The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and events have also inspired works of poetry, fiction, drama, film, and art throughout Chinese history, including Internet fantasy literature today. There is a vast body of secondary literature on these two subjects individually, but very little on their interface.
The image of the Jian’an era, with its feasting, drinking, heroism, and literary panache, as well as intense male friendship, was to return time and again in the romanticized narrative of the Three Kingdoms. How did Jian’an bifurcate into two distinct nostalgias, one of which was the first paradigmatic embodiment of wen (literary graces, cultural patterning), and the other of wu (heroic martial virtue)? How did these largely segregated nostalgias negotiate with one another? And how is the predominantly male world of the Three Kingdoms appropriated by young women in contemporary China? The Halberd at Red Cliff investigates how these associations were closely related in their complex origins and then came to be divergent in their later metamorphoses.
This edition is the first that treats Hamlet as the work of a philosophical poet concerned with knowing the nature of the world, particularly the human world. Where conventional editions lift the play out of its specific setting and analyze it in the light of the social, cultural, and political circumstances of Elizabethan England, Jan Blits takes the play’s dramatic setting of early Renaissance Denmark as indispensable to understanding its rich meaning. In providing notations and commentary on Hamlet, Blits sets aside the historicist principle or prejudice, pervasive throughout literary studies today. Blits, by contrast, strives to understand the play entirely on its own terms. He inflicts no literary or philosophic theory—no parochial professional preconceptions—upon the play. Instead, he aims to be fully receptive to what Shakespeare wrote and try to draw out of the play the substance that he deliberately put into it. His treatment of Horatio is particularly stunning in this regard.
Though they differ from each other, there are two generally trustworthy texts of Hamlet—namely, the Second Quarto (1604–5) and the Folio (1623). Blits does not consult the First Quarto (1603), which contains a much different dialogue, some different character names, and omits some famous passages. Blits points out important variations and refrains from pronouncing which are clearly right or wrong. He omits references to secondary works (including his own) as distractions from the play itself. The Bibliography lists many primary and secondary readings that readers will find helpful. He follows the line-numbering of the New Cambridge Shakespeare Edition, edited by Philips Edwards.
Teachers and students of Shakespeare will find a valuable resource in Blits' new edition of Hamlet, which brings readers as close to the mind and heart of the real Shakespeare as possible and remains untouched by the fingerprints of literary theory and other mechanisms unknown and inconsequential to Shakespeare. This is also an indispensable tool in helping teachers in one of the greatest challenges of the classical classroom––namely, how to teach Shakespeare?
Hamlet's Castle is both a theoretical and a practical examination of the interactions that take place in a literary classroom. The book traces the source of literature's power to the relationship between its illusional quality and its abstract meaning and relates these elements to the process by which a group, typically an academic class, forms a judgment about a literary work. In focusing on the importance of the exchange of ideas by readers, Gordon Mills reveals a new way of looking at literature as well as a different concept of the social function of the literary classroom and the possible application of this model to other human activities.
The three fundamental elements that constitute Mills's schema are the relationship between a reader and the illusional quality of literature, the relationship between a reader and the meaning of a text, and the concept of social experience within the environment of a text. The roles of illusion and meaning in a text are explored in detail and are associated with areas outside literature, including science and jurisprudence. There is an examination of the way in which decisions are forced by peers upon one another during discussion of a literary work-an exchange of opinion which is commonly a source of pleasure and insight, sought for its own sake. In the course of his study, Mills shows that the act of apprehending a literary structure resembles that of apprehending a social structure. From this relationship, he derives the social function of the literary classroom.
In combining a theoretical analysis with the practical objective of determining what value can be found in the study of literature by groups of people, Mills has produced a critical study of great significance. Hamlet's Castle will change concepts about the purpose of teaching literature, affect the way in which literature is taught, and become involved in the continuing discussion of the relationship of literary studies to other disciplines.
HandiLand looks at young adult novels, fantasy series, graphic memoirs, and picture books of the last 25 years in which characters with disabilities take center stage for the first time. These books take what others regard as weaknesses—for instance, Harry Potter’s headaches or Hazel Lancaster’s oxygen tank—and redefine them as part of the hero’s journey. HandiLand places this movement from sidekick to hero in the political contexts of disability rights movements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ghana.
Elizabeth A. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion. The book moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world. Moving, funny, and beautifully written, HandiLand: The Crippest Place on Earth is the definitive study of disability in contemporary literature for young readers.
As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.
By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate. Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.
Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.
