A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY517 start with R start with R
In The Road to Armageddon Cecil Eby shows how the widely admired writers of English popular fiction and poetry contributed, at least in England, to a romantic militarism coupled with xenophobia that helped create the climate that made World War I seem almost inevitable.
Between the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the opening guns of 1914, the works of such widely read and admired writers as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Rupert Brooke, as well as a host of now almost forgotten contemporaries, bombarded their avid readers with strident warnings of imminent invasions and prophecies of the collapse of civilization under barbarian onslaught and internal moral collapse.
Eby seems these narratives as growing from and in turn fueling a collective neurosis in which dread of coming war coexisted with an almost loving infatuation with it. The author presents a vivid panorama of a militant mileau in which warfare on a scale hitherto unimaginable was largely coaxed into being by works of literary imagination. The role of covert propaganda, concealed in seemingly harmless literary texts, is memorably illustrated.
Road-Book America discloses how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of new American texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that decisively share the characterizing form. Sherrill's discussion encompasses hundreds of American narratives published in the past four decades, including such examples of the genre as William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, and E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate.
Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, traveling characters common to both old and new versions, Sherrill shows how the "new American picaresque" transforms the satirical aims of the original into an effort to map and catalog the immensity and variety of America.
Open, resilient, perennially hopeful, and endowed with a protean adaptability, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self. Mining the relevance of the reformulated picaresque for American life, Road-Book America shows how this old form, adaptable as the picaro himself, lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal and a restoration of cultural confidence in some old ways of being American.
Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost's poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost's reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau, through James and pragmatism. He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost's shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man's relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.
The book shows that Frost was neither a pessimist lamenting the uncertainties of the Darwinian worldview, nor a humanist opposing its power. Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science, and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression, but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.
Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry, but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.
"A forceful, appealing study of the Frost-Darwin relation, which has gone little noted by previous scholars, and a fresh explanation of Frost's ambivalent relation to modernism, which he scorned but also influenced" --William Howarth, Princeton University
Robert Faggen is Associate Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College and Adjunct Associate Professor, Claremont Graduate School.
This collection of essays by leading critics and poets charts Robert Hayden’s growing reputation as a major writer of some of the twentieth century’s most important poems on African-American themes, including the famed “Middle Passage” and “Frederick Douglass.” The essays illuminate the themes and techniques that established Hayden as a modernist writer with affinities to T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, and W. B. Yeats, as well as to traditions of African-American writings that include such figures as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetryis the first and only book to collect significant essays on this distinguished poet. Covering sixty years of commentary, book reviews, essays, and Hayden’s own published materials, this volume is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the poet’s vision of experience, artistry, and influence. The book includes forty different works that examine the life and poetry of Hayden, the first African-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called Poet Laureate) and to receive the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.
This book sheds new light on the work of Robert Hayden (1913–80) in response to changing literary scholarship. While Hayden’s poetry often reflected aspects of the African American experience, he resisted attempts to categorize his poetry in racial terms. This fresh appreciation of Hayden’s work recontextualizes his achievements against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement and traces his influence on contemporary African American poets. Placing Hayden at the heart of a history of African American poetry and culture spanning the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip-Hop era, the book explains why Hayden is now a canonical figure in 20th-century American literature.
In deep readings that focus on Hayden’s religiousness, class consciousness, and historical vision, author Derik Smith inverts earlier scholarly accounts that figure Hayden as an outsider at odds with the militancy of the Black Arts movement. Robert Hayden in Verse offers detailed descriptions of the poet’s vigorous contributions to 1960s discourse about art, modernity, and blackness to show that the poet was, in fact, an earnest participant in Black Arts-era political and aesthetic debates.
Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries reinstates Stevenson at the center of critical debate and demonstrates the sophistication of his writings and the present relevance of his kaleidoscopic achievements. While most young readers know Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) as the author of Treasure Island, few people outside of academia are aware of the breadth of his literary output. The contributors to Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries look, with varied critical approaches, at the whole range of his literary production and unite to confer scholarly legitimacy on this enormously influential writer who has been neglected by critics.
As the editors point out in their Introduction, Stevenson reinvented the “personal essay” and the “walking tour essay,” in texts of ironic stylistic brilliance that broke completely with Victorian moralism. His first full-length work of fiction, Treasure Island, provocatively combined a popular genre (subverting its imperialist ideology) with a self-conscious literary approach.
Stevenson, one of Scotland’s most prolific writers, was very effectively excluded from the canon by his twentieth-century successors and rejected by Anglo-American Modernist writers and critics for his play with popular genres and for his non-serious metaliterary brilliance. While Stevenson’s critical recognition has been slowly increasing, there have been far fewer published single-volume studies of his works than those of his contemporaries, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Lowell's charismatic personality, compelling poetry, and literary fame attracted lovers and friends who were both frightened and excited by his aura of brilliance and danger. He loved the idea of falling in love, and in his recurring manic episodes he needed women at the center of his emotional and artistic life. Each affair became an intense dramatic episode. Though he idealized his loves and encouraged their talents, his frenetic affairs and tortured marriages were always conducted on his own terms. Robert Lowell in Love tells the story of the poet in the grip of love and gives voice to the women who loved him, inspired his poetry, and suffered along with him.
