Results by title

8113 books match the query 'Literary Criticism' and 516 start with m

Sort by

Miles of Stare

Transcendentalism and the Problem of Literary Vision in Nineteenth-Century America

Michelle Kohler

University of Alabama Press, 2014

Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists.

The strangeness of nineteenth-century poetic vision is exemplified most famously by Emerson’s transparent eyeball. That disembodied, omniscient seer is able to shed its body and transcend sight paradoxically in order to see—not to create—poetic language “manifest” on the American landscape. In Miles of Stare, Michelle Kohler explores the question of why, given American transcendentalism’s anti-empiricism, the movement’s central trope becomes an eye purged of imagination. And why, furthermore, she asks, despite its insistent empiricism, is this notorious eye also so decidedly not an eye? What are the ethics of casting a boldly equivocal metaphor as the source of a national literature amidst a national landscape fraught with slavery, genocide, poverty, and war?

Miles of Stare explores these questions first by tracing the historical emergence of the metaphor of poetic vision as the transcendentalists assimilated European precedents and wrestled with America’s troubling rhetoric of manifest destiny and national identity. These questions are central to the work of many nineteenth-century authors writing in the wake of transcendentalism, and Kohler offers examples from the writings of Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Howells, and Jewett that form a cascade of new visual metaphors that address the irreconcilable contradictions within the transcendentalist metaphor and pursue their own efforts to produce an American literature. Douglass’s doomed witness to slavery, Hawthorne’s reluctantly omniscient narrator, and Dickinson’s empty “miles of Stare” variously skewer the authority of Emerson’s all-seeing poetic eyeball while attributing new authority to the limitations that mark their own literary gazes.

Tracing this metaphorical conflict across genres from the 1830s through the 1880s, Miles of Stare illuminates the divergent, contentious fates of American literary vision as nineteenth-century writers wrestle with the commanding conflation of vision and language that lies at the center of American transcendentalism—and at the core of American national identity.

[more]

Mill and Mansion

A Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865

John Coolidge

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

Available for the first time in paperback, this pioneering work has long been a model for interdisciplinary scholarship in American urban and cultural studies. For this second edition, the author provides a new preface reflecting on the research and cultural changes that have taken place since 1865.

[more]

Millennial Style

The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman

Duke University Press, 2024

In Millennial Style, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman looks at recent experiments in black expressive culture that begin in the place of ruin. By ruin, Abdur-Rahman means the political terror and social abjection that constitute the ongoing peril of black lives. Whereas earlier black writers and artists have employed realist modes of expression to represent racial harm and to imaginatively remediate it, the black avant-garde of today displays more experimental methods. Abdur-Rahman outlines four widely employed modes in contemporary African diasporic cultural production: Black Grotesquerie, Hollowed Blackness, Black Cacophony, and the Black Ecstatic. Mobilizing black feminist and black radical thought, she considers work by such cultural practitioners as Wangechi Mutu, Marci Blackman, Alexandria Smith, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Harmony Holiday, and Essex Hemphill. Writerly and experimental, Millennial Style theorizes contemporary black art as the holding (or hoarding) of black mortal and material resources against the injuries of social death, as the fashioning of relational ethics, and as exuberant black world-building in ruinous times.

[more]

Milosz and the Problem of Evil

Lukasz Tischner; Translated from the Polish by Stanley Bill

Northwestern University Press, 2015

While scholars have chronicled Czesław Miłosz’s engagement with religious belief, no previous book-length treatment has focused on his struggles with theodicy in both poetry and thought. Miłosz wrestled with the problem of believing in a just God given the powerful evidence to the contrary in the natural world as he observed it and in the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Poland. Rather than attempt to survey Miłosz’s vast oeuvre, Łukasz Tischner focuses on several key works—The Land of Ulro, The World, The Issa Valley, A Treatise on Morals, A Treatise on Poetry, and From the Rising of the Sun—carefully tracing the development of Miłosz’s moral arguments, especially in relation to the key texts that influenced him, among them the Bible, the Gnostic writings, and the works of Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer. The result is a book that examines Miłosz as both a thinker and an artist, shedding new light on all aspects of his oeuvre.