For twenty-five years, the Iowa Review has published many of America's finest writers, often helping them become established in their careers. From Tillie Olsen and William Stafford in the first volume to James Galvin and Pattiann Rogers in the twenty-fourth, the names and voices are recognizable and respected or soon will be. As editor David Hamilton notes in his introduction to this eclectic anniversary volume of nearly eighty poems and stories, "To a considerable extent we have defined ourselves by them; thus Hard Choices, a generous sampling of the best and most interesting writing from the Iowa Review's first years, defines the past and the future of American literature."
The Iowa Review is one of a small group of dedicated literary magazines that have defined American literary culture in the past quarter century. The adventurous, stimulating pieces in Hard Choices will encourage readers to look forward to the next quarter century.
These 16 essays from the fifth annual J.Lloyd Eaton Conference at the University of California, Riverside, seek to come to grips with science fiction’s core, the core at which “science must ultimately seem to outweigh the fiction.”
Never before has hard SF been the topic of such extended discussion by such qualified people. The dialogue constitutes new (and potentially shocking to a traditional literary critic) modes of literary criticism, modes that take into account the impact of scientific speculation and method on our culture and on the ways our culture invents stories and myths.
Essayists include writer/scientist professors Robert L. Forward, David Brin, and Gregory Benford. Noted critics and writers with scientific backgrounds or interests include: James Gunn, Frank McConnell, George Guffey, John Huntington, Paul Carter, Patricia Warrick, Paul Alkon, Robert M. Philmus, David Clayton, Eric S. Rabkin, Herbert Sussman, Michael Collings, and George E. Slusser.
It wasn’t all black or white. It wasn’t a vogue. It wasn’t a failure. By restoring interracial dimensions left out of accounts of the Harlem Renaissance—or blamed for corrupting it—George Hutchinson transforms our understanding of black (and white) literary modernism, interracial literary relations, and twentieth-century cultural nationalism in the United States.
What has been missing from literary histories of the time is a broader sense of the intellectual context of the Harlem Renaissance, and Hutchinson supplies that here: Boas’s anthropology, Park’s sociology, various strands of pragmatism and cultural nationalism—ideas that shaped the New Negro movement and the literary field, where the movement flourished. Hutchinson tracks the resulting transformation of literary institutions and organizations in the 1920s, offering a detailed account of the journals and presses, black and white, that published the work of the “New Negroes.” This cultural excavation discredits bedrock assumptions about the motives of white interest in the renaissance, and about black relationships to white intellectuals of the period. It also allows a more careful investigation than ever before of the tensions among black intellectuals of the 1920s. Hutchinson’s analysis shows that the general expansion of literature and the vogue of writing cannot be divorced from the explosion of black literature often attributed to the vogue of the New Negro—any more than the growing sense of “Negro” national consciousness can be divorced from expanding articulations and permutations of American nationality. The book concludes with the first full-scale interpretation of the landmark anthology The New Negro.
A courageous work that exposes the oversimplifications and misrepresentations of popular readings of the Harlem Renaissance, this book reveals the truly composite nature of American literary culture.
In poems, stories, memoirs, and essays about color and culture, prejudice and love, and feminine trials, dozens of African-American women writers--some famous, many just discovered--give us a sense of a distinct inner voice and an engagement with their larger double culture. Harlem's Glory unfolds a rich tradition of writing by African-American women, hitherto mostly hidden, in the first half of the twentieth century. In historical context, with special emphasis on matters of race and gender, are the words of luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston and Georgia Douglas Johnson as well as rare, previously unpublished writings by figures like Angelina Weld Grimké, Elise Johnson McDougald, and Regina Andrews, all culled from archives and arcane magazines.
Editors Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph arrange their selections to reveal not just the little-suspected extent of black women's writing, but its prodigious existence beyond the cultural confines of New York City. Harlem's Glory also shows how literary creativity often coexisted with social activism in the works of African-American women.
This volume is full of surprises about the power and diversity of the writers and genres. The depth, the wit, and the reach of the selections are astonishing. With its wealth of discoveries and rediscoveries, and its new slant on the familiar, all elegantly presented and deftly edited, the book will compel a reassessment of writing by African-American women and its place in twentieth-century American literary and historical culture.
At her death in 1986, Harriette Simpson Arnow left a modest collection of published work: ten short stories, five novels, two non-fiction books, a short autobiography, and nineteen essays and book reviews. Although the sum is small, her writing has been examined from regionalist, Marxist, feminist, and other critical perspectives.
The 1970s saw the first serious attempts to revive interest in Arnow. In 1971, Tillie Olsen identified her as a writer whose "books of great worth suffer the death of being unknown, or at best, a peculiar eclipsing." Joyse Carol Oates wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Arnow's The Dollmaker is "our most unpretentious American masterpiece."