Here is a bold new vision of one of America’s most distinguished and controversial poets. Vereen Bell gives us a subtly reasoned account of the pattern of Robert Lowell’s poetic life, of his struggle to live in “the world as is.” Bell contends that Lowell’s poetry is characterized above all by its chronic and systematic pessimism, but that, paradoxically, Lowell’s reluctance to accept the consequences of his own unsparing vision is what gives his poetry its vigor, richness, and tonal complexity. The Lowell that is revealed is spiritually disconsolate but at the same time unable to suppress a deep-seated idealism.
Drawing on his thorough knowledge of the complete Lowell canon, Bell devotes particular attention to eight of the volumes, concentrating on the last phase of Lowell’s career, from Notebook (and its revision, History) through Day by Day. His readings bring a new understanding of Lowell’s art.
Toward the end of his career, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “It may be said that our lives are our own supreme fiction.” Although lauded for his writing in multiple genres, Warren never wrote an autobiography. Instead, he created his own “shadowy autobiography” in his poetry and prose, as well as his fiction and nonfiction. As one of the most thoughtful scholars on Robert Penn Warren and the literature of the South, Joseph Millichap builds on the accepted idea that Warren’s poetry and fiction became more autobiographical in his later years by demonstrating that that same progression is replicated in Warren’s literary criticism. This meticulously researched study reexamines in particular Warren’s later nonfiction in which autobiographical concerns come into play—that is, in those fraught with psychological crisis such as Democracy and Poetry.
Millichap reveals the interrelated literary genres of autobiography, criticism, and poetry as psychological modes encompassing the interplay of Warren’s life and work in his later nonfiction. He also shows how Warren’s critical engagement with major American authors often centered on the ways their creative work intersected with their lives, thus generating both autobiographical criticism and the working out of Warren’s own autobiography under these influences. Millichap’s latest book focuses on Warren’s critical responses to William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Theodore Dreiser. In addition, the author carefully considers the black and female writers Warren assessed more briefly in American Literature: The Makers and the Making.
Robert Penn Warren, Shadowy Autobiography, and Other Makers of American Literature presents the breadth of Millichap’s scholarship, the depth of his insight, and the maturity of his judgment, by giving us to understand that in his writing, Robert Penn Warren came to know his own vocation as a poet and critic—and as an American.
The Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) is now recognized as one of the most important European authors of the modernist period, having garnered high praise from such prominent voices as Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, and J. M. Coetzee. Robert Walser: A Companion is the first comprehensive guide to Walser’s work in English. The twelve essays in this collection examine Walser’s literary output, historical milieu, and idiosyncratic writing process, addressing aspects of his biography; discussing the various genres in which he wrote (the novel, short prose, drama, lyric poetry, and letters); and analyzing his best-known novels and short stories alongside lesser-known but no less fascinating poems, plays, and prose pieces.
An essential addition to the scholarship about this eccentric, prolific, and influential writer’s work, Robert Walser: A Companion will be of interest both to established scholars and to those coming to Walser for the first time.
Since the end of the Second World War—and particularly over the last decade—Japanese science fiction has strongly influenced global popular culture. Unlike American and British science fiction, its most popular examples have been visual—from Gojira (Godzilla) and Astro Boy in the 1950s and 1960s to the anime masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell of the 1980s and 1990s—while little attention has been paid to a vibrant tradition of prose science fiction in Japan.
Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams remedies this neglect with a rich exploration of the genre that connects prose science fiction to contemporary anime. Bringing together Western scholars and leading Japanese critics, this groundbreaking work traces the beginnings, evolution, and future direction of science fiction in Japan, its major schools and authors, cultural origins and relationship to its Western counterparts, the role of the genre in the formation of Japan’s national and political identity, and its unique fan culture.
Covering a remarkable range of texts—from the 1930s fantastic detective fiction of Yumeno Kyûsaku to the cross-culturally produced and marketed film and video game franchise Final Fantasy—this book firmly establishes Japanese science fiction as a vital and exciting genre.
Contributors: Hiroki Azuma; Hiroko Chiba, DePauw U; Naoki Chiba; William O. Gardner, Swarthmore College; Mari Kotani; Livia Monnet, U of Montreal; Miri Nakamura, Stanford U; Susan Napier, Tufts U; Sharalyn Orbaugh, U of British Columbia; Tamaki Saitô; Thomas Schnellbächer, Berlin Free U.
Christopher Bolton is assistant professor of Japanese at Williams College.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. is professor of English at DePauw University.