[more]

Milton Among Spaniards

Angelica Duran

University of Delaware Press, 2011

Firmly grounded in literary studies but drawing on religious studies, translation studies, drama, and visual art, Milton among Spaniards is the first book-length exploration of the afterlife of John Milton in Spanish culture, illuminating underexamined Anglo-Hispanic cultural relations. This study calls attention to a series of powerful engagements by Spaniards with Milton’s works and legend, following a general chronology from the eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, tracing the overall story of Milton’s presence from indices of prohibited works during the Inquisition, through the many Spanish translations of Paradise Lost, to the author’s depiction on stage in the nineteenth-century play Milton, and finally to the representation of Paradise Lost by Spanish visual artists.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

[more]

Milton and This Pendant World

By George W. Whiting

University of Texas Press, 1958

Milton and This Pendant World is an interpretation of the great English poet “in an age increasingly skeptical, in a culture dominated by the assumptions of the natural and historical sciences and by the illusions of progress and enlightenment.”

Those are the words of the author of this book, George Wesley Whiting, an eminent and devoted Miltonian. Believing that Milton has a vital message for the modern world, Whiting has abandoned the usual pattern for examining a poet—study of versification, meter, and other poetic devices. Instead, he presents an exposition of the spiritual and moral meaning of Milton’s poetry, which can still have truth and beauty for this doubting age.

The literary image of the pendant world was familiar in Milton’s seventeenth century, but is meaningless to most people of our day. The comforting picture of the world hanging from heaven on a golden chain signifies God’s close watchfulness over humanity and the inseparable bond which links us to the spiritual kingdom.

The author declares that the search for God and the struggle to overcome the spiritual and material forces that impede the search represent the most vital of all human efforts; for unless this search is our primary motivation, life is without meaning, without final purpose.

Whiting also observes that true Christianity stands not for the impoverishment of humanity and our enslavement to the Deity, but rather for human moral health, harmonious development, and spiritual welfare. In order to save civilization from destruction at the hands of its friends—secularists, specialists, militarists, and politicians—we must have a renaissance of the spirit, a cultural synthesis in which a revitalized religion, enriched by philosophy and science, renews the ideals of Christianity.

[more]

Milton's Modernities

Poetry, Philosophy, and History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present

Edited by Feisal G. Mohamed and Patrick Fadely

Northwestern University Press, 2017

The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future.

Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond.

Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

[more]

Milton’s Moving Bodies

Marissa Greenberg and Rachel Trubowitz

Northwestern University Press, 2024

A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton’s oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries

This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton’s writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body—human and textual—as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton’s moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton’s contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton’s Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet’s legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.

[more]

Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel

Rene Girard and Literary Criticism

Pierpaolo Antonello

Michigan State University Press, 2015

Fifty years after its publication in English, René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has become one of the great classics of literary criticism, and the notion of triangular desire is now part of the theoretical parlance among critics and students. It also represents the genetic starting point for what has become one of the most encompassing, challenging, and far-reaching theories conceived in the humanities in the last century: mimetic theory. This book provides a forum for new generations of scholars and critics to reassess, challenge, and expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard’s book, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection. It also provides a more extensive and detailed historical understanding of the representation of desire, imitation, and rivalry within European and world literature, from Dante to Proust and from Dickens to Jonathan Littell.

[more]

Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime

The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought

Timothy Murray, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1997

In the first collection of its kind, Timothy Murray brings together writing by leading French thinkers on the political effects of theatricality on theater, film, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In addition to recently translated work by Cixous and Deleuze, the collection features English translations of essays by Althusser, Derrida, Durand, Fanon, Féral, Foucault, Girard, Green, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, and Marin.

Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime provides a welcome theoretical contribution to recent theories of performance and to the development of French cultural studies. Its emphasis on the politics of theatricality lends unprecedented focus to French theorizations of the body, gender, sight, screen, voice, territoriality, otherness, and diversity. In so doing, the volume provides an intellectual context and theoretical blueprint for future work in the cultural study of mimesis, masochism, and mime. The collection highlights the importance of theatricality to the theory and practice of aesthetics as well as to French debates over patriarchy, absolutism, and metaphysics. In turn, wide-ranging analyses provide a range of approaches to the politics of identity, feminism, marginality, and postcoloniality. Timothy Murray's introduction makes clear the theoretical context of the volume, and situates the book in relation to recent Anglo-American debates over realism, multiculturalism, and identity politics.

