“Sol Plaatje’s Mafeking Diary is a document of enduring importance and fascination. The product of a young black South African court interpreter, just turned 23 years old when he started writing, it opens an entirely new vista on the famous Siege of Mafeking. By shedding light on the part played by the African population of the town, Plaatje explodes the myth, maintained by belligerents, and long perpetuated by both historians and the popular imagination, this this was a white man’s affair. One of the great epics of British imperial history, and perhaps the best remembered episode of the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902, is presented from a wholly novel perspective.
“At the same time, the diary provides an intriguing insight into the character of a young man who was to play a key role in South African political and literary history during the first three decades of this century. It reveals much of the perceptions and motives that shaped his own attitudes and intellectual development and, indeed, those of an early generation of African leaders who sought to build a society which did not determine the place of its citizens by the colour of their skin. The diary therefore illuminates the origins of a struggle which continues to this day.”
— John L. Comaroff (ed.) in his preface
Mock trial—Roman style.
The Major Declamations stand out for their unique contribution to our understanding of the final stage in Greco-Roman rhetorical training. These exercises, in which students learned how to compose and deliver speeches on behalf of either the prosecution or the defense at imaginary trials, demonstrate how standard themes, recurring situations and arguments, and technical rules were to be handled by the aspiring orator. And what is more, they lay bare the mistakes that students often made in this process.
Declamation was practiced in the ancient world from as early as the fifth century BC, but most of its vast tradition has disappeared. The surviving material is mainly in Greek, from the second century AD onward. In Latin the nineteen declamations in the present anthology are by far the most important evidence. In antiquity they were attributed to Quintilian, but they are now thought to be the work of several authors and to date from around AD 100 to the mid- or late third century.
A wide variety of fascinating ethical, social, and legal details animates the fictional world conjured up by these oratorical exercises, and although the themes of declamation can be unrealistic and even absurd (often reminiscent of ancient novel and tragedy), they seem to provide a safe space in which a student could confront a range of complex issues, so as to attain both the technical knowledge necessary to speak persuasively and the soft skills needed to manage the challenges of adult life under the Roman empire.
Mock trial—Roman style.
The Major Declamations stand out for their unique contribution to our understanding of the final stage in Greco-Roman rhetorical training. These exercises, in which students learned how to compose and deliver speeches on behalf of either the prosecution or the defense at imaginary trials, demonstrate how standard themes, recurring situations and arguments, and technical rules were to be handled by the aspiring orator. And what is more, they lay bare the mistakes that students often made in this process.
Declamation was practiced in the ancient world from as early as the fifth century BC, but most of its vast tradition has disappeared. The surviving material is mainly in Greek, from the second century AD onward. In Latin the nineteen declamations in the present anthology are by far the most important evidence. In antiquity they were attributed to Quintilian, but they are now thought to be the work of several authors and to date from around AD 100 to the mid- or late third century.
A wide variety of fascinating ethical, social, and legal details animates the fictional world conjured up by these oratorical exercises, and although the themes of declamation can be unrealistic and even absurd (often reminiscent of ancient novel and tragedy), they seem to provide a safe space in which a student could confront a range of complex issues, so as to attain both the technical knowledge necessary to speak persuasively and the soft skills needed to manage the challenges of adult life under the Roman empire.
Mock trial—Roman style.
The Major Declamations stand out for their unique contribution to our understanding of the final stage in Greco-Roman rhetorical training. These exercises, in which students learned how to compose and deliver speeches on behalf of either the prosecution or the defense at imaginary trials, demonstrate how standard themes, recurring situations and arguments, and technical rules were to be handled by the aspiring orator. And what is more, they lay bare the mistakes that students often made in this process.
Declamation was practiced in the ancient world from as early as the fifth century BC, but most of its vast tradition has disappeared. The surviving material is mainly in Greek, from the second century AD onward. In Latin the nineteen declamations in the present anthology are by far the most important evidence. In antiquity they were attributed to Quintilian, but they are now thought to be the work of several authors and to date from around AD 100 to the mid- or late third century.
A wide variety of fascinating ethical, social, and legal details animates the fictional world conjured up by these oratorical exercises, and although the themes of declamation can be unrealistic and even absurd (often reminiscent of ancient novel and tragedy), they seem to provide a safe space in which a student could confront a range of complex issues, so as to attain both the technical knowledge necessary to speak persuasively and the soft skills needed to manage the challenges of adult life under the Roman empire.
In time for the centennial celebration of her classic Mysticism, this volume of Underhill's letters will enable readers and researchers to follow her as she reconciled her beliefs with her daily life. The letters reveal her personal and theological development and clarify the relationships that influenced her life and work. Hardly aloof, she enjoyed the interests, mirth, and compassion of close friendships.
Drawing from collections previously unknown to scholars, The Making of a Mystic shows the range of Evelyn Underhill's mind and interests as well as the immense network of her correspondents, including Sir James Frazier and Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This substantial selection of Underhill's correspondence demonstrates an exceptional scope, beginning with her earliest letters from boarding school to her mother and extending to a letter written to T. S. Eliot from what was to be her deathbed in London in 1941 as the London Blitz raged around her.
Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—a raw and barren strip-mined landscape—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.
Wally’s story is a charming distillation of the themes that the late, beloved Gene Logsdon returned to again and again in his many books and hundreds of articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.
Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s poetic prose.
This new facsimile edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes a plate-by-plate guide to the texts, interlinear figures, and larger designs in a commentary accompanying the transcript of each reproduced plate. Drawings from Blake’s manuscript notebook, which were used as a basis for the designs, as well as working proof impressions, are also included, demonstrating the evolution of the work. This edition also reproduces a single plate from each of the other eight surviving copies, revealing how over a period of more than thirty years Blake altered the way he finished each copy. An introduction explores the book's literary and historical background, Blake’s printing process, and the book's anonymous initial publication.
This expertly edited work is available for students and scholars in paperback and for collectors in a special hardcover edition. Both versions allow Blake’s vision to reassert its breathtaking power.
This new facsimile edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell includes a plate-by-plate guide to the texts, interlinear figures, and larger designs in a commentary accompanying the transcript of each reproduced plate. Drawings from Blake’s manuscript notebook, which were used as a basis for the designs, as well as working proof impressions, are also included, demonstrating the evolution of the work. This edition also reproduces a single plate from each of the other eight surviving copies, revealing how over a period of more than thirty years Blake altered the way he finished each copy. An introduction explores the book's literary and historical background, Blake’s printing process, and the book's anonymous initial publication.
This expertly edited work is available for students and scholars in paperback and for collectors in a special hardcover edition. Both versions allow Blake’s vision to reassert its breathtaking power.
Eliza Orzeszkowa was a trailblazing Polish novelist who, alongside Leo Tolstoy and Henryk Sienkiewicz, was a finalist for the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature. Of her many works of social realism, Marta (1873) is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of the English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women.
Suddenly widowed, the previously middle-class Marta Świcka is left penniless and launched into a grim battle for her survival and that of her small daughter. As she applies for job after job in Warsaw—portrayed here as an every-city, an unforgiving commercial landscape that could be any European metropolis of the time—she is told time after time that only men will be hired, that men need jobs because they are fathers and heads of families.
Marta burns with Orzeszkowa’s feminist conviction that sexism was not just an annoyance but a threat to the survival of women and children. It anticipated the need for social safety nets whose existence we take for granted today, and could easily read as an indictment of current efforts to dismantle those very programs. Tightly plotted and exquisitely translated by Anna Gąsienica-Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, Marta resonates beyond its Polish setting to find its place in women’s studies, labor history, and among other works of nineteenth-century literature and literature of social change.
Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers gathers more than two decades of wisdom from twenty-nine accomplished authors. It offers previously unpublished interviews along with freshly edited versions of ten interviews from Nancy Bunge's well-received previous collection, Finding the Words. The first section, Theory, incorporates interviews which document the golden age of writing programs in which authors with a strong sense of social and cultural responsibility taught as seriously as they wrote. These conversations delve into the writers' philosophies and teaching methods. The second section, Practice, presents interviews with authors who discuss how they've approached the writing of particular works. Altogether the interviews introduce authors as inspirational models and provide insightful techniques for other writers to try. One piece of advice recurs with striking consistency: to produce fresh, interesting work, aspiring writers must develop a passionate self-trust. This rule has an essential corollary: improving as a writer means constantly stretching oneself with new information and skills. Sure to interest writing and literature teachers as well as writers at every stage of development, Master Class is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate writing courses.
Interviews with Marvin Bell, Ivan Doig, Sandra Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Etheridge Knight, Margot Livesey, Larry McMurtry, James Alan McPherson, Clarence Major, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sue Miller, N. Scott Momaday, Kyoko Mori, Thylias Moss, W. S. Penn, Kit Reed, Alix Kates Shulman, William Stafford, Wallace Stegner, Ruth Stone, Scott Turow, Katherine Vaz, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Richard Wilbur, Richard Yates, and Helen Yglesias.
In 1927, at the peak of his career, Zane Grey bought a three-masted schooner, which he sailed to the Galapagos Islands, later journeying to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji.
As colorful as his characters were, so too was their creator. A consummate explorer, Zane Grey toured the world, was an acclaimed expert on salt- and freshwater fishing, and incorporated the sights and sounds he witnessed into his writings.
As a companion to his biographical work of Grey’s literary life, Zane Grey: Romancing the West, author Stephen J. May now gives as a remarkable look into another aspect of Grey’s existence, the side little known but central to the measure of the man.
Maverick Heart makes use of Grey’s own memoirs and letters to give an enlightening portrait of this larger-than-life American character and a telling insight into one of the key shapers of the cultural heritage of our country.
The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true.
In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir—a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author’s past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered.
The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one’s deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O’Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process.
For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
Exemplary wisdom from ancient Rome.