Takayuki Tatsumi is professor of English at Keio University.
Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor
The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.
Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.
Rocking the Boat is a celebration of strong, committed women who helped to build the American labor movement. Through the stories of eleven women from a wide range of backgrounds, we experience the turmoil, hardships, and accomplishments of thousands of other union women activists through the period spanning the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These women tell powerful stories that highlight and detail women's many roles as workers, trade unionists, and family members. They all faced difficulties in their personal lives, overcame challenges in their unions, and individually and collectively helped improve women's everyday working lives.
Maida Springer-Kemp came from New York City's Harlem, Local 22 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to represent the AFL-CIO in Africa. In Chicago, Alice Peurala fought for her job in the steel mill and her place in the steel workers' union. Jessie De La Cruz organized farm workers in California. Esther Peterson, organizer, educator, and lobbyist, became an advisor to four U.S. presidents. In chapters based on oral history interviews, these women and others provide new perspectives and practical advice for today's working women. They share an idealistic and practical commitment to the labor movement. As Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers and a founding member of the National Organization of Women said, "You have to take a look at how to rock the boat. You don't want to spill yourself out if you can avoid it, but sometimes you have to rock the boat." From these women we, too, learn how to rock the boat.
Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. F. Brett Cox surveys the landscape of Zelazny's creative life and contradictions. Launched by the classic 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," Zelazny soon won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with …And Call Me Conrad and two years later won again for Lord of Light. Cox looks at the author's overnight success and follows Zelazny into a period of continued formal experimentation, the commercial triumph of the Amber sword and sorcery novels, and renewed acclaim for Hugo-winning novellas such as "Home Is the Hangman" and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai." Throughout, Cox analyzes aspects of Zelazny's art, from his preference for poetically alienated protagonists to the ways his plots reflected his determined individualism.
Clear-eyed and detailed, Roger Zelazny provides an up-to-date reconsideration of an often-misunderstood SF maverick.
-Jonathan Dollimore, York University
"Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is an up-to-date and suggestive collection on a subject that all scholars of the early modern period have encountered but few have studied in the range and depth represented here."
-Lawrence Manley, Yale University
"A model of cross-disciplinary exchange, Rogues and Early Modern English Culture foregrounds the figure of the rogue in a nexus of early modern cultural inscriptions that reveals the provocation a seemingly marginal figure offers to authorities and various forms of authoritative understanding, then and now. The new and recent work gathered here is an exciting contribution to early modern studies, for both scholars and students."
-Alexandra W. Halasz, Dartmouth College
Rogues and Early Modern English Culture is a definitive collection of critical essays on the literary and cultural impact of the early modern rogue. Under various names-rogues, vagrants, molls, doxies, vagabonds, cony-catchers, masterless men, caterpillars of the commonwealth-this group of marginal figures, poor men and women with no clear social place or identity, exploded onto the scene in sixteenth-century English history and culture. Early modern representations of the rogue or moll in pamphlets, plays, poems, ballads, historical records, and the infamous Tudor Poor Laws treated these characters as harbingers of emerging social, economic, and cultural changes.
Images of the early modern rogue reflected historical developments but also created cultural icons for mobility, change, and social adaptation. The underclass rogue in many ways inverts the familiar image of the self-fashioned gentleman, traditionally seen as the literary focus and exemplar of the age, but the two characters have more in common than courtiers or humanists would have admitted. Both relied on linguistic prowess and social dexterity to manage their careers, whether exploiting the politics of privilege at court or surviving by their wits on urban streets.
Deftly edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, this anthology features essays from prominent and emerging critics in the field of Renaissance studies and promises to attract considerable attention from a broad range of readers and scholars in literary studies and social history.
An environmental humanist’s study of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation in Indian fiction.
Rogues in the Postcolony is a study of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels that dramatize the impacts of extractive capitalism and colonial occupation on local communities in several Indian states. In this materialist history of development on the subcontinent, Stacey Balkan considers works by Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga that critique violent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession at the hands of corporate entities like the English East India Company and its many legatees. By foregrounding the intersections among landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression, Rogues in the Postcolony also attends to the complicity of popular aesthetic forms with political and economic policy, as well as the colonial and extractivist logics that often frame discussions around the so-called Anthropocene epoch.
Bringing together questions about settler-colonial practices and environmental injustice, Rogues in the Postcolony concludes with an investigation of new extractivist frontiers, including solar capitalism, and considers the possibility of imagining life after extraction on the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.
early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries
by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites
in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of
paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake,
Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.
Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of
myth in the structure of societies past and present—how we create,
use, and are guided by systems of myth to answer fundamental questions
about ourselves and our world.
Many of the sections in Mythologies, originally published as a
two-volume cloth set, will soon be available in four paperback volumes
(two are announced here; two more are scheduled for 1993). These
volumes will reproduce the articles, introductory essays, and
illustrations as they appeared in the full Mythologies set.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman history for a Greek audience.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was born before 53 BC and went to Italy before 29 BC. He taught rhetoric in Rome while studying the Latin language, collecting material for a history of Rome, and writing. His Roman Antiquities began to appear in 7 BC.
