Results by title

This thought-provoking collection explores significant new facets of an American author of lasting international stature.

“Edited by three eminent Fitzgerald scholars, this fine book comprises nineteen incisive and provocative essays (most written for this collection) by . . . well-known Fitzgerald critics. The content is as varied as the international origins of its authors.” —Choice

As the author of some of the most compelling short stories ever written, two of the central novels in American literature, and some of the most beautiful prose ever penned, F. Scott Fitzgerald is read and studied all over the world. Sixty-two years after his death, his works—protean, provocative, multilayered, and rich—continue to elicit spirited responses. This collection grew out of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference that convened in Princeton at the centennial of this author's birth. Bringing together dozens of the world's leading scholars and commentators, the conference and the book celebrate the ever-growing legacy of Fitzgerald's art.

The subjects of these 19 essays reflect the contributors' wish to shine new light on less-frequently discussed aspects of Fitzgerald's work. Topics include Fitzgerald's Princeton influences and his expression of Catholic romanticism; his treatments of youth culture, the devil, and waste; parallels in the work of Mencken, Cather, and Murakami; and the ways gender, pastoral mode, humor, and the Civil War are variously presented in his work. One illustrated summary examines Fitzgerald's effect on popular culture through his appearance in the comics. Two broad overviews—one on Fitzgerald's career and another on the final developments in the author's style—round out the collection.

The international scope of the contributors to this volume reflects Fitzgerald's worldwide reputation and appeal. With extensive treatments of This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Last Tycoon, and the Pat Hobby stories, this collection makes an unusual and significant contribution to the field of Fitzgerald studies.

Explore a diversity of feminist readings of the Bible

This latest volume in the Bible and Women series is concerned with documenting, through word and image, both well-known and largely unknown women and their relationship to the Bible from the period of the late eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays in this collection illustrate the broad range of treatment of the Holy Scripture. Paul Chilcote, Marion Ann Taylor, Christiana de Groot, Elizabeth M. Davis, and Pamela S. Nadell offer perspectives on the Anglo-American sphere during this period. Marina Cacchi, Adriano Valerio, Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, and Alexei Klutschewski and Eva Maria Synek illuminate the areas of southern and eastern Europe. Angela Berlis, Ruth Albrecht, Doris Brodbeck, Ute Gause, and Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler examine women from the German-speaking world and their texts. Bernhard Schneider, Magda Motté, Katharina Büttner-Kirschner, and Elfriede Wiltschnigg treat the subject area of religious literature and art.

Features

• Insight into how women participated in academic exegesis and applied biblical figures as models for structuring their own lives
• Exploration of genres used by women, including letters, diaries, autobiographical records, stories, novels, songs, poems, and specialized exegetical treatises and commentaries on individual books of the Bible
• Detailed analyses of women’s interpretations ranging from those that sought to confirm traditions to those that challenged them

In this innovative analysis of canonical British novels, Campbell identifies a new literary device—the surrogate family—as a signal of cultural anxieties about young women’s changing relationship to matrimony across the long eighteenth century. By assembling chosen families rather than families of origin, Campbell convincingly argues, female protagonists in these works compensate for weak family ties, explore the world and themselves, prepare for idealized marriages, or sidestep marriage altogether. Tracing the evolution of this rich convention from the female characters in Defoe’s and Richardson’s fiction who are allowed some autonomy in choosing spouses, to the more explicitly feminist work of Haywood and Burney, in which connections between protagonists and their surrogate sisters and mothers can substitute for marriage itself, this book makes an ambitious intervention by upending a traditional trope—the model of the hierarchal family—ultimately offering a new lens through which to regard these familiar works.

A detailed history of the Church of England’s Welsh dioceses, including the building of cathedrals and churches.

The volumes in this series trace the process of reorganization and reform that took place in the Church of England after the Norman conquest, with the building of new cathedrals, the establishment of new constitutions for their chapters, and the appointment of foreign clergy. In this period, when many documents are undated, the chronological framework is provided by the careers of bishops, dignitaries, canons, and cathedral priors.  

​This volume covers the years 1541 to 1857, with a focus on the Welsh dioceses. During this period, six new dioceses were created out of larger dioceses, with former abbey churches named as their cathedrals. These fourteen cathedrals were known as the New Foundation, as compared with the thirteen medieval secular cathedrals of the Old Foundation. Further substantial reorganization took place in the 1830s, and additional dioceses were created to meet the needs of the period. This volume offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the period, making it an essential research tool for historians.

A striking examination of the death penalty in the Soviet Union that documents in heart-rending detail how its citizens, hopeful for a new life post-Stalin, lost faith that their transgressions could be forgiven.

From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.

Winner of the Brazilian Studies Association’s Roberto Reis Book Award for First Monograph • Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Antonio Candido Book Award • Shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award 

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

The search for belief and meaning among nineteenth-century intellectuals

The nineteenth century’s explosion of scientific theories and new technologies undermined many deep-seated beliefs that had long formed the basis of Western society, making it impossible for many to retain the unconditional faith of their forebears. A myriad of discoveries—including Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, Joule’s law of conservation of energy, Pasteur’s germ theory, Darwin’s and Wallace’s theories of evolution by natural selection, and Planck’s work on quantum theory—shattered conventional understandings of the world that had been dictated by traditional religious teachings and philosophical systems for centuries.