Valerius Maximus compiled his handbook of notable deeds and sayings during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). The collection was admired in antiquity and has recently been attracting renewed scholarly attention. Yet to date there has been no modern English translation of Memorable Doings and Sayings. This work is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, in two volumes, a freshly edited Latin text facing D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s pleasing and authoritative translation.
Valerius arranges his instructive examples in short chapters, each focused on a particular virtue, vice, religious practice, or traditional custom—including Omens, Dreams, Anger, Cruelty, Bravery, Fidelity, Gratitude, Friendship, Parental Love. The moral undercurrent of this collection is readily apparent. But Valerius tells us that the book’s purpose is simply practical: he decided to select worthwhile material from famous writers so that people looking for illustrative examples might be spared the trouble of research. Whatever the author’s intention, his book is an interesting source of information on Roman attitudes toward religion and moral values in the first century.
Exemplary wisdom from ancient Rome.
Valerius Maximus compiled his handbook of notable deeds and sayings during the reign of Tiberius (AD 14–37). The collection was admired in antiquity and has recently been attracting renewed scholarly attention. Yet to date there has been no modern English translation of Memorable Doings and Sayings. This work is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, in two volumes, a freshly edited Latin text facing D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s pleasing and authoritative translation.
Valerius arranges his instructive examples in short chapters, each focused on a particular virtue, vice, religious practice, or traditional custom—including Omens, Dreams, Anger, Cruelty, Bravery, Fidelity, Gratitude, Friendship, Parental Love. The moral undercurrent of this collection is readily apparent. But Valerius tells us that the book’s purpose is simply practical: he decided to select worthwhile material from famous writers so that people looking for illustrative examples might be spared the trouble of research. Whatever the author’s intention, his book is an interesting source of information on Roman attitudes toward religion and moral values in the first century.
How to write a speech in ancient Greek.
This volume contains three rhetorical treatises dating probably from the reign of Diocletian (AD 285–312) that provide instruction on how to compose epideictic (display) speeches for a wide variety of occasions both public and private. Two are attributed to one Menander Rhetor of Laodicea (in southwestern Turkey); the third, known as the Ars Rhetorica, incorrectly to the earlier historian and literary critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus. These treatises derive from the schools of rhetoric that flourished in the Roman Empire from the second through fourth centuries AD in the Greek East. Although important examples of some genres of occasional prose were composed in the fifth and fourth centuries BC by Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and especially Isocrates, it was with the flowering of rhetorical prose during the so-called Second Sophistic in the second half of the second century AD that more forms were developed as standard repertoire and became exemplary.
Distinctly Hellenic and richly informed by the prose and poetry of a venerable past, these treatises are addressed to the budding orator contemplating a civic career, one who would speak for his city’s interests to the Roman authorities and be an eloquent defender of its Greek culture and heritage. They provide a window into the literary culture, educational values and practices, and social concerns of these Greeks under Roman rule, in both public and private life, and considerably influenced later literature both pagan and Christian.
This edition offers a fresh translation, ample annotation, and texts based on the best critical editions.
Long famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner.
Mencken was prolific; much of his best work lies buried in the newspapers and magazines in which it originally appeared. Mencken’s America is a sampling of this uncollected work, arranged to present the wide-ranging treatise on American culture that Mencken himself never wrote.
The core of the book is a series of six articles on “The American” published in the Smart Set in 1913-14. Never before reprinted, they embody the essence of Mencken’s views on the deficiencies of his countrymen.
What was the problem with America? For Mencken, it could be summed up in one word: Puritanism. Puritanism accounted for much that was wrong with American culture: the prevalence of “militant morality” represented by Prohibition, by campaigns against prostitution, and by religious fundamentalism. American hostility toward the fine arts led to furious attempts to suppress any work of art that was thought to contravene conventional morality-attempts that Mencken chronicles with impressive scholarship in the essay “Puritanism as a Literary Force.”
Mencken reserved his greatest scorn for American political institutions. Opposed to the very principle of democracy and universal suffrage, he maintained that, in the absence of an educated electorate, all politicians are compelled to become demagogues.
Bracing, infuriating, and pungent, H. L. Mencken’s writings retain their relevance even after the passage of nearly a hundred years, cogently discussing issues with which Americans of the twenty-first century are still wrestling. Sagaciously edited by S. T. Joshi, one of the country’s foremost Mencken scholars, Mencken’s America is a superb example of America’s turning the looking glass on itself.
Dawn Powell was a gifted satirist who moved in the same circles as Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, renowned editor Maxwell Perkins, and other midcentury New York luminaries. Her many novels are typically divided into two groups: those dealing with her native Ohio and those set in New York. “From the moment she left behind her harsh upbringing in Mount Gilead, Ohio, and arrived in Manhattan, in 1918, she dove into city life with an outlander’s anthropological zeal,” reads a recent New Yorker piece about Powell, and it is those New York novels that built her reputation for scouring wit and social observation.