Dionysius states that his objects in writing history were to please lovers of noble deeds and to repay the benefits he had enjoyed in Rome. But he wrote also to reconcile Greeks to Roman rule. Of the twenty books of Roman Antiquities (from the earliest times to 264 BC) we have the first nine complete; most of Books 10 and 11; and later extracts and an epitome of the whole. Dionysius studied the best available literary sources (mainly annalistic and other historians) and possibly some public documents. His work and that of Livy are our only continuous and detailed independent narratives of early Roman history.
Dionysius was author also of essays on literature covering rhetoric, Greek oratory, Thucydides, and how to imitate the best models in literature.
The Loeb Classical Library publishes a two-volume edition of the critical essays; the edition of Roman Antiquities is in seven volumes.
Roman Cities provides the first comprehensive study in English of major Roman cities, including an excellent coverage of the Roman legacy which was transmitted to medieval and modern trends in architecture and urban planning..
Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.
Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.
Rome’s foreign wars, nation by nation.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple 'common' dialect, 24 books of 'Roman affairs', in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
Appian (Appianus) was a Greek official of Alexandria. He saw the Jewish rebellion of 116 CE, and later became a Roman citizen and advocate and received the rank of eques (knight). In his older years he held a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius who was emperor 138–161 CE. Honest admirer of the Roman empire though ignorant of the institutions of the earlier Roman republic, he wrote, in the simple “common” dialect, 24 books of “Roman affairs,” in fact conquests, from the beginnings to the times of Trajan (emperor 98–117 CE). Eleven have come down to us complete, or nearly so, namely those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, Punic, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the Civil Wars. They are valuable records of military history.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Appian is in four volumes.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Rome’s internal conflicts, from the Gracchi to the Empire.
Appian (Appianus) is among our principal sources for the history of the Roman Republic, particularly in the second and first centuries BC, and sometimes our only source, as for the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. Born circa AD 95, Appian was an Alexandrian official at ease in the highest political and literary circles who later became a Roman citizen and advocate. He apparently received equestrian rank, for in his later years he was offered a procuratorship. He died during the reign of Antoninus Pius (emperor 138–161).
Appian’s theme is the process by which the Roman Empire achieved its contemporary prosperity, and his unique method is to trace in individual books the story of each nation’s wars with Rome up through her own civil wars. Although this triumph of “harmony and monarchy” was achieved through characteristic Roman virtues, Appian is unusually objective about Rome’s shortcomings along the way. His history is particularly strong on financial and economic matters, and on the operations of warfare and diplomacy.
Of the work’s original twenty-four books, only the Preface and Books 6–9 and 11–17 are preserved complete or nearly so: those on the Spanish, Hannibalic, African, Illyrian, Syrian, and Mithridatic wars, and five books on the civil wars.
This edition of Appian replaces the original Loeb edition by Horace White and adds the fragments, as well as his letter to Fronto.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
A sweeping chronicle from Aeneas to Alexander Severus.
Dio Cassius (Cassius Dio), circa AD 150–235, was born at Nicaea in Bithynia in Asia Minor. On the death of his father (Roman governor of Cilicia) he went in 180 to Rome, entered the Senate, and under the emperor Commodus was an advocate. He held high offices, becoming a close friend of several emperors; he was made governor of Pergamum and Smyrna; consul in 220; proconsul of Africa; governor of Dalmatia and then of Pannonia; and consul again in 229.
Of the eighty books of Dio's great work Roman History, covering the era from the legendary landing of Aeneas in Italy to the reign of Alexander Severus (AD 222–235), we possess Books 36–60 (36 and 55–60 have gaps), which cover the years 68 BC–AD 47. The missing portions are partly supplied, for the earlier gaps by Zonaras, who relies closely on Dio, and for some later gaps (Book 35 onwards) by John Xiphilinus (of the eleventh century). There are also many excerpts. The facilities for research afforded by Dio's official duties and his own industry make him a very vital source for Roman history of the last years of the republic and the first four emperors.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Dio Cassius is in nine volumes.
Roman tragedies were written for over three hundred years, but only fragments remain of plays that predate the works of Seneca in the mid-first century C.E., making it difficult to define the role of tragedy in ancient Roman culture. Nevertheless, in this pioneering book, Mario Erasmo draws on all the available evidence to trace the evolution of Roman tragedy from the earliest tragedians to the dramatist Seneca and to explore the role played by Roman culture in shaping the perception of theatricality on and off the stage.