In the 1990s, it is appropriate to take stock of her earlier work and to prompt reexamination of this powerful yet poorly understood writer. This collection of critical essays examines traditional as well as new interpretations of Arnow and her work. It also suggests future directions for Arnow scholarship and includes studies of all of Arnow's writing, fiction and non-fiction, published and unpublished.
Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.
The poetry collected in this volume reveals the range and power of the contemporary American imagination. The verve, freedom, and boldness of American English are combined with the new harmonies of modern cadence. Here are distillations of twentieth-century perception, feeling, and thought, and reflections of changing social realities, scientific and psychoanalytic insights, and the strong voices of feminism and black consciousness. This is a book for those who value fresh and original poetry and for readers worldwide who are curious about contemporary American experience.
Helen Vendler relies on her own taste and judgment in singling out excellent poems, beginning with the late modernist flowering of Wallace Stevens and continuing to the present. Her wide-ranging Introduction places recent American poetry in its aesthetic and social contexts. The anthology provides an extensive offering of the work of major poets and introduces many writers who are only now beginning to make their reputation. Thirty-five poets are included, with a representative selection from the earlier to later work of each and a significant number of long poems. Brief biographies of the poets are appended.
This volume celebrates 100 years of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. It contains essays by Harvard faculty, emeriti, currently enrolled graduate students, and most recent Ph.D.s. It displays the range and diversity of the study of the Classics at Harvard at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Volume 100 includes: E. Badian, “Darius III”; D. R. Shackleton Bailey, “On Statius’ Thebaid”; Brian W. Breed, “Silenus and the Imago Vocis in Eclogue 6”; Wendell Clausen, “Propertius 2.32.35–36”; Kathleen Coleman, “Missio at Halicarnassus”; Stamatia Dova, “Who Is μακάρτατος in the Odyssey?”; Casey Dué, “Tragic History and Barbarian Speech in Sallust’s Jugurtha”; John Duffy and Dimiter Angelov, “Observations on a Byzantine Manuscript in Harvard College Library”; Mary Ebbott, “The List of the War Dead in Aeschylus’ Persians”; Gloria Ferrari, “The Ilioupersis in Athens”; José González, “Musai Hypophetores: Apollonius of Rhodes on Inspiration and Interpretation”; Albert Henrichs, “Drama and Dromena: Bloodshed, Violence, and Sacrificial Metaphor in Euripides”; Alexander Hollmann, “Epos as Authoritative Speech in Herodotos’ Histories”; Thomas E. Jenkins, “The Writing in (and of) Ovid’s Byblis Episode”; Christopher Jones, “Nero Speaking”; Prudence Jones, “Juvenal, the Niphates, and Trajan’s Column (Satire 6.407–412)”; Leah J. Kronenberg, “The Poet’s Fiction: Virgil’s Praise of the Farmer, Philosopher, and Poet at the End of Georgics 2”; Olga Levaniouk, “Aithôn, Aithon, and Odysseus”; Nino Luraghi, “Author and Audience in Thucydides’ Archaeology. Some Reflections”; Gregory Nagy, “‘Dream of a Shade’: Refractions of Epic Vision in Pindar’s Pythian 8 and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes”; Corinne Ondine Pache, “War Games: Odysseus at Troy”; David Petrain, “Hylas and Silva: Etymological Wordplay in Propertius 1.20”; Timothy Power, “The Parthenoi of Bacchylides 13”; Eric Robinson, “Democracy in Syracuse, 466–412 B.C.”; Charles Segal, “The Oracles of Sophocles’ Trachiniae: Convergence or Confusion?”; Zeph Stewart, “Plautus’ Amphitruo: Three Problems”; Sarolta A. Takàcs, “Politics and Religion in the Bacchanalian Affair of 186 B.C.E.”; R. J. Tarrant, “The Soldier in the Garden and Other Intruders in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”; Richard F. Thomas, “A Trope by Any Other Name: ‘Polysemy,’ Ambiguity, and Significatio in Virgil”; Michael A. Tueller, “Well-Read Heroes Quoting the Aetia in Aeneid 8”; and Calvert Watkins, “A Distant Anatolian Echo in Pindar: The Origin of the Aegis Again.”