In this critical biography and study of the New York novels, Patricia Palermo reminds us how Powell earned a place in the national literary establishment and East Coast social scene. Though Powell’s prolific output has been out of print for most of the past few decades, a revival is under way: the Library of America, touting her as a “rediscovered American comic genius,” released her collected novels, and in 2015 she was posthumously inducted into the New York State Writer’s Hall of Fame.
Engaging and erudite, The Message of the City fills a major gap in in the story of a long-overlooked literary great. Palermo places Powell in cultural and historical context and, drawing on her diaries, reveals the real-life inspirations for some of her most delicious satire.
A beguiling tale of mistaken transformation.
In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, also known as The Golden Ass, we have the only Latin novel which survives entire. It is truly enchanting: a delightful romance combining realism and magic.
The hero, Lucius, eager to experience the sensations of a bird, resorts to witchcraft but by an unfortunate pharmaceutical error finds himself transformed into an ass. He knows he can revert to his own body by eating rose-petals, but these prove singularly elusive; and the bulk of the work describes his adventures as an animal. He also retails many stories that he overheard, the most charming being that of Cupid and Psyche (beginning, in true fairy-tale fashion, ‘Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina’). Some of the stories are as indecent as they are witty, and two in the ninth book were deemed by Boccaccio worthy of inclusion in the Decameron. At last the goddess Isis takes pity on Lucius. In a surprising denouement, he is restored to human shape and, now spiritually regenerated, is initiated into her mysteries. The author’s baroque Latin style nicely matches his fantastic narrative and is guaranteed to hold a reader's attention from beginning to end.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apuleius is in three volumes.
A beguiling tale of mistaken transformation.
In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, also known as The Golden Ass, we have the only Latin novel which survives entire. It is truly enchanting: a delightful romance combining realism and magic.
The hero, Lucius, eager to experience the sensations of a bird, resorts to witchcraft but by an unfortunate pharmaceutical error finds himself transformed into an ass. He knows he can revert to his own body by eating rose-petals, but these prove singularly elusive; and the bulk of the work describes his adventures as an animal. He also retails many stories that he overheard, the most charming being that of Cupid and Psyche (beginning, in true fairy-tale fashion, ‘Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina’). Some of the stories are as indecent as they are witty, and two in the ninth book were deemed by Boccaccio worthy of inclusion in the Decameron. At last the goddess Isis takes pity on Lucius. In a surprising denouement, he is restored to human shape and, now spiritually regenerated, is initiated into her mysteries. The author’s baroque Latin style nicely matches his fantastic narrative and is guaranteed to hold a reader's attention from beginning to end.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Apuleius is in three volumes.
Mexico City is one of Latin America’s cultural capitals, and one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the world. The Mexico City Reader is an anthology of "Cronicas"—short, hybrid texts that are part literary essay, part urban reportage—about life in the capital. This is not the "City of Palaces" of yesteryear, but the vibrant, chaotic, anarchic urban space of the1980s and 1990s—the city of garbage mafias, necrophiliac artists, and kitschy millionaires.
Like the visitor wandering through the city streets, the reader will be constantly surprised by the visions encountered in this mosaic of writings—a textual space brimming with life and crowded with flâneurs, flirtatious students, Indian dancers,
food vendors, fortune tellers, political activists, and peasant protesters.
The essays included in this anthology were written by a panoply of writers, from well-known authors like Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibagüengoitia to younger figures like Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Juieta García González, all of whom are experienced practitioners of the city. The texts collected in this anthology are among the most striking examples of this concomitant "theory and practice" of Mexico City, that most delirious of megalopolises.
“[An] exciting literary journey . . .”—Carolyn Malloy, Multicultural Review
Praise for Mezcal:
"Mezcal is also a lyrical meditation upon the ultimate strength of the land, specifically the desert Southwest, and how that land prevails and endures despite every effort of modern industry and development to rape and savage it in the name of progress. Mezcal lingers in the mind as only the very best books manage to do."—Harry Crews
"The author . . . excavates his own tormented life—and its relation to the land he loves—in a series of powerful, imagistic autobiographical essays. Like the desert he cherishes, this memoir is harsh yet lovely, full of sour self-truth. . . . A potent presentation of the wounds of one man's life, packed with indelible impressions; but there's little healing here, making this a bitter if beautiful read."—Kirkus Review
"In Mezcal . . . Bowden drops the journalistic veil, exploring the ecology of his interior landscape at least as thoroughly as the changing scenery that surrounds him. . . . Others—Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey—have already staked inviolate claims on the Southwestern deserts. But Bowden owns the complex terrain where, like a mezcal-inspired mirage, the Sonoran sun-belt overlaps the gray convolutions of the American mind."—Los Angeles Times
The winning manuscript of the fourth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize is also the exciting American debut by a poet who has already established himself as an important international poetic voice. Midland, the seventh collection by Kwame Dawes, draws deeply on the poet’s travels and experiences in Africa, the Caribbean, England, and the American South. Marked equally by a lushness of imagery, an urgency of tone, and a muscular rhythm, Midland, in the words of the final judge, Eavan Boland, is “a powerful testament of the complexity, pain, and enrichment of inheritance…It is a compelling meditation on what is given and taken away in the acts of generation and influence. Of a father’s example and his oppression. There are different places throughout the book. They come willfully in and out of the poems: Jamaica. London. Africa. America. But all the places become one place in the central theme and undersong here: which is displacement…The achievement of this book is a beautifully crafted voice which follows the painful and vivid theme of homelessness in and out of the mysteries of loss and belonging.”
