The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle offer a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century.

The 308 letters in this volume cover a critical period in Tyndall’s personal and scientific lives. The volume begins with the difficult ending of his relationship with the Drummond family, disputes about his work in glaciology, and his early seminal work on the absorption of radiant heat by gases. It ends with the start of his championship of Julius Robert Mayer’s work on the mechanical equivalent of heat. In between, Tyndall carefully establishes his own priority for his work on radiant heat, and he accepts the position of professor of physics at the Government School of Mines. The lure of the Alps also becomes ever stronger. In this period comes perhaps Tyndall’s greatest mountaineering achievement, the first ascent of the Weisshorn, and a remarkable winter visit to Chamonix and the Mer de Glace. As his reputation grows, Tyndall continues to make his way in society. He is elected to the elite Athenaeum Club on January 31, 1860.
 

What is found in this epic may be elsewhere;
What is not in this epic is nowhere else.
—from The Mahabharata

The second longest poem in world literature, The Mahabharata is an epic tale, replete with legends, romances, theology, and metaphysical doctrine written in Sanskrit. One of the foundational elements in Hindu culture, this great work consists of nearly 75,000 stanzas in eighteen books, and this volume marks the much anticipated resumption of its first complete modern English translation. With the first three volumes, the late J. A. B. van Buitenen had taken his translation up to the threshold of the great war that is central to the epic. Now James Fitzgerald resumes this work with translations of the books that chronicle the wars aftermath: The Book of Women and part one of The Book of Peace. These books constitute volume 7 of the projected ten-volume edition. Volumes 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10 of the series will be published over the next several years.

In his introductions to these books, Fitzgerald examines the rhetoric of The Mahabharatas representations of the wars aftermath. Indeed, the theme of The Book of Women is the grief of the women left by warriors slain in battle. The book details the keening of palace ladies as they see their dead husbands and sons, and it culminates in a mass cremation where the womens tears turn into soothing libations that help wash the deaths away. Fitzgerald shows that the portrayal of the womens grief is much more than a sympathetic portrait of the sufferings of war. The scenes of mourning in The Book of Women lead into a crisis of conscience that is central to The Book of Peace and, Fitzgerald argues, the entire Mahabharata. In this book, the man who has won power in the great war is torn between his own sense of guilt and remorse and the obligation to rule which ultimately he is persuaded to embrace.

The Mahabharata is a powerful work that has inspired awe and wonder for centuries. With a penetrating glimpse into the trauma of war, this volume offers two of its most timely and unforgettable chapters.

During the first six of the ten months covered by this volume, Madison completed his initial period of service as a delegate from Virginia in the Congress of the Confederation. His correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph, as well as his other papers, reveal the mounting difficulties besetting him and his fellow nationalists who sought to preserve a union among the thirteen states. The major problems, which included demobilizing the discontented army, obtaining public revenue, funding the Confederation debt, pressing the British to evacuate their military posts, enforcing the preliminary articles of peace, creating a public domain in the West, locating a provisional or permanent capital of the Confederation, and negotiating commercial treaties with European powers, fostered sectionalism, factionalism, and an emphasis upon state sovereignty. As a prominent member of Congress, Madison sought legislative and constitutional remedies for this menacing divisiveness. To him the maintenence of the new nation embodied "the greatest trust ever confided to a political society," for it was "the last and fairest experiment in favor of the rights of human nature."

Early in December, after an absence of over three years, Madison returned to Montpelier, his father's estate. There during the winter of 1783-1784, he studied law, renewed old friendships, and canvassed the residents of Orange County for support of his candidacy for election to the House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly.

maintenance

In these selections readers are treated to a rare opportunity to see the
world through the eyes of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant
and sensitive scientists. Conceived by Chandrasekhar as a supplement to
his Selected Papers, this volume begins with eight papers he
wrote with Valeria Ferrari on the non-radial oscillations of stars. It
then explores some of the themes addressed in Truth and Beauty,
with meditations on the aesthetics of science and the world it examines.
Highlights include: "The Series Paintings of Claude Monet and the
Landscape of General Relativity," "The Perception of Beauty and the
Pursuit of Science," "On Reading Newton's Principia at Age Past
Eighty," and personal recollections of Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru,
and others.

Selected Papers, Volume 7 paints a picture of Chandra's universe,
filled with stars and galaxies, but with space for poetics, paintings,
and politics.

The late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper
limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1983. He was the author of many books, including
The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and, most recently,
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.

The University of Michigan Press announces that it will assume the annual publication of TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship, beginning with Volume 7. As the journal of the Society for Textual Scholarship, TEXT has always had a strong commitment to the theory as well as the practice of textual scholarship, and the new imprint strengthens this association. It will continue to be the best single source for keeping up with and following the increasingly active debate within the international textual community.

The Society for Textual Scholarship is an interdisciplinary organization devoted to providing a forum for the discussion of the cross-disciplinary implications of current research in various areas of contemporary textual work. These areas include the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical analysis, editing, and annotation of texts in disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, theater, film, linguistics, classical and biblical studies, philosophy, art history, history of science, legal history, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, and textual and literary theory. The contents of TEXT reflect this interdisciplinary concern and this range of fields.

TEXT 7 continues the tradition of offering its readers a series of sophisticated essays on specific textual problems, written by acknowledged experts in each field, balanced by a certain concern for those general problems in textual scholarship that all editors, bibliographers, and textual critics (not to mention literary critics) must confront. It is thus a further contribution to the "discourse" of the text and is as critical and ideological as it is descriptive and analytical.

The volume is organized in the same way as earlier ones, with an opening section of articles dealing with theoretical matters (e.g., Paul Eggert on document and text and Joseph Grigely on textual space), followed by articles arranged in chronological order of subject from medieval (e.g., Mary-Jo Arn on punctuation and Daniel Mosser on editing the Canterbury Tales) to Renaissance (e.g., Ted-Larry Pebworth on coterie poetry and Ernest W. Sullivan II on Donne) to modern (e.g., Heather Bryant Jordan on T. S. Eliot and Lawrence Rainey on Pound). Most of the essays in the chronological section also have a substantial theoretical argument. The final section of the volume consists of review-essays and reviews that give a thorough account and evaluation of books and editions while situating them in the various current debates on author, text, and culture. Highlights include reviews of editions of Marlowe, Burton, Johnson, and Thackeray and of George Landow's Hypertext, Ian Small and Marcus Walsh's Theory and Practice of Text-Editing, and D. C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship.

D. C. Greetham is Professor of English, City University of New York Graduate Center. W. Speed Hill is Professor of English, City University of New York. Peter Shillingsburg is Professor of English, Mississippi State University. All three are on the board of the Society for Textual Scholarship.

The University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (nine volumes) makes available to students and teachers a unique selection of primary documents, many in new translations. These readings, prepared for the highly praised Western civilization sequence at the University of Chicago, were chosen by an outstanding group of scholars whose experience teaching that course spans almost four decades. Each volume includes rarely anthologized selections as well as standard, more familiar texts; a bibliography of recommended parallel readings; and introductions providing background for the selections. Beginning with Periclean Athens and concluding with twentieth-century Europe, these source materials enable teachers and students to explore a variety of critical approaches to important events and themes in Western history.

Individual volumes provide essential background reading for courses covering specific eras and periods. The complete nine-volume series is ideal for general courses in history and Western civilization sequences.