The contributors are especially helpful in linking varying political accounts of ideology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to historical and contemporary work in performance, film, and video. Astute commentaries on Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Artaud are combined with fascinating analyses of more recent mixed-media performance, from the European stage (Duras, Théâtre du Soleil, Bene, and Strehler), to the site of North American performance (Snow, Mabou Mines, Wilson, and Rainer).

Mimesis, Masochism, & Mime provides a stunning account of the political importance of theatricality to contemporary French thought and will be welcomed by readers in French studies, theory, theater, cultural studies, film, women's studies, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.

"The essays . . .are judiciously chosen, accurately justified, wide in range within the dispensation of post-structuralist thought--that is, they touch on everything from the question of origins to the libidinal economy of performance to post- Brechtian staging to the ineliminable shadow play of tragedy through its ideological demystification by schizoanalysis to feminism in the theater." --Herbert Blau, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Timothy Murray is Professor of English at Cornell University and former Editor of Theatre Journal. He is the author of Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France and Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas.

[more]

Mimetic Disillusion

Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U.S. Dramatic Realism

Anne Fleche

University of Alabama Press, 1997

Reimagining American dramatic realism through the lenses of mimesis, theory, and theatrical innovation.

This volume focuses on two major writers of the 1930s and 1940s—Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams—one whose writing career was just ending and the other whose career was just beginning. In new readings of their major works from this period, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire, Fleche develops connections to the writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, among others, and discusses poststructuralism in the light of modern writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and Walter Benjamin. Fleche also extends this discussion to the work of two contemporary playwrights, Adrienne Kennedy and Tony Kushner. The aim of Mimetic Disillusion is not to reject "mimetic" and "realistic" readings but to explore the rich complexities of these two ideas and the fruit of their ongoing relevance to U.S. theatre.

[more]

Mimetic Lives

Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel

Chloë Kitzinger

Northwestern University Press, 2021

What makes some characters seem so real? Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel explores this question through readings of major works by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Working at the height of the Russian realist tradition, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky each discovered unprecedented techniques for intensifying the aesthetic illusion that Chloë Kitzinger calls mimetic life—the reader’s sense of a character’s autonomous, embodied existence. At the same time, both authors tested the practical limits of that illusion by extending it toward the novel’s formal and generic bounds: philosophy, history, journalism, theology, myth.

Through new readings of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and other novels, Kitzinger traces a productive tension between mimetic characterization and the author’s ambition to transform the reader. She shows how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky create lifelike characters and why the dream of carrying the illusion of “life” beyond the novel consistently fails. Mimetic Lives challenges the contemporary truism that novels educate us by providing enduring models for the perspectives of others, with whom we can then better empathize. Seen close, the realist novel’s power to create a world of compelling fictional persons underscores its resources as a form for thought and its limits as a direct source of spiritual, social, or political change.

Drawing on scholarship in Russian literary studies as well as the theory of the novel, Kitzinger’s lucid work of criticism will intrigue and challenge scholars working in both fields.

[more]

Mindprints

Thoreau's Material Worlds

Ivan Gaskell

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A rediscovery of Thoreau’s interactions with everyday objects and how they shaped his thought.

Though we may associate Henry David Thoreau with ascetic renunciation, he accumulated a variety of tools, art, and natural specimens throughout his life as a homebuilder, surveyor, and collector. In some of these objects, particularly Indigenous artifacts, Thoreau perceived the presence of their original makers, and he called such objects “mindprints.” Thoreau believed that these collections could teach him how his experience, his world, fit into the wider, more diverse (even incoherent) assemblage of other worlds created and re-created by other beings every day. In this book, Ivan Gaskell explores how a profound environmental aesthetics developed from this insight and shaped Thoreau’s broader thought.

[more]

Minor Creatures

Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel

Ivan Kreilkamp

University of Chicago Press, 2018

In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England’s major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works by authors from the Brontës to Eliot, from Dickens to Hardy, animals appeared as markers of domestic coziness and familial kindness. Yet for all their supposed significance, the animals in nineteenth-century fiction were never granted the same fullness of character or consciousness as their human masters: they remain secondary figures. Minor Creatures re-examines a slew of literary classics to show how Victorian notions of domesticity, sympathy, and individuality were shaped in response to the burgeoning pet class. The presence of beloved animals in the home led to a number of welfare-minded political movements, inspired in part by the Darwinian thought that began to sprout at the time. Nineteenth-century animals may not have been the heroes of their own lives but, as Kreilkamp shows, the history of domestic pets deeply influenced the history of the English novel.