Midland is the work of a keen and transcendent intellect, a collection of poems that speaks to the landscape from inside, from an emotional and experiential place of risk and commitment.
Few episodes in Texas history have excited more popular interest than the Mier Expedition of 1842. Nineteen-year-old Joseph D. McCutchan was among the 300 Texans who, without the cover of the Lone Star flag, launched their own disastrous invasion across the Rio Grande.
McCutchan's diary provides a vivid account of his experience—the Texans' quick dispatch by Mexican troops at the town of Mier, the hardships of a forced march to Mexico City, over twenty months of imprisonment, and the journey back home after release. Although there are other firsthand accounts of the Mier Expedition, McCutchan was the only diarist who followed the Tampico route to Mexico City. His account documents a different experience than that of the main body of prisoners who marched to the national capital by way of Monterrey, Saltillo, and Agua Nueva.
Among the last of the prisoners to be freed, McCutchan covers in his journal the whole period of confinement from December 26, 1842, to the final release on September 16, 1844.
The McCutchan diary is set apart from other Mier accounts not only by the new information it provides, but also by Joseph Milton Nance's superb editing. Nance is an acknowledged authority on the hostilities between Texas and Mexico during the era of the Texas Republic. He has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary with characteristic scholarship and painstaking attention to detail.
Two ill-fated rhetoricians.
Antiphon of Athens, born in 480 BC, spent his prime in the great period of Athens but, disliking democracy, was himself an ardent oligarch who with others set up a violent short-lived oligarchy in 411. The restored democracy executed him for treason. He had been a writer of speeches for other people involved in litigation. Of the fifteen surviving works three concern real murder cases. The others are exercises in speechcraft consisting of three tetralogies, each tetralogy comprising four skeleton speeches: accuser’s; defendant’s; accuser’s reply; defendant’s counter-reply.
Andocides of Athens, born ca. 440 BC, disliked the extremes of both democracy and oligarchy. Involved in religious scandal in 415 BC, he went into exile. After at least two efforts to return, he did so under the amnesty of 403. In 399 he was acquitted on a charge of profaning the Mysteries and in 391–390 took part in an abortive peace embassy to Sparta. Extant speeches are: On His Return (a plea on his second attempt); On the Mysteries (a self-defense); On the Peace with Sparta. The speech Against Alcibiades (the notorious politician) is suspect.
Four rhetoricians confronting Macedonian dominance.
This volume collects the speeches of four orators involved in the ill-fated resistance of Athens to the power of Philip and Alexander the Great of Macedon.
Lycurgus of Athens (ca. 396–325 BC) concentrated on domestic affairs, especially financial, which he managed for twelve years, and naval matters. He also constructed and repaired important public buildings. Athens refused to surrender him to Alexander and honored him until his death.
Dinarchus of Corinth (ca. 361–291) as resident alien in Athens became a forensic speaker and also assailed Demosthenes and others. He was accused by Alexander’s runaway treasurer Harpalus of corruption. Dinarchus favored oligarchic government under Macedonian control. He prospered under the regency of Demetrius of Phalerum (317–307), but was exiled after the restoration of democracy, returning circa 292.
Demades of Athens (ca. 380–318) was an able seaman, then unscrupulous politician. He favored Philip, but fought for Athens at Chaeronea (338). Captured there and released by Philip, he helped to make peace, and later influenced Alexander and then Antipater in Athens’ favor. But acceptance of bribes and his tortuous policy ruined him, and he was executed by Antipater.
Hyperides of Athens (ca. 390–322) was a forensic and political speaker who was hostile to Philip and led Athens’ patriots after 325. For resistance to Antipater he ultimately met death by violence. What survives today of his speeches was discovered in the nineteenth century.
A miscellany of mostly imperial verse.
This two-volume anthology covers a period of four and a half centuries, beginning with the work of the mime-writer Publilius Syrus who flourished ca. 45 BC and ending with the graphic and charming poem of Rutilius Namatianus recording a sea voyage from Rome to Gaul in AD 416. A wide variety of theme gives interest to the poems: hunting in a poem of Grattius; an inquiry into the causes of volcanic activity by the author of Aetna; pastoral poems by Calpurnius Siculus and by Nemesianus; fables by Avianus; a collection of Dicta, moral sayings, as if by the elder Cato; eulogy in Laus Pisonis; and the legend of the Phoenix, a poem of the fourth century. Other poets complete the work.
A miscellany of mostly imperial verse.