Performing a philological analysis of texts informed by semiotic theory and audience reception, Erasmo pursues two main questions in this study: how does Roman tragedy become metatragedy, and how did off-stage theatricality come to compete with the theatre? Working chronologically, he looks at how plays began to incorporate a rhetoricized reality on stage, thus pointing to their own theatricality. And he shows how this theatricality, in turn, came to permeate society, so that real events such as the assassination of Julius Caesar took on theatrical overtones, while Pompey's theatre opening and the lavish spectacles of the emperor Nero deliberately blurred the lines between reality and theatre. Tragedy eventually declined as a force in Roman culture, Erasmo suggests, because off-stage reality became so theatrical that on-stage tragedy could no longer compete.
Cohn argues that a full understanding of the contemporary romance requires an investigation of its literary and historical sources and analogues. Three principal sources are examined in the context of women's history in bourgeois society. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Erye, and Gone With the Wind demonstrate the development of romance fiction's themes, yet in all three the central love story is complicated by issues of property, the sign of male power. Jan Cohn further considers the development of the genre n the fictions of Harriet Lewis and May Agnes Fleming, prolific and popular American romance writers of the late nineteenth century who developed the role of the villain, thereby bringing into focus the sexual and economic struggles faced by the heroine.
Romance and the Erotics of Property sets romance fiction against a historic and literary background, arguing that contemporary romance disguises as tales of love the subversive fantasies of female appropriation and male property and power.
In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.
The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.
By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.
A leading historian argues that in the empire we know as Byzantium, the Greek-speaking population was actually Roman, and scholars have deliberately mislabeled their ethnicity for the past two centuries for political reasons.
Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself “Byzantine.” And while the identities of minorities in the eastern empire are clear—contemporaries speak of Slavs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Jews, and Muslims—that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations.
Historical evidence tells us unequivocally that Byzantium’s ethnic majority, no less than the ruler of Constantinople, would have identified as Roman. It was an identity so strong in the eastern empire that even the conquering Ottomans would eventually adopt it. But Western scholarship has a long tradition of denying the Romanness of Byzantium. In Romanland, Anthony Kaldellis investigates why and argues that it is time for the Romanness of these so-called Byzantines to be taken seriously.
In the Middle Ages, he explains, people of the eastern empire were labeled “Greeks,” and by the nineteenth century they were shorn of their distorted Greekness and became “Byzantine.” Only when we understand that the Greek-speaking population of Byzantium was actually Roman will we fully appreciate the nature of Roman ethnic identity. We will also better understand the processes of assimilation that led to the absorption of foreign and minority groups into the dominant ethnic group, the Romans who presided over the vast multiethnic empire of the east.
Recent scholarship in post-humanism, post-colonialism, disability studies, post-modern feminism, eco-criticism, and radical Orientalism has significantly affected the critical discourse on this topic. In engaging with the work and thought of Coleridge, Poe, Hoffmann, Mary Shelley, and other Romantic luminaries, the contributors to this collection open new methodological approaches to understanding human interaction with technology that strives to simulate, supplement, or supplant organic life.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
In Romantic Complexity, Jack Stillinger examines three of the most admired poets of English Romanticism--Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth--with a focus on the complexity that results from the multiple authorship, the multiple textual representation, and the multiple reading and interpretation of their best works.
Specific topics include the joint authorship of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, an experiment of 1798 that established the most essential characteristics of modern poetry; Coleridge's creation of eighteen or more different versions of The Ancient Mariner and how this textual multiplicity affects interpretation; the historical collaboration between Keats and his readers to produce fifty-nine separate but entirely legitimate readings of The Eve of St. Agnes; and a number of practical and theoretical matters bearing on the relationships among these writers and their influences on one another.
Stillinger shows his deep understanding of the poets' lives, works, and the history of their reception, in chapters rich with intriguing questions and answers sure to engage students and teachers of the world's greatest poetry.
Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology.
Although modern media tend to represent globalization as an essentially contemporary phenomenon, many scholars now agree that its fundamental dynamics—especially its characteristic annulment of spatial and temporal differences—have been present for several centuries. Moreover, the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth century saw the convergence of a number of world-changing socio-political developments in the Western world. Romantic Globalism is significant because it is the first extended scholarly study that brings together these lines of inquiry. In so doing, Romantic Globalism not only charts a new course of study for British Romanticism but also suggests how the Romantics’ visions of globality might still be valuable to us today.
In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.
Few can match Charles Rosen's cultivation and discernment, whether as pianist, music historian, or critic. Here he gives us a performance of literary criticism as high art, a critical conjuring of the Romantic period by way of some of its central texts.
"What is the real business of the critic?" Rosen asks of George Bernard Shaw in one of his essays. It is a question he answers throughout this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Hölderlin, he examines the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In essays on Honoré de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations of it; and the significance of the established text.
With an apt comparison or a startling juxtaposition, Rosen opens whole worlds of insight, as in his linking of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape painting and Schumann's music, or in his review of the theory and musicology of Heinrich Schenker alongside the work of Roman Jakobson.