[more]

Minor Salvage

The Korean War and Korean American Life Writings

Stephen Hong Sohn

University of Michigan Press, 2022

The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” remains ongoing. Though active fighting only occurred between 1950 and 1953, the signing of an armistice resulted in an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Minor Salvage reads early Korean American life writings in order to explore the admittedly partial ways in which those made precarious by war seek to rebuild their lives. The titular phrase “minor salvage,” draws on different valences of the word salvage which, while initially associated with naval recovery efforts, can also be used to describe the rescue of waste material. Spurred by the stories told and retold to him by his parents Soon Ho and Yunpyo, Sohn enacts minor salvage by reading overlooked early Korean American life writings penned by Induk Pahk, Taiwon Koh, Joseph Anthony, and Kim Yong-ik alongside a later generation of life writings authored by Sunny Che and K. Connie Kang. In the context of the Korean War, Sohn argues, life writings take on a crucial political orientation precisely because of the fragility attached to refugees, civilians, children, women, and divided family members. To depict the possibility of life is to acknowledge simultaneously the threat of death, violence, and brutality, and in this regard, such life writings are part of a longer genealogy in which marginalized communities find representational power through the creative process.

[more]

Minotaur, Parrot, and the SS Man

Essays on Jorge de Sena

George Monteiro

Tagus Press, 2021

An undisputed giant of twentieth-century Portuguese letters, writer and literary critic Jorge de Sena (1919–1978) spent the most productive decades of his life away from Portugal, teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the essays gathered in this collection, George Monteiro deftly weaves together his readings of Sena's poetry and prose, both literary and critical, with evidence drawn from the deep well of Sena's biographical archive, focusing in particular on his Brazilian and U.S. years. This expansive overview of Sena's unparalleled career, intended to commemorate the centenary of the writer's birth, is also a tribute to Monteiro's own remarkably voluminous and far-reaching body of work on the intersection of Portuguese and Anglo-American literary studies.

[more]

Mirabile Dictu

Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic

Douglas Biow

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Mirabile Dictu covers in six separate chapters the works of Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. Its broad aim is to provide a select cross-section of works in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in order systematically to examine and compare for the first time the marvelous in the light of epic genre, of literary and critical theory (both past and present), and of historically and culturally determined representational practices.

Douglas Biow organizes this volume around the literary topos of the bleeding branch through which a metamorphosed person speaks. In each chapter the author takes this "marvellous event" as his starting point for a broad-ranging comparison of the several poets who employed the image; he also investigates the ways in which a period's notion of "history" underpins its representations of the marvelous. This method offers a controlled yet flexible framework within which to develop readings that engage a multiplicity of theories and approaches.

Mirabile Dictu offers not only an insightful survey of the literary connections among this group of important poets, but also a useful point of departure for scholars and students intrigued by the reuse of epic conventions, by the peculiar role of "marvellous" events in dramatic poetry, and by the later history of classical literature.

[more]

Miraculous Simplicity

Essays on R.S. Thomas

William V. Davis

University of Arkansas Press, 1993

Pondering now the being and nature of God, now the mystery of time, now the assault of contemporary lifestyles on the natural world, R. S. Thomas’s poetry and prose reflect his Welsh heritage and his determination to be Welsh. Moved by his own personal attraction to the work of Thomas and guided by his careful reading of it, William V. Davis brings us this excellent collection of essays exploring the distinguished yet controversial poet-priest.

In the autobiographical essay, Thomas reveals his passion for his homeland and his ever-present hunger for spiritual and natural exploration:

As I stood in the sun and the sea wind, with my shadow falling upon
those rocks, I certainly was reminded of the transience of human existence,
and my own in particular. As Pindar put it: “A dream about a
shadow is man.” I began to ponder more the being and nature of God
and his relation to the late twentieth-century situation, which science and
technology had created in the western world. Where did the ancient
world of rock and ocean fit into an environment in which nuclear physics
and the computer were playing an increasingly prominent part? . . .