This two-volume anthology covers a period of four and a half centuries, beginning with the work of the mime-writer Publilius Syrus who flourished ca. 45 BC and ending with the graphic and charming poem of Rutilius Namatianus recording a sea voyage from Rome to Gaul in AD 416. A wide variety of theme gives interest to the poems: hunting in a poem of Grattius; an inquiry into the causes of volcanic activity by the author of Aetna; pastoral poems by Calpurnius Siculus and by Nemesianus; fables by Avianus; a collection of Dicta, moral sayings, as if by the elder Cato; eulogy in Laus Pisonis; and the legend of the Phoenix, a poem of the fourth century. Other poets complete the work.
The first English translation of the earliest Latin poems about miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, composed in twelfth-century Canterbury by a Benedictine monk who inspired Chaucer.
Nigel (ca. 1135–1198), a Benedictine monk at Christ Church in Canterbury, is best known for The Mirror of Fools—a popular satire whose hero Burnellus the Ass is referenced in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Nigel’s oeuvre also includes other important poems and hagiography.
The Miracles of the Virgin is the oldest Latin poem about miracles performed by Mary. This collection features seventeen lively tales in which the Virgin rescues a disappointed administrator from a pact with the devil, has a Roman emperor killed by a long-dead martyr, saves a Jewish boy from being burned alive, and shields an abbess from the shame of pregnancy. Each story illustrates the boundlessness of Mary’s mercy. In the Tract on Abuses, a letter that resembles a religious pamphlet, Nigel rails against ecclesiastical corruption and worldly entanglements.
Alongside authoritative editions of the Latin texts, this volume offers the first translations of both works into English.
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.
Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
An unconventional take on the corpse challenges traditional conceptions of who—and what—counts as human, while offering bold insights into the modernist project
Too often regarded as the macabre endpoint of life, the corpse is rarely discussed and largely kept out of the public eye. In The Modernist Corpse, Erin E. Edwards unearths the critically important but previously buried life of the corpse, which occupies a unique place between biology and technology, the living and the dead. Exploring the posthumous as the posthuman, Edwards argues that the corpse is central to understanding relations between the human and its “others,” including the animal, the machine, and the thing.
From photographs of lynchings to documentation of World War I casualties, the corpse is also central to the modernist project. Edwards turns critical attention to the corpse through innovative, posthumanist readings of canonical thinkers such as William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, offering new insights into the intersections among race, gender, technical media, and matter presumed to be dead. Edwards’s expansive approach to modernism includes diverse materials such as Hollywood film, experimental photography, autopsy discourses, and the comic strip Krazy Kat, producing a provocatively broad understanding of the modernist corpse and its various “lives.”
The Modernist Corpse both establishes important new directions for modernist inquiry and overturns common thought about the relationship between living and dead matter.
Educated in the humanities and trained in psychiatry, Jean Starobinski is a central figure in the Geneva School of criticism. His classic work, Montaigne in Motion, is a subtly conceived and elegantly written study of the Essais of Montaigne, whose deceptively plainspoken meditations have entranced readers and stimulated philosophers since their first publication in 1580 and 1595.
Here Starobinski offers a decidedly postmodern reading of Montaigne. In chapters dealing with the themes of public and private life, friendship, death, the body, and love, Starobinski reveals much that will remind us that Montaigne’s thought is as apropos to our time as it was to his own.
“The most important contribution to Montaigne studies since Friedrich’s work . . . . [It] will be the critical framework in which scholars will discuss Montaigne in the years to come.”—Choice
“Starobinski brings Montaigne to life by treating him as our contemporary and asking him modern questions.”—Hudson Review
Moods, Louisa May Alcott's first novel was published in 1864, four years before the best-selling Little Women. The novel unconventionally presents a "little woman," a true-hearted abolitionist spinster, and a fallen Cuban beauty, their lives intersecting in Alcott's first major depiction of the "woman problem."
Sylvia Yule, the heroine of Moods, is a passionate tomboy who yearns for adventure. The novel opens as she embarks on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends, both of whom fall in love with her. These rival suitors, close friends, are modeled on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Daniel Thoreau. Aroused, but still "moody" and inexperienced, Sylvia marries the wrong man. In the rest of the novel, Alcott attempts to resolve the dilemma she has created and leave her readers asking whether, in fact, there is a place for a woman such as Sylvia in a man's world.
In 1882, eighteen years after the original publication, Alcott revised and republished the novel. Her own literary success and the changes she helped forge in women's lives now allowed her heroine to meet, as Alcott said, "a wiser if less romantic fate than in the former edition." This new volume contains the complete text of the 1864 Moods and Alcott's revisions for the 1882 version, along with explanatory notes by the editor. A critical introduction places Moods in the context of Alcott's own literary history and in the larger historical setting of nineteenth-century society and culture.
Winner of the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical novel, Moontrap is a book of remarkable beauty and power about a man caught between his vivid past and an uncertain future.