This volume of eighteen articles offers: Andrew R. Dyck, “The Fragments of Heliodorus Homericus”; Hayden Pelliccia, “Aeschylus, Eumenides 64–88 and the Ex Cathedra Language of Apollo”; G. Zuntz, “Aeschyli Prometheus”; Georgia Ann Machemer, “Medicine, Music, and Magic: The Healing Grace of Pindar’s Fourth Nemean”; Carlo O. Pavese, “On Pindar fr. 169”; Deborah Steiner, “Pindar’s ‘Oggetti Parlanti’”; Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, “Parody and Later Greek Comedy”; Noel Robertson, “Athens’ Festival of the New Wine”; Richard F. Thomas, “Two Problems in Theocritus (Id. 5.49, 22.66)”; Nita Krevans, “Ilia’s Dream: Ennius, Virgil, and the Mythology of Seduction”; Benjamin Victor, “Remarks on the Andria of Terence”; Cynthia Damon, “Comm. Pet. 10”; Harold Gotoff, “Oratory: The Art of Illusion”; Henri J. W. Wijsman, “Ascanius, Gargara and Female Power in Georgics 3.269–270”*; Robert V. Albis, “Aeneid 2.57–59: The Ennian Background”; Mario Geymonat, “Callimachus at the End of Aeneas’ Narration”; Alessandro Barchiesi, “Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid’s Heroides”; and Monika Asztalos, “Boethius as a Transmitter of Greek Logic to the Latin West: The Categories.”
* By misunderstanding this article was published in an uncorrected form in HSCP, vol. 94 (1992). Any reference should be made to the article as published here.
Volume 97 of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology is a special issue, entitled “Greece in Rome,” comprising revised versions of papers presented at a Loeb Classical Conference on the question of the Greek influence on Roman culture, with a particular though not exclusive emphasis on the Augustan period. The papers reflect the complexity of the relationship between the cultures involved—Greek, Roman, and Italic—and span many fields: history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, religion, and the visual arts.
Contributors include: G. W. Bowersock, “The Barbarism of the Greeks”; John Scheid, “Graeco Ritu: A Typically Roman Way of Honoring the Gods”; Calvert Watkins, “Greece in Italy outside Rome”; Gisela Striker, “Cicero and Greek Philosophy”; Brad Inwood, “Seneca in His Philosophical Milieu”; Bettina Bergmann, “Greek Masterpieces and Roman Recreative Fictions”; Elaine K. Gazda, “Roman Sculpture and the Ethos of Emulation: Reconsidering Repetition”; Ann Kuttner, “Republican Rome Looks at Pergamon”; Cynthia Damon, “Greek Parasites and Roman Patronage”; Richard F. Thomas, “Vestigia Ruris: Urbane Rusticity in Virgil’s Georgics”; R. J. Tarrant, “Greek and Roman in Seneca’s Tragedies”; Christopher P. Jones, “Graia Pandetur ab Urbe”; Albert Henrichs, “Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture”; and Sarolta A. Takács, “Alexandria in Rome.”
In the period between 1815 and 1820, Mary Shelley wrote her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, as well as its companion piece, Mathilda, a tragic incest narrative that was confiscated by her father, William Godwin, and left unpublished until 1959. She also gave birth to four—and lost three—children.
In this hybrid text, Rachel Feder interprets Frankenstein and Mathilda within a series of provocative frameworks including Shelley’s experiences of motherhood and maternal loss, twentieth-century feminists’ interests in and attachments to Mary Shelley, and the critic’s own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Harvester of Hearts explores how Mary Shelley’s exchanges with her children—in utero, in birth, in life, and in death—infuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Feder theorizes “elective affinities,” a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history. Feder blurs the distinctions between intellectual, bodily, literary, and personal history, reanimating the classical feminist discourse on Frankenstein by stepping into the frame.
The result—at once an experimental book of literary criticism, a performative foray into feminist praxis, and a deeply personal lyric essay—not only locates Mary Shelley’s monsters within the folds of maternal identity but also illuminates the connections between the literary and the quotidian.
In “Hatching Ruin,” Charles H. Gold provides a complete description of Samuel L. Clemens’s business relationships with Charles L. Webster and James W. Paige during the 1880s. Gold analyzes how these relationships affected Clemens as a person and an artist, most notably in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries: philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.
Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.
In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.
Stories of ghostly spirits who return to this world to warn of danger, to prophesy, to take revenge, to request proper burial, or to comfort the living fascinated people in ancient times just as they do today. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, the author combines a modern folkloric perspective with literary analysis of ghost stories from classical antiquity to shed new light on the stories' folk roots.
The author begins by examining ancient Greek and Roman beliefs about death and the departed and the various kinds of ghost stories which arose from these beliefs. She then focuses on the longer stories of Plautus, Pliny, and Lucian, which concern haunted houses. Her analysis illuminates the oral and literary transmission and adaptation of folkloric motifs and the development of the ghost story as a literary form. In her concluding chapter, the author also traces the influence of ancient ghost stories on modern ghost story writers, a topic that will interest all readers and scholars of tales of hauntings.
Robyn R. Warhol’s goal is to investigate the effects of readers’ emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol’s theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans.
Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as “effeminate” forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press