[more]

Mirror of the Indies

A History of Dutch Colonial Literature

Rob Nieuwenhuys

University of Massachusetts Press, 1982

This book is the definitive literary history of the colonial Dutch East Indies and is partially distinguished from its predecessors by its discussion of materials ranging from natural history and religious sermons to pamphlets and the accounts of travelers from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. What emerges from this comprehensive approach is an unusually thorough and sensitive account of the manifold encounters of the Dutch with the East Indian societies that they conquered, tried to understand, and, finally, had to relinquish under the inevitable pressures of change and the desire for independence. This history records how a hybrid literature emerges from that of the colonial culture to become a distinct literature of its own and why the concepts derived from European cultural history--such as baroque or neoclassicism--are totally inapplicable to the works discussed here.

[more]

Mirrors of Our Playing

Paradigms and Presences in Modern Drama

Thomas R. Whitaker

University of Michigan Press, 1999

For centuries, theater has maintained a central role in the development and preservation of artistic, social, and political themes in society. Yet in recent decades, theater has taken an increasingly marginal role. In this book, Thomas R. Whitaker examines the reasons for the marginalization of this important and influential art form, considering not only histories of various dramatic forms, but also the individual histories of various playwrights and their times. In so doing, he explores the importance of perceiving drama in a different light: as a participatory tool, a mirror that reflects life as it unfolds and plays out before us. Whitaker's unique and comprehensive study of drama poses theater as a collaborative and interactive experience, an experience that involves not only the playwright, the text, and the artists, but the audience as well as the society and culture of that audience.Contrary to the common critical belief that drama can only be theorized as a “performed action,” Whitaker conceptualizes drama as an interaction between a “performed action” and an “action of performance.” The whole of Mirrors of Our Playing is founded on the understanding that a play is a manifold mirror of the “playing” that is our lives; therefore, the play is shaped by a complex interaction between the paradigms that make up our view of the world and the reflection of these paradigms in the “mirror” that is the play.Focusing on both scripts and performance, Mirrors of Our Playing takes a fresh look at modern English-speaking drama, from its Anglo-Irish beginnings to its contemporary cross-fertilizations and international dispersals. It shows how most important English-speaking theater has been shaped in accord with several major paradigms, while it examines four major presences in that theater: Lord Byron, Samuel Beckett, Wole Soyinka, and Peter Brook. Mirrors of Our Playing stands on the borderlands between text-oriented and performanceoriented criticism. It seeks to extend our knowledge of the history of modern drama in English as that drama has engaged certain paradigms of performance. It is therefore grounded in close textual analysis of a great many texts that are understood as scripts for performance. Its several chapters incorporate, as they proceed, a variety of subordinate strategies: the placing of theater in historical context, the comparison of closely related plays, the charting of historical sequences of development within a given genre or paradigm, examination of the influence of a historical figure or of contemporary works, and the tracing of the exploratory development of a major director.

[more]

Mirtilla, A Pastoral

A Bilingual Edition

Isabella Andreini

Iter Press, 2018

Isabella Andreini was the most famous actress of the Italian Renaissance, the darling of dukes and kings, as well as of less-moneyed theatergoers. As a founding member with her husband, Francesco, of the Compagnia dei Gelosi, she performed ceaselessly throughout Italy and France, and was prized for the new role she invented for women on stage, that of the ingénue with a comic bent. She was also a playwright; in fact, the first woman to publish a pastoral. This modern edition and translation subtly captures the novelty, as well as the imaginative pyrotechnics, of a brilliant, self-made virtuosa of the stage.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series: Volume 62

[more]

Miscellaneous Verdicts

Writings on Writers

Anthony Powell

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Miscellaneous Verdicts represents the best of Anthony Powell's critical writing over a period of four decades. Drawn from his regular reviews for the Daily Telegraph, from his occasional humorous pieces for Punch, and from his more sustained pieces of critical and anecdotal writing on writers, this collection is as witty, fresh, surprising, and entertaining as one would expect from the author of Dance to the Music of Time.