The year is 1850, a transitional period in the new Oregon Territory, with settlers and lawmakers working to subdue the untamed region. Johnson Monday, a former mountain man, has been living on a bend of the Willamette River near Oregon City for seven years with his Shoshone Indian wife, struggling to make a place in settled society. One day, Webster T. Webster, a raucous, unrepentant trapper, arrives for an unexpected visit. With his earthy humor and stubborn adherence to the simple life, "Webb" leads Monday through adventures that flirt dangerously close to lawlessness, while helping him to rediscover his moral center. Through defiance, triumph, and tragedy, Moontrap follows Johnson Monday as he realizes that relinquishing the stark honesty of mountain life for the compromises of civilization may be too high a price to pay.
Following Trask in Don Berry's trilogy of novels set in the Oregon Territory, Moontrap offers a richly comic and intensely poignant portrayal of pioneer life.
Topics in Stoicism.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.
We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.
His moral essays are collected in Volumes I–III of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.
Topics in Stoicism.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.
We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.
His moral essays are collected in Volumes I–III of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.
Topics in Stoicism.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt’s care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial service. After some disgrace during Claudius’ reign he became tutor and then, in AD 54, advising minister to Nero, some of whose worst misdeeds he did not prevent. Involved (innocently?) in a conspiracy, he killed himself by order in 65. Wealthy, he preached indifference to wealth; evader of pain and death, he preached scorn of both; and there were other contrasts between practice and principle.
We have Seneca’s philosophical or moral essays (ten of them traditionally called Dialogues)—on providence, steadfastness, the happy life, anger, leisure, tranquility, the brevity of life, gift-giving, forgiveness—and treatises on natural phenomena. Also extant are 124 epistles, in which he writes in a relaxed style about moral and ethical questions, relating them to personal experiences; a skit on the official deification of Claudius, Apocolocyntosis (in LCL 15); and nine rhetorical tragedies on ancient Greek themes. Many epistles and all his speeches are lost.
His moral essays are collected in Volumes I–III of the Loeb Classical Library’s ten-volume edition of Seneca.
Bringing together the thoughts of one of American literature’s sharpest cultural critics, this compendium will open the eyes of a whole new audience to the work of Lionel Trilling. Trilling was a strenuous thinker who was proud to think “too much.” As an intellectual he did not spare his own kind, and though he did not consider himself a rationalist, he was grounded in the world.
This collection features 32 of Trilling’s essays on a range of topics, from Jane Austen to George Orwell and from the Kinsey Report to Lolita. Also included are Trilling’s seminal essays “Art and Neurosis” and “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” Many of the pieces made their initial appearances in periodicals such as The Partisan Review and Commentary; most were later reprinted in essay collections. This new gathering of his writings demonstrates again Trilling’s patient, thorough style. Considering “the problems of life”—in art, literature, culture, and intellectual life—was, to him, a vital occupation, even if he did not expect to get anything as simple or encouraging as “answers.” The intellectual journey was the true goal.
No matter the subject, Trilling’s arguments come together easily, as if constructing complicated defenses and attacks were singularly simple for his well-honed mind. The more he wrote on a subject and the more intricate his reasoning, the more clear that subject became; his elaboration is all function and no filler. Wrestling with Trilling’s challenging work still yields rewards today, his ideas speaking to issues that transcend decades and even centuries.
2022 Art in Service to the Environment Award, Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Honorable Mention, 2022 Nonfiction Prize, Writers' League of Texas
Writers explore a city’s relationship with chronic catastrophic flooding.
Shortly after Hurricane Harvey dumped a record 61 inches of rain on Houston in 2017, celebrated writer and Bayou City resident Lacy M. Johnson began collecting flood stories. Although these stories attested to the infinite variety of experience in America’s most diverse city, they also pointed to a consistent question: What does catastrophic flooding reveal about this city, and what does it obscure?
More City than Water brings together essays, conversations, and personal narratives from climate scientists, marine ecologists, housing activists, urban planners, artists, poets, and historians as they reflect on the human geography of a region increasingly defined by flooding. Both a literary and a cartographic anthology, More City than Water features striking maps of Houston’s floodplains, waterways, drainage systems, reservoirs, and inundated neighborhoods. Designed by University of Houston seniors from the Graphic Design program, each map, imaginative and precise, shifts our understanding of the flooding, the public’s relationship to it, and the fraught reality of rebuilding. Evocative and unique, this is an atlas that uncovers the changing nature of living where the waters rise.
Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) is a unique figure in the history of the Catholic Church, thanks to her public visionary experiences during which she lost consciousness, while a deep voice, identifying itself as Christ, issued from her, narrating the feasts and pageants taking place in heaven. Juana’s so called “sermons,” collected in a manuscript called Libro del Conorte, form a fascinating window into Castilian religiosity in the early sixteenth century. There is much to reap from these sermons concerning Spanish Renaissance culture, theology, mysticism, gender roles, and interreligious interactions.
“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.
Writing in Western American Literature, Charles L. Adams said, “In Mountain Dialogues, we see Frank Waters acknowledging his sources—major influences on a great American thinker and writer. Waters weaves together threads of these influences, adds his own thought, and presents us with a truly cosmic overview. This overview is thoroughly that of an American ‘Westerner’; it also is one that merits international consideration.”
