, Meleager of Gadara (first century BC), was added another Garland, by Philip of Thessalonica (mid-first century AD) and then a Cycle by Agathias of Myrina (AD 567/8). In about AD 900 these collections (now lost) and perhaps others (also lost, by Rufinus, Diogenianus, Strato, and Palladas) were partly incorporated and arranged into fifteen books according to subject by Constantine Cephalas; most of his collection is preserved in a manuscript called the Palatine Anthology. A second manuscript, the Planudean Anthology made by Maximus Planudes in 1301, contains additional epigrams omitted by Cephalas.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, and Paulus Silentiarius.

This Loeb edition of The Greek Anthology replaces the earlier edition by W. R. Paton, with a Greek text and ample notes reflecting current scholarship. Volume I contains the following: Book 1. Christian Epigrams; Book 2. Description of the Statues in the Gymnasium of Zeuxippus; Book 3. Epigrams in the Temple of Apollonis at Cyzicus; Book 4. Prefaces to Various Anthologies; Book 5. Erotic Epigrams.

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The Greek Anthology, Volume II
Books 7–8
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

A gathering of poetic blossoms.

The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.

The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.

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The Greek Anthology, Volume III
Book 9
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

A gathering of poetic blossoms.

The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.

The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.

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The Greek Anthology, Volume IV
Books 10–12
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

A gathering of poetic blossoms.

The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.

The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.

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The Greek Anthology, Volume V
Books 13–16
W. R. Paton
Harvard University Press

A gathering of poetic blossoms.

The Greek Anthology (literally, “Gathering of Flowers”) is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called Stephanus, literally, “wreath” or “garland”) made and contributed to by Meleager of Gadara (1st century BC) was added another by Philippus of Thessalonica (late 1st century AD), a third by Diogenianus (2nd century), and much later a fourth, called the Circle, by Agathias of Myrina. These (lost) and others (also lost) were partly incorporated, arranged according to contents, by Constantinus Cephalas (early 10th century?) into fifteen books now preserved in a single manuscript of the Palatine Library at Heidelberg. The grand collection was rearranged and revised by the monk Maximus Planudes (14th century) who also added epigrams lost from Cephalas’ compilation.

The fifteen books of the Palatine Anthology are: I, Christian Epigrams; II, Descriptions of Statues; III, Inscriptions in a temple at Cyzicus; IV, Prefaces of Meleager, Philippus, and Agathias; V, Amatory Epigrams; VI, Dedicatory; VII, Sepulchral; VIII, Epigrams of St. Gregory; IX, Declamatory; X, Hortatory and Admonitory; XI, Convivial and Satirical; XII, Strato’s “Musa Puerilis”; XIII, Metrical curiosities; XIV, Problems, Riddles, and Oracles; XV, Miscellanies. Book XVI is the Planudean Appendix: Epigrams on works of art.

Outstanding among the poets are Meleager, Antipater of Sidon, Crinagoras, Palladas, Agathias, Paulus Silentiarius.

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Greek Bucolic Poets
Theocritus. Bion. Moschus
translated by J. M. Edmonds
Harvard University Press

Theocritus of the third century BCE, born at Syracuse, travelled widely in the Greek world. Having studied poetry at Cos with poet and critic Philitas, he composed poetry under patronage, chiefly perhaps at Syracuse and Cos; and then went to Alexandria in Egypt, whose King Ptolemy II (died 246 BCE), pupil of Philitas, befriended him. Here (and at Cos?) he spent the rest of his life. Most lovable of Greek versemakers, Theocritus was the founder of bucolic or pastoral poetry. Of his so-called Idylls, 'Little forms' or pieces (not all are genuine), ten are about pastoral life real or idealised; several are small epics (three are hymns); two are beautiful 'occasional' poems (one about a country walk, one to accompany a gift of a distaff for the wife of his friend Nicias); six are love-poems; several are mimes, striking pictures of common life; and three are specially expressive of his own feelings. The 24 'Epigrams' were apparently inscribed on works of art.

Moschus of Syracuse, 2nd century BCE, came next. As a grammarian he wrote a (lost) work on Rhodian dialect. Though he was classed as bucolic, his extant poetry (mainly 'Runaway Love' and the story of 'Europa') is not really pastoral, the 'Lament for Bion' not being Moschus's work.

'Megara' may be by Theocritus; but 'The Dead Adonis' is much later.

Bion of Phlossa near Smyrna lived in Sicily, probably late 2nd and early 1st century BCE. Most of the extant poems are not really bucolic, but 'Lament for Adonis' is floridly brilliant.

The so-called Pattern-Poems, included in the bucolic tradition, are found also in the Greek Anthology.

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The Greek Classics
Aldus Manutius
Harvard University Press, 2016
Aldus Manutius (c. 1451–1515) was the most important and innovative scholarly publisher of the Renaissance. His Aldine Press was responsible for more first editions of classical literature, philosophy and science than any other publisher before or since. Aldus was particularly concerned to preserve through the printer’s art the most important remains of Greek literature that had survived the age of the manuscript book, and to provide the literati of his own time with the tools they needed to keep the knowledge of Greek alive. This edition contains all of Aldus’s prefaces to his editions of the Greek classics, translated for the first time into English, along with other illustrative writings by his collaborators. They provide unique insight into the world of scholarly publishing in Renaissance Venice.
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