Powell begins with a section on the British, exploring his fascination both with genealogy and with figures like John Aubrey, and writing in depth about writers like Kipling, Conrad, and Hardy. The second section, on America, also opens with discussions of family trees (in this case presidential ones) and includes pieces on Henry James, James Thurber, American booksellers in Paris, Hemingway, and Dashiell Hammett. Personal encounters, and absorbing incidents from the lives of his subjects, frequently fill these pages—as they do even more in the section on Powell's contemporaries—Connolly, Orwell, Graham Greene, and others. Finally, and aptly, the book closes with a section on Proust and matters Proustian, including a marvellous essay on what is eaten and drunk, and by whom, in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

"An urbane book, quietly erudite, very sensible, highly civilized, remarkably useful."—Anthony Burgess, Observer

"An acute intelligence and fastidious sense of humor make [Powell] the funniest and most profound living writer of the English language."—Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Sunday Telegraph

Anthony Powell was born in London in 1905. He is the author of seven novels, a biography of John Aubrey, two plays, a collection of memoirs, and the twelve-volume novel sequence Dance to the Music of Time.

[more]

Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists

Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction

Keith McMahon

Duke University Press, 1995

Having multiple wives was one of the mainstays of male privilege during the Ming and Qing dynasties of late imperial China. Based on a comprehensive reading of eighteenth-century Chinese novels and a theoretical approach grounded in poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and feminist criticism, Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists examines how such privilege functions in these novels and provides the first full account of literary representations of sexuality and gender in pre-modern China.
In many examples of rare erotic fiction, and in other works as well-known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Keith McMahon identifies a sexual economy defined by the figures of the "miser" and the "shrew"—caricatures of the retentive, self-containing man and the overflowing, male-enervating woman. Among these and other characters, the author explores the issues surrounding the practice of polygamy, the logic of its overvaluation of masculinity, and the nature of sexuality generally in Chinese society. How does the man with many wives manage and justify his sexual authority? Why and how might he escape or limit this presumed authority, sometimes to the point of portraying himself as abject before the shrewish woman? How do women accommodate or coddle the man, or else oppose, undermine, or remold him? And in what sense does the man place himself lower than the spiritually and morally superior woman?
The most extensive English-language study of Chinese literature from the eighteenth century, this examination of polygamy will interest not only students of Chinese history, culture, and literature but also all those concerned with histories of gender and sexuality.

[more]

Mishima

A Vision of the Void

Maguerite Yourcenar

University of Chicago Press, 2001

On November 25, 1970, Japan's most renowned postwar novelist, Yukio Mishima, stunned the world by committing ritual suicide. Here, Marguerite Yourcenar, a brilliant reader of Mishima and a scholar with an eye for the cultural roles of fiction, unravels the author's life and politics: his affection for Western culture, his family and his homosexuality, his brilliant writings, and his carefully premeditated death.

[more]

Miss Stephen's Apprenticeship

How Virginia Stephen Became Virginia Woolf

Rosalind Brackenbury

University of Iowa Press, 2018

During the years leading up to her marriage with Leonard Woolf in 1912, the year in which she finished The Voyage Out and sent it to be published by her cousin at Duckworth’s, the future Virginia Woolf was teaching herself how to be a writer. While her brothers were sent first to private schools, then to Cambridge to be educated, Virginia Stephen and her sister Vanessa were informally educated at home. With this background, how did she know she was a writer? What were her struggles? How did she teach herself? What made Miss Stephen into the author Virginia Woolf?

Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship explores these questions, delving into Virginia Woolf ’s letters and diaries, seeking to understand how she covered the distance from the wistful “I only wish I could write,” to the almost casual statement, “the novels are finished.” These days, the trajectory of a writer very often starts with studying for an MFA. In Woolf ’s case, however, it’s instructive to ask: How did a great writer, who had no formal education, invent for herself the framework she needed for a writing life? How did she know what she had to learn? How did she make her own way?

Novelist Rosalind Brackenbury explores these questions and others, and in the process reveals what Virginia Woolf can give to young writers today.

[more]

Missing Measures

Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter

Timothy Steele

University of Arkansas Press, 1990

By the close of the nineteenth century, many poets had abandoned rhyme and meter in favor of “free verse.” Nearly one hundred years later, a growing number of younger poets are reclaiming traditional conventions of prosody by composing rhymed and measured poetry.

Missing Measures is the first full articulation of the aesthetics of this new movement. Timothy Steele, one of the best of those poets who are sometimes called the “New Formalists,” treats his subject against a backdrop of the long history of ideas about poetry, formulated first by the ancients and re-examined and re-interpreted by subsequent writers.

Steele offers a new perspective on the wholesale departure from tradition proclaimed in modernist critical justifications. A rare marriage of clear writing, careful scholarship, and bold thinking, Missing Measures provides a vital new movement with a critical manifesto.