Fictions of Certitude: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning, 1840–1920 investigates the fin de siècle search for truth and meaning in a world that had been radically transformed. John S. Haller Jr. examines the moral and philosophical journeys of nine European and American intellectuals who sought deeper understanding amid such paradigmatic upheaval. Auguste Comte, John Henry Newman, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, John Fiske, William James, Lester Frank Ward, and Paul Carus all belonged to an age in which one world was passing while another world that was both astounding and threatening was rising to take its place.

For Haller, what makes the work of these nine thinkers worthy of examination is how they strove in different ways to find certitude and belief in the face of an epochal sea change. Some found ways to reconceptualize a world in which God and nature coexist. For others, the challenge was to discern meaning in a world in which no higher power or purpose can be found. As explained by D. H. Meyer, “The later Victo­rians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would.”
 

Final Solutions offers a ground-breaking and genuinely unique analysis of modern genocide. Sabby Sagall draws on the insights of the Frankfurt school and Wilhelm Reich to create an innovative combination of Marxism and psychoanalysis. He argues that genocide is a product of an ‘irrational’ destructiveness by social classes or communities that have suffered major historical defeats or similar forms of extreme stress.

Sagall shows how the denial of human needs and the ensuing feelings of isolation and powerlessness propel groups to project their impotent rage, hatred and destructiveness engendered by these defeats on to the 'outsider' and the 'other'.

The book applies this theoretical framework to four modern genocides – that of the Native Americans, the Armenians, the Jews and the Rwandan Tutsis. This is a truly pioneering contribution which adds to our understanding of some of the darkest hours of humanity – and how we can stop them from happening again.

Melting sea ice and rumbling volcanoes. Sled dogs racing through unnamed valleys.

These were the images that came to mind when Molly Rettig moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work as a reporter at the local newspaper. An avid environmentalist, she couldn’t wait to explore the vast, untamed spaces that had largely been paved over on the east coast. But when her 72-year-old neighbor, Clutch, invites her on a tour of his gold mine—an 800-foot tunnel blasted into the side of his house–she begins to question many of her ideas about Alaska, and about herself. 

In Finding True North, Rettig takes us on a gripping journey through Alaska's past that brings alive the state's magnificent country and its quirky, larger-than-life characters. She meets a trapper who harvests all she needs from the land, a bush pilot who taught himself how to fly, and an archaeologist who helped build an oil pipeline through pristine wilderness. While she learns how airplanes, mines, and oil fields have paved the way for newcomers like herself, she also stumbles upon a bigger question: what has this quest for Alaska’s natural resources actually cost, and how much more is at stake?

This is a book about all the ways wild places teach us about ourselves. Rettig writes both playfully and honestly about how one place can be many things to many people—and how all of it can be true.

Where language, body, and form converge in the poetry of Larry Eigner.

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, despite profound physical limitations caused by cerebral palsy. Using only the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Eigner generated a torrent of urgent and rich language, participating in vital correspondences as well as publishing widely in literary magazines and poetry journals.

While Eigner wrote before the emergence of ecopoetics, his poetry reflected a serious engagement with scientific writing and media, including Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring. Eigner was writing about environmental disasters and climate change long before such concerns took on a moral incumbency. Similarly, Eigner was ahead of his time in his exploration of disability. The field of disability studies has expanded rapidly in the new millennium. Eigner was not an overtly biographical poet, at least as far as his physical limitations were concerned, but his poetry spoke volumes on the idea of embodiment in all its forms.

Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner’s Ecrippoetics is the first full-length study of Eigner’s poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner’s two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic—one whose work has much to tell us about the ecology and embodiment of our futures. Hart sees Eigner’s overlapping concerns for disability, ecology, and poetic form as inextricable, and coins the phrase ecrippoetics here to describe Eigner’s prescient vision.

Examining the power of speculative fiction to reimagine historical accounts of the conquest of the Americas

The historical conquest of the Americas resides at the core of all first-contact narratives, which stage colonization and resistance in the generic guise of speculative fiction. Starting from this axiom, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac Zimmer examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. First Contact thus poses a foundational question: Can we understand the conquest as an originary world-historical event without eclipsing the other cosmologies that existed, and continue to exist, within the contact zone? Can we decolonize the speculative imagination itself?

A survivor's powerful testament to faith, memory, and the triumph of the human spirit.

A fascinating memoir about a Holocaust survivor's loss of and journey back to faith. In 1939, Baruch Goldstein was a religiously observant adolescent resident of the Jewish community in Mlawa, a town that was then in East Prussia. After war broke out, the Jewish community there was relatively sheltered, as that region was incorporated into the German Reich rather than into the General Government (the German run-fragment of pre-war Poland, where conditions were harsh for everyone). However in 1942, Goldstein was sent to Auschwitz, where he stayed two-and-a-half years. His family was scattered all to their deaths, but he survived the war--barely. For Decades I Was Silent is an account of life in a small Polish-German town and provides information on the religious life of the Jewish citizens. This book creates a direct sense of the random, mystifying personal violence individuals felt at the hands of Germans--not the anonymous industrial death machine, but immediate, face-to-face violence.

After the war, Goldstein drifted as a refugee to UNRR camps in Italy. Over time, young Goldstein had to face the fact that all of his extended family was lost and he had only the possibilities of Palestine or help from distant relatives in the United States as a future. His American relatives urged him to enter the United States as a yeshiva student, and eventually he became a rabbi and started a family. As a young rabbinical student, and then as a rabbi, Goldstein was forced to confront the events of the Holocaust and the damage done to his faith. 

This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.