And as the Bloomsbury Review wrote: “Mountain Dialogues is more than just a collection of personal essays. It is an ‘evolutionist’s handbook’ for the sons and daughters of the new West, a guide for those who would transcend the limitations of Western civilization.”
As Charlie McCarthy is to Edgar Bergen, so is Martin T. Dooley to newspaper humorist Finley Peter Dunne. Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, originally published in 1898, collects brief, humorous pieces Dunne wrote for the Chicago Evening Post and the Chicago Journal. In an Irish-American dialect as thick as the foam on a pint of stout, Mr. Dooley and his friends discuss the military "sthrateejy" for American action in Cuba, "iliction" day shenanigans, Queen Victoria's jubilee, the "new woman," and the strange American sport of football, in which a player puts "a pair iv matthresses on his legs, a pillow behind, [and] a mask over his nose" and tries to kill his fellow men. Through his tall tales and speculations, Mr. Dooley reveals the pleasure and pain of being Irish in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century.
Clothed in the charming hyperbole and mislocution of the unflappable Mr. Dooley, Dunne's incisive social criticism flies unerringly to the target, exposing prejudice, hypocrisy, insensitivity, and plain old-fashioned humbug.
As Americans debate what it means to be a multicultural society, one need only turn for lessons to the Southwest, where distinct peoples have coexisted over centuries. Here difference has not only survived but thrived in a melting pot of races and customs.
This book presents a montage of differing perspectives demonstrating that there is no single, definitive description of the Southwest. It brings together a host of writers, from early travelers and historians to contemporary commentators, who explore a region diverse in its people and ecology and show it to be not just a segment of the nation, but rather a border contact zone.
The editors have assembled an interdisciplinary composite, drawing on history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Fiction, essays, poetry, newspaper articles, and interviews with local inhabitants add a colorful dimension to the coverage. All of the contributions reveal the tremendous impact that everyday occurrences can have and show how life in the Southwest is affected by the interweaving of social, cultural, and ecological forces. Together they demonstrate the role played by personal and cultural memory in creating alternative views of environment, landscape, human social interaction, conquest, dispossession, technological change, and the survival of cultures.
The Multicultural Southwest is a multifaceted work that shows the many ways in which the past continues to affect the present. It will create in readers an awareness of the phenomena that fuel human imagination and creativity as it opens their eyes to the possibilities of the future.
She was the daughter of a circuit judge and state senator. He was the youngest son of Virginia’s Civil War governor and was a state legislator himself at the age of nineteen. Their courtship and marriage stands as a portrait of a bygone way of life unique to the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. My Dearest Angel is their story, told through their faithful correspondence over the course of their fifty years together.
Piecing together the voluminous letters, their granddaughter, noted author Katie Letcher Lyle, has succeeded in giving us an intimate panorama of the full and oftentimes wrenching lives led by Greenlee and Katie Letcher. Domestic life, family secrets, and visiting luminaries are part of their story. But the abiding appeal of My Dearest Angel is the maturation of a lifelong relationship built on the crest of a changing world.
Jürek Becker (1937–97) is best known for his novel Jacob the Liar, which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lódz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfiction, and the essays, lectures, and interviews collected in My Father, the Germans and I share a common thread in that they each speak to Becker’s interactions with and opinions on the social, political, and cultural conditions of twentieth-century Germany.
Becker, who had lived in both German states and in unified Germany, was passionately and humorously active in the political debates of his time. Becker never directly aligned himself with either the political ideology of East Germany or the capitalist market forces of West Germany. The remains of fascism in postwar Germany, and the demise of Socialism, as well as racism and xenophobic violence, were topics that perpetually interested Becker. However, his writings, as evidenced in this collection, were never pedantic, but always entertaining, retaining the sense of humor that made his novels so admired.
My Father, the Germans and I gives expression to an exceptional author’s perception of himself and the world and to his tireless attempt to bring his own unique tone of linguistic brevity, irony, and balance to German relations.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 launched a vast, global diaspora, with many Iranians establishing new lives in the United States. In the four decades since, the diaspora has expanded to include not only those who emigrated immediately after the revolution but also their American-born children, more recent immigrants, and people who married into Iranian families, all of whom carry their own stories of trauma, triumph, adversity, and belonging that reflect varied and nuanced perspectives on what it means to be Iranian or Iranian American. The essays in My Shadow Is My Skin are these stories.
This collection brings together thirty-two authors, both established and emerging, whose writing captures the diversity of Iranian diasporic experiences. Reflecting on the Iranian American experience over the past forty years and shedding new light on themes of identity, duality, and alienation in twenty-first-century America, the authors present personal narratives of immigration, sexuality, marginalization, marriage, and religion that offer an antidote to the news media’s often superficial portrayals of Iran and the people who have a connection to it. My Shadow Is My Skin illuminates a community that rarely gets to tell its own story.
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