Throughout this volume we hear the voice of a shrewd aesthetic interpreter, performing the critic's task even as he redefines it in his sparkling fashion.
The rebels of the Romantic period speak more directly to the issues of today than any other group of writers of the past. Mary Wollstonecraft exposed the problem of women's rights; her husband William Godwin protested against war, economic and social imbalances, and cruel penal practices; their daughter Mary Shelley produced the original science fiction, Frankenstein, and introduced into the novel radical social and antireligious views. Shelley campaigned in Ireland for Irish separation, wrote pamphlets on parliamentary reform, and propounded an egalitarian world; Byron addressed himself to problems of social injustice and lost his life as a result of his participation in the Greek war of independence. Leigh Hunt, the first radical, crusading journalist, battled all forms of injustice from child labor to army flogging; Thomas Love Peacock's lively, satiric novels excoriated sham.
Their rebellion carried into their personal lives: Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Byron openly flouted the laws of marital relations, and several adopted unconventional dress. The rebels paid dearly for their public and private views. Shelley was deprived of his children, Byron was driven into exile, and Leigh Hunt was imprisoned.
The lives and works of these major Romantics are sketched in a concise and lively way in these twelve essays, which are derived from Shelley and His Circle, Volumes I through IV. The collection provides a cohesive picture of some of the Romantics whose lives interlocked in the early 1800's.
Romanticism: A German Affair is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.
Simpson demonstrates the close association between "theory" and "method" and shows that by the mid-eighteenth century, "method" had acquired distinctly subversive associations in England. Attributed increasingly to the French and the Germans, "method" paradoxically evoked images both of inhuman rationality and unbridled sentimentality; in either incarnation, it was seen as a threat to what was claimed to be authentically British. Simpson develops these paradigms in relation to feminism, the gendering of Anglo-American culture, and the emergence of literature and literary criticism as antitheoretical discourses. He then looks at the Romantic poets' response to this confining ideology of the cultural role of literature. Finally, Simpson considers postmodern theory's claims for the radical energy of nonrational or antirationalist positions.
This is an essential book not only for students of the Romantic period and intellectual historians concerned with the idea of "method," but for anyone interested in the historical background of today's debates over the excesses and possibilities of "theory."
Biondo Flavio (1392–1463), humanist and historian, was a pioneering figure in the Renaissance discovery of antiquity; famously, he was the author who popularized the term “Middle Age” to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of antiquity in his own time. While serving a number of Renaissance popes, he inaugurated an extraordinary program of research into the history, cultural life, and physical remains of the ancient world.
The capstone of this research program, Rome in Triumph (1459), has been said to bear comparison with the Encyclopédie of Diderot as the embodiment of the ideals of an age, seeking as it does to answer the overarching question of humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli: what made Rome great? To answer the question Biondo undertakes a comprehensive reconstruction of Rome’s religion, government, military organization, customs and institutions over its thousand-year history. This volume contains the first edition of the Latin text since 1559 and the first translation into any modern language.
Ronald Harwood’s Tragic Vision offers the first critical analysis of prolific and award-winning British author Ronald Harwood (1934–2020). Though he received an Oscar for The Pianist, a knighthood, and numerous other awards and nominations, Harwood worked as a ghostwriter, script doctor, and veritable unknown for many years. As he became successful, many critics still misread his works and positioned him as a less-fashionable counterpart to his lifelong friend Harold Pinter. This study proposes a conceptual framework to approach his, and others’, work based on the genre of tragedy, offering a greater appreciation for and understanding of the Harwood canon.
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness?
A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain’s military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens’s and Thackeray’s acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton’s curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill’s The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde’s clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope’s novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London’s clubland—this all-important room of his own—comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.
Wampole examines both the philosophical implications of this metaphor and its political evolution. From the root as home to the root as genealogical origin to the root as the past itself, rootedness has survived in part through its ability to subsume other compelling metaphors, such as the foundation, the source, and the seed. With a focus on this concept’s history in France and Germany, Wampole traces its influence in diverse areas such as the search for the mystical origins of words, land worship, and nationalist rhetoric, including the disturbing portrayal of the Jews as an unrooted, and thus unrighteous, people. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences.
Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.
Throughout her career, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin has been at the vanguard of discussions about feminism and sexism, the state of poetry, and our place in the natural world. The Roots of Things gathers into one volume her best essays on the issues that have been closest to her throughout her storied career.
Divided into sections on "Taking Root," "Poets and Poetry," and "Country Living," these pieces reveal Kumin honing her views within a variety of forms, including speeches, critical essays, and introductions of other writers’ work. Whether she is recollecting scenes from her childhood, ruminating on the ups and downs of what she calls "pobiz" (for "poetry business"), describing the battles she’s fought on behalf of women, or illuminating the lives of animals, Kumin offers insight that can only be born of long and closely observed experience.
Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)Biography brings this extraordinary woman to life in a unique blend of biography and autobiography. Coupling her own memories with Bonheur's first-person account, Anna Klumpke, a young American artist who was Bonheur's lover and chosen portraitist, recounts how she came to meet and fall in love with Bonheur. Bonheur's account of her own life story, set nicely within Klumpke's narrative, sheds light on such topics as gender formation, institutional changes in the art world, governmental intervention in the arts, the social and legal regulation of dress codes, and the perceived transgressive nature of female sexual companionship in a repressive society, all with the distinctive flavor of Bonheur's artistic personality.
Gretchen van Slyke's translation provides a rare glimpse into the unconventional life of this famous French painter, and renders accessible for the first time in English this public statement of Bonheur's artistic credo. More importantly, whether judged by her century's standards (or perhaps even our own), it details a story of lesbian love that is bold, unconventional, and courageous.
"The remarkable life of Rosa Bonheur, one of the most highly decorated artists and certainly the best known female artist of her time in nineteenth-century France, is long overdue for further scrutiny." --Therese Dolan, Temple University
Gretchen van Slyke is Associate Professor of French, University of Vermont.
Thinker, writer, diplomat, feminist Rosario Castellanos was emerging as one of Mexico's major literary figures before her untimely death in 1974. This sampler of her work brings together her major poems, short fiction, essays, and a three-act play, The Eternal Feminine. Translated with fidelity to language and cultural nuance, many of these works appear here in English for the first time, allowing English-speaking readers to see the depth and range of Castellanos' work.
In her introductory essay, "Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contexts, Voices, and Signs," Maureen Ahern presents the first comprehensive study of Castellanos' work as a sign or signifying system. This approach through contemporary semiotic theory unites literary criticism and translation as an integral semiotic process. Ahern reveals how Castellanos integrated women's images, bodies, voices, and texts to feminize her discourse and create a plurality of new signs/messages about women in Mexico. Describing this process in The Eternal Feminine, Castellanos observes, "...it's not good enough to imitate the models proposed for us that are answers to circumstances other than our own. It isn't even enough to discover who we are. We have to invent ourselves."
In typical Tate style, the book continually straddles the line between fiction and autobiography, entertaining readers with amusing accounts of the poet's own experiences while drawing on these to narrate the fictional stories as well.
James Tate is Professor of Poetry, University of Massachusetts. He is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Worshipful Company of Fletchers: Poems, 1994; Selected Poems, 1991; Distance from Loved Ones, 1990. He has received several awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1992.
Emily Dickinson wrote a "letter to the world" and left it lying in her drawer more than a century ago. This widely admired epistle was her poems, which were never conventionally published in book form during her lifetime. Since the posthumous discovery of her work, general readers and literary scholars alike have puzzled over this paradox of wanting to communicate widely and yet apparently refusing to publish. In this pathbreaking study, Martha Nell Smith unravels the paradox by boldly recasting two of the oldest and still most frequently asked questions about Emily Dickinson: Why didn't she publish more poems while she was alive? and Who was her most important contemporary audience?
Regarding the question of publication, Smith urges a reconception of the act of publication itself. She argues that Dickinson did publish her work in letters and in forty manuscript books that circulated among a cultured network of correspondents, most important of whom was her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Rather than considering this material unpublished because unprinted, Smith views its alternative publication as a conscious strategy on the poet's part, a daring poetic experiment that also included Dickinson's unusual punctuation, line breaks, stanza divisions, calligraphic orthography, and bookmaking—all the characteristics that later editors tried to standardize or eliminate in preparing the poems for printing.
Dickinson's relationship with her most important reader, Sue Dickinson, has also been lost or distorted by multiple levels of censorship, Smith finds. Emphasizing the poet-sustaining aspects of the passionate bonds between the two women, Smith shows that their relationship was both textual and sexual. Based on study of the actual holograph poems, Smith reveals the extent of Sue Dickinson's collaboration in the production of poems, most notably "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers." This finding will surely challenge the popular conception of the isolated, withdrawn Emily Dickinson.
Well-versed in poststructuralist, feminist, and new textual criticism, Rowing in Eden uncovers the process by which the conventional portrait of Emily Dickinson was drawn and offers readers a chance to go back to original letters and poems and look at the poet and her work through new eyes. It will be of great interest to a wide audience in literary and feminist studies.
A fresh exploration of apologetic material that pushes beyond form criticism
Andrew Knapp applies modern genre theory to seven ancient Near Eastern royal apologies that served to defend the legitimacy of kings who came to power under irregular circumstances. Knapp examines texts and inscriptions related to Telipinu, Hattusili III, David, Solomon, Hazael, Esarhaddon, and Nabonidus to identify transhistorical common issues that unite each discourse.
