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71 books match the query 'Historical Events' and 6 start with e

cover of Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Paraic Finnerty

University of Massachusetts Press, 2006

One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeare—her letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard.

Páraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinson's life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeare's multifaceted presence in Dickinson's world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals.

Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinson's engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinson's specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him.

Finnerty also examines those of Dickinson's responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeare's most powerful and transgressive female characters—Cleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbeth—instead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeare's most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.
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cover of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shotaro and Literary Memory in Japan

Enduring Postwar

Yasuoka Shotaro and Literary Memory in Japan

Kendall Heitzman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2019

Yasuoka Shotaro (1920–2013) was perfectly situated to become Japan's premier chronicler of the Showa period (1926–89). Over fifty years as a writer, Yasuoka produced stories, novels, plays, and essays, as well as monumental histories that connected his own life to those of his ancestors. He was also the only major Japanese writer to live in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement, when he spent most of an academic year at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 1977, he translated Alex Haley's Roots into Japanese.

For a long period, Yasuoka was at the center of the Japanese literary establishment, serving on prize committees and winning the major literary prizes of the era: the Akutagawa, the Noma, the Yomiuri, and the Kawabata. But what makes Yasuoka fascinating as a writer is the way that he consciously, deliberately resisted accepted narratives of modern Japanese history through his approach to personal and collective memory.

In Enduring Postwar, the first literary and biographical study of Yasuoka in English, Kendall Heitzman explores the element of memory in Yasuoka's work in the context of his life and evolving understanding of postwar Japan.
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cover of Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence

Enemies of All Humankind

Fictions of Legitimate Violence

Sonja Schillings

Dartmouth College Press, 2016

Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization. Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.
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cover of Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

Entranced Earth

Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape

Jens Andermann

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A sweeping analysis of the lasting effects of neocolonial extractivism in Latin American aesthetic modernity from 1920 to the present

Looking to the extractive frontier as a focal point of Latin American art, literature, music, and film, Jens Andermann asks what emerges at the other end of landscape. Art in the Global South has long represented and interrogated “insurgent nature”—organic and inorganic matter, human and nonhuman life, thrown into turmoil.

In Entranced Earth: Art, Extractivism, and the End of Landscape, Andermann traces the impact of despaisamiento—world-destroying un-landscaping—throughout the Latin American modernist archive. At the same time, he explores innovative, resilient modes of allyship forged between diverse actors through their shared experiences of destruction. From the literary regionalism of the 1930s to contemporary bio art, from modernist garden architecture to representations of migration and displacement in sound art and film, Entranced Earth tracks the crisis of landscape and environmental exhaustion beyond despair toward speculative, experimental forms of survival.

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cover of Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945

Epic and Exile

Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945

Hunter Bivens

Northwestern University Press, 2015

The antifascist exile beginning in 1933 led to a cooling among the émigrés of the artistic and literary modernist experiments of the Weimar Republic and to a return to realism and the traditional novel form. Epic and Exile examines the Popular Front– oriented cultural initiatives of the 1930s less in terms of their political strategy than in their function as a cultural and literary program for the exiles, implying a specific relationship to questions of artistic form, historical conceptions, and indeed the political as such. A popular front aesthetics is, Bivens argues, realist and modernist at once, and, in its focus on the opacities and contradictions of everyday life as a historical formation, it is particularly concerned with problems of the epic form.
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cover of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community

Extremities

Trauma, Testimony, and Community

Edited by Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw

University of Illinois Press, 2002

How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten?

How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture.

Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer.

Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession–-they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.

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