[more]

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Winter Jade Werner

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature explores the notion that missionaries, often perceived as only evangelically motivated in the British imperial project, were also spurred on by cosmopolitan ideals. Winter Jade Werner makes this surprising connection in order to write against standard understandings of missionary work as well as typical understandings of cosmopolitanism as a deeply secular project.
Missionary Cosmopolitanism identifies the nineteenth-century novel as thematically and formally attuned to the tension between missionaries’ cosmopolitan values and the moral impoverishment of their imperialist and expansionist practices. Werner’s chapters interact with canonical works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, along with lesser-known works by Robert Southey and Sydney Owenson. Ultimately, Missionary Cosmopolitanism demonstrates that nineteenth-century literature both illustrated and helped define missionary discourses regarding cosmopolitan ideas, showing how global evangelicalism continues to tap into the “new cosmopolitanisms” of today.

[more]

Mixed Realism

Videogames and the Violence of Fiction

Timothy J. Welsh

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Mixed Realism is about how we interact with media. Timothy J. Welsh shows how videogames, like novels, both promise and trouble experiences of “immersion.” His innovative methodology offers a new understanding of the expanding role of virtuality in contemporary life.

Today’s wired culture is a mixed reality, conducted as exchanges between virtual and material contexts. We make balance transfers at an ATM, update Facebook timelines, and squeeze in sessions of Angry Birds on the subway. However, the “virtual” is still frequently figured as imaginary, as opposed to “real.” The vision of 1990s writers of a future that would pit virtual reality against actual reality has never materialized, yet it continues to haunt cultural criticism. Our ongoing anxiety about immersive media now surrounds videogames, especially “shooter games,” and manifests as a fear that gamers might not know the difference between the virtual world and the real world.

As Welsh notes, this is the paradox of real virtuality. We understand that the media-generated virtualities that fill our lives are not what they represent. But what are they if they are not real? Do they have presence, significance, or influence exceeding their material presence and the user processes that invoke them? What relationships do they establish through and beyond our interactions with them?

Mixed Realism brims with fresh analyses of literary works such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, along with sustained readings of controversial videogames such as Super Columbine Massacre and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Continually connecting the dots between surprising groupings of texts and thinkers, from David Foster Wallace to the cult-classic videogame Eternal Darkness and from Cormac McCarthy to Grand Theft Auto, it offers a fresh perspective on both digital games and contemporary literature.

[more]

Mixed-Race Superheroes

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

Rutgers University Press, 2021

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic “half-breed.”

The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.

[more]

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture

Inter-American Literary Dialogues

Edited by Monika Kaup and Debra Rosenthal

University of Texas Press, 2002

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

[more]

Mobility and Migration

East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629-1640

Roger Thompson

University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

During the 1630s, more than 14,000 people sailed from Britain bound for New England, constituting what has come to be known as the Great Migration. This book offers the most extensive study of these emigrants ever undertaken. Focusing on 2,000 individuals who moved from the five counties of eastern England, it provides historians with important new findings on mobility, family life, kinship networks, and community cohesion.

Roger Thompson reveals the personal experiences and ancestral histories of the emigrants. He follows them across the Atlantic and investigates their lives and achievements in the New World. Distinguising between such groups as gentry, entrepreneurs, artisans, farmers, and servants, he explores whether the migration tended to be a solitary uprooting from a stable and predictable world of familiar neighborhoods or simply a longer move among many relocations.

Thompson also sheds light on the issue of motivation: Were these settlers pulled by the hope of eventual enrichment or of founding a purified society, or were they pushed by intolerance and persecution at home? Did they see New England as a haven of escape or an opportunity to exploit? Did New Englanders seek to replicate “English ways,” preserving traditional culture and society, or did they embrace change and innovation? Mobility and Migration provides a wealth of new evidence for historians of both early modern England and colonial America.

[more]

Mobility and Modernity

Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination

Robert D. Aguirre

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Mobility and Modernity: Panama in the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination rewrites the history of the Panama Canal, assessing for the first time the literary culture of the preceding decades. In this period, U.S. and British writers and visual artists developed sophisticated languages of mobility, time, and speed to cast the isthmus as an in-between place, a point of connection to more important destinations. These discourses served an important role in their own day and laid the imaginative ground for the canal to come.