Features:
- Compares Hittite, Israelite, Aramean, Assyrian, and Babylonian apologies
- Examination of apologetic as a mode instead of a genre
- Charts and illustrations
Rubén Darío (1867–1916), the undisputed standard-bearer of the Modernist movement in Hispanic letters, was born in Nicaragua. In 1886 he went to Chile, where he published Azul (1888), his first important book of poems and stories. Later he lived for extended periods in Argentina, Spain, and France, and in these countries produced his best work: compelling poems of beauty, style, and dignity, especially Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905). The perfection of form, exotic essences, and rich ornamentation of his earlier work give way in his most mature poems to self-probings and doubts, the anguish so characteristic of twentieth-century literature. But the hedonistic note, the quenchless appetite for life, dominating Azul and Prosas profanas (1896) never die out, and are magnificently present in El poema del otoño (1910). Darío has had a tremendous impact on Hispanic literature. He is one of the best examples of the poet who is true to his art as determined by his innermost impulses. His poetry has fertilized a whole generation of writers in Spanish America and in Spain, and even now his influence continues to be felt.
Since the collected poems of eleventh- and twelfth-century Persian philosopher Omar Khayyám were first translated into English in 1859 by Patrick Fitzgerald, the Rubáiyát has become one of the most popular books of verse in the world. In addition to English, it has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Urdu, and many other languages. It has been published in numerous editions: precious volumes with bejeweled bindings, artist’s books, scholarly and critical editions, forgeries and fake editions, making it a perfect object for both book collectors and lovers of poetry. This comprehensive volume is the first bibliography of Khayyám’s classic work since the first Rubáiyát bibliography by A. G. Potter, which was published in 1929
Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time.
Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry."
Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature.
After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief.
The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.
Praised by Paul Auster as “one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime,” Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversière, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight, as any sonnet. “I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood and doesn’t understand,” says the section that gives the book its title, as he revisits childhood cityscapes and explores the tricks memory plays on us.
A mixture of genres—the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory, and art—this is a book of both epigrammatic concision and dreamlike narratives that meander with the poet’s thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. The book’s layered texts echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy’s own poetics and thought.
One of the most gifted of America’s writers, James Rufus Agee (1909–1955), spent a third of his short life in Tennessee, yet no biographical treatment until this one has so fully explored his roots in the state. In Rufus, Paul F. Brown draws deeply on a trove of journals, letters, interviews, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, to produce a captivating portrait of Agee’s boyhood.
Brown meticulously delineates Agee’s family history, his earliest years as a sensitive child growing up in Knoxville’s Fort Sanders neighborhood, and the traumatic event that marked his sixth year: his father’s death in an automobile accident. Young Rufus—as his family always called him—revered his father and would use his memories of the tragedy to create his most enduring work of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Death in the Family. Just a few years after his father was killed, Agee’s mother placed him in the St. Andrew’s School for Mountain Boys near Sewanee, Tennessee, where he would meet his mentor and lifelong friend, Father James Flye; these experiences would inspire Agee’s poignant novella, The Morning Watch. Another year in Knoxville followed, and then his mother, newly remarried, whisked him away to New England, where he would complete his education at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard.
Brown’s account deftly reconstructs various settings the young Agee encountered—including not only turn-of-the-century Knoxville and St. Andrew’s but also the mountain hamlet of LaFollette, his father’s hometown—and the complex family relationships that swirled around the young writer-to-be. Brown also explores Knoxville’s belated discovery of its famous son, initiated when Hollywood came to town in 1962 to film All the Way Home, an adaptation of A Death in the Family. Notable commemorations—including academic seminars, a public park, and a street named in Agee’s honor—would come later as the writer’s posthumous reputation bloomed. And now, with Rufus, we have the definitive account of how it all began.
One of the most common scenes in Augustan and Romantic literature is that of a writer confronting some emblem of change and loss, most often the remains of a vanished civilization or a desolate natural landscape. Ruins and Empire traces the ruin sentiment from its earliest classical and Renaissance expressions through English literature to its establishment as a dominant theme of early American art.
Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence: all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity.
In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.”
Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.
Martin shows how Paradise Lost, written at the threshold of the enormous imaginative shift that accompanied the Protestant, scientific, and political revolutions of the seventeenth century, conforms to a prophetic baroque model of allegory similar to that outlined by Walter Benjamin. As she demonstrates, Milton’s experimentation with baroque forms radically reformulates classical epic, medieval romance, and Spenserian allegory to allow for both a naturalistic, empirically responsible understanding of the universe and for an infinite and incomprehensible God. In this way, the resulting poetic world of Paradise Lost is like Milton’s God, an allegorical “ruin” in which the divine is preserved but at the price of a loss of certainty. Also, as Martin suggests, the poem affirmatively anticipates modernity by placing the chief hope of human progress in the fully self-authored subject.
Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets Paradise Lost in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds. Ruins of Allegory will greatly interest all Milton scholars, as well as students of literary criticism and early modern studies.
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others—and deft use of psychoanalytic theory—The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.
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