In this study, Robert D. Aguirre provides bold new interpretations of Anthony Trollope, John Lloyd Stephens, and Eadweard Muybridge and also recovers information about literary communities previously lost to history. Mobility and Modernity shows how Panama became defined as a site of incipient globalization and a crucial link of empire. Across this narrow strip of land people and things traveled, technology developed, and political forces erupted. The isthmus became a site of mobility that paradoxically produced varieties of immobility. Parting ways with histories that celebrate the canal as a mighty engineering feat, Mobility and Modernity reveals a more complex story of cultural conflict that began with the first gold rush news in the late 1840s and continued throughout the century.

[more]

Modeling Citizenship

Jewish and Asian American Writing

Authored by Cathy Schlund-Vials

Temple University Press, 2011

Navigating deftly among historical and literary readings, Cathy Schlund-Vials examines the analogous yet divergent experiences of Asian Americans and Jewish Americans in Modeling Citizenship. She investigates how these model minority groups are shaped by the shifting terrain of naturalization law and immigration policy, using the lens of naturalization, not assimilation, to underscore questions of nation-state affiliation and sense of belonging.

Modeling Citizenship examines fiction, memoir, and drama to reflect on how the logic of naturalization has operated at discrete moments in the twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on two exemplary literary works. For example, Schlund-Vials shows how Mary Antin's Jewish-themed play The Promised Land is reworked into a more contemporary Chinese American context in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.

In her compelling analysis, Schlund-Vials amplifies the structural, cultural, and historical significance of these works and the themes they address.

[more]

Models of Value

Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel

James Thompson

Duke University Press, 1996

James Thompson examines the concept of value as it came to be understood in eighteenth-century England through two emerging and divergent discourses: political economy and the novel. By looking at the relationship between these two developing forms—one having to do with finance, the other with romance—Thompson demonstrates how value came to have such different meaning in different realms of experience. A highly original rethinking of the origins of the English novel, Models of Value shows the novel’s importance in remapping English culture according to the separate spheres of public and domestic life, men’s and women’s concerns, money and emotion.
In this account, political economy and the novel clearly arise as solutions to a crisis in the notion of value. Exploring the ways in which these different genres responded to the crisis—political economy by reconceptualizing wealth as capital, and the novel by refiguring intrinsic or human worth in the form of courtship narratives—Thompson rereads several literary works, including Defoe’s Roxana, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Burney’s Cecilia, along with influential contemporary economic texts. Models of Value also traces the discursive consequences of this bifurcation of value, and reveals how history and theory participate in the very novelistic and economic processes they describe. In doing so, the book bridges the opposition between the interests of Marxism and feminism, and the distinctions which, newly made in the eighteenth century, continue to inform our discourse today.
An important reformulation of the literary and cultural production of the eighteenth century, Models of Value will attract students of the novel, political economy, and of literary history and theory.

[more]

Modern American Grotesque

Literature and Photography

James Goodwin

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.

A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

[more]

Modern American Poetry, 1865-1950

Alan Shucard

University of Massachusetts Press, 1990

An examination of the origins and evolution of modernism in American verse from Dickinson to the objectivist movement, this book offers imaginative readings of those writers who helped create a distinctive American poetic voice.

[more]

Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent

Wayne C. Booth

University of Chicago Press, 1974

When should I change my mind? What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new "philosophy of good reasons" Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that "you cannot reason about values" and that "the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted," and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a "befouled rhetorical climate" in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes—defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of "values" becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads.

Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find "identity" or a "self." In casting doubt on systematic doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of "systematic assent," Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of "good reasons"—many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These "good reasons" are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, "When should I change my mind?"

[more]

Modern Hamlets & Soliloquies

An Expanded Edition

Mary Z. Maher

University of Iowa Press, 2003

In Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies (Iowa, 1992), Mary Maher examined how modern actors have chosen to perform Hamlet’s soliloquies, and why they made the choices they made, within the context of their specific productions of the play.

Adding to original interviews with, among others, Derek Jacobi, David Warner, Kevin Kline, and Ben Kingsley, Modern Hamlets and Their Soliloquies: An Expanded Edition offers two new and insightful interviews, one with Kenneth Branagh, focusing on his 1997 film production of the play, and one with Simon Russell Beale, discussing his 2000-2001 run as Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre.

[more]