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2706 books match the query 'European' and 622 start with t

cover of The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning: A Literary Life

The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning

A Literary Life

Richard S. Kennedy & Donald S. Hair

University of Missouri Press, 2007

The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning offers an accessible and authoritative guide to the essentials of Robert Browning’s life and poetry. Drawing from his personal letters and from the diaries and memoirs of his contemporaries, this literary biography provides a wealth of information about the main events of his life, including the social, political, religious, and aesthetic issues that concerned him; it offers critical commentary defining the central characteristics of his poetry; and it tracks the changes in his reputation through contemporary reviews and the growth of the Browning societies.
            An English poet who was deeply responsive to European culture and affairs, Robert Browning has sometimes been dismissed by modern readers for his obscurity or roughness of language. Now two distinguished scholars of Browning’s work trace the arc of his development as an artist and thinker from his earliest poems to the last in his long and remarkably productive career.
            The authors illustrate how Browning moved from describing “incidents in the development of a soul,” to developing his reader’s soul as collaborator in the artistic process, to the development of his own soul in the making of poetry. Through a fresh reading of not only his poetry but also the letters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, they have garnered details that situate the two in historical context, provide a vivid sense of Robert’s personality, and also correct biases against Elizabeth’s influence. Their critical commentary focuses on the poet’s dramatic imagination and argues that his extensive body of work after The Ring and the Book—often dismissed as evidencing a decline in his poetic powers—represented new directions in his poetry marked by inventive dialogue, verbal puzzles, and virtuoso rhyming.
             Written to appeal to both general readers and scholars, the book will enable anyone to read Browning’s poems with a firm sense of the subjects and practices that are central to his texts, along with a knowledge of their context in the poet’s life and thought. The Dramatic Imagination of Robert Browning invites readers of a singular body of poetry to achieve a new understanding of Browning’s work and a greater appreciation of his life.
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cover of The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

The Dream of Absolutism

Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

Hall Bjørnstad

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV.

What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do?
 
In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun’s famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king’s secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.
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cover of The Duchess of Suffolk

The Duchess of Suffolk

Thomas Drue. Edited and with an Introduction by Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith

The Ohio State University Press, 2015

With the inaugural edition of the Early Modern Drama Texts series, Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith illuminate the only surviving work of playwright and actor Thomas Drue. First performed by the Palsgrave’s Men at the Fortune Theater in 1624, The Duchess of Suffolk dramatizes the exile of Protestant noblewoman Katherine Willoughby (1519–80) during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary I (1516–58). Drawing from popular accounts in works by John Foxe and Thomas Deloney, Drue created a narrative of exaggerated peril, as the Duchess and her companions are chased across the continent. The embellished history evokes many iconic figures of the Reformation, from the celebrated Oxford Martyrs Hugh Latimer, Thomas Cranmer, and Nicholas Ridley to Bishop Edmund Bonner, whose infamous reputation had earned him the soubriqet “bloody Bonner.” A tragicomic history, The Duchess of Suffolk still resonated when it was written and performed in early seventeenth-century England some seventy years later.
 
With this volume, Dutton and Galbraith provide a critical apparatus that situates The Duchess of Suffolk in historical context and suggests an explanation for its continued resonance. They account for the play’s censorship in 1624 by detailing how it evoked contemporary parallels to the controversial foreign policy of King James I. More specifically, the editors offer an introduction that includes a historical overview of the author, staging, printing, and reception. Facing facsimiles of the original are pages with the updated text, complete with annotations to clarify language and staging details. This edition of The Duchess of Suffolk will have something to offer to early modern drama scholars as well as scholars of book history.
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cover of The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The Dynastic Imagination

Family and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Adrian Daub

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Adrian Daub’s The Dynastic Imagination offers an unexpected account of modern German intellectual history through frameworks of family and kinship. Modernity aimed to brush off dynastic, hierarchical authority and to make society anew through the mechanisms of marriage, siblinghood, and love. It was, in other words, centered on the nuclear family. But as Daub shows, the dynastic imagination persisted, in time emerging as a critical stance by which the nuclear family’s conservatism and temporal limits could be exposed. Focusing on the complex interaction between dynasties and national identity-formation in Germany, Daub shows how a lingering preoccupation with dynastic modes of explanation, legitimation, and organization suffused German literature and culture.
​
Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of literature, sciences, and the history of ideas, engaging with remnants of dynastic ideology in the work of Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and Stefan George, and in the work of early feminists and pioneering psychoanalysts. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history. 
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cover of The Early Novel in French: Poetics of a Genre in the Making

The Early Novel in French

Poetics of a Genre in the Making

Virginia Krause

Northwestern University Press, 2027

Examining the role of changes in print technologies and poetics in the early novel

Around the same time that Aristotle’s Poetics was reemerging from obscurity, Rabelais was composing his Pantagruel series, while a host of influential works in a chivalric, sentimental, or pastoral vein were being imported from Spain and Italy. From this emergent corpus, Rabelais’s is the only name to have unambiguously made it into our modern canon of literary history, where he appears to stand alone as an early pioneer of the novel. The Early Novel in French: Poetics of a Genre in the Making explores the literary, cultural, and eminently material soil in which these early forms of what we would come to know as the novel originally took root, showing how they were imaginatively responding to the practices and uncertainties of the literary texts of their own era as well as to works of classical antiquity. 

Within the flowering of experimental fictional forms in mid-sixteenth-century France, Virginia Krause identifies historical subplots shaping the development of this genre. As rhetorical culture continued to animate fictions through an active literary tradition, print culture was changing the very fabric of books. The early novel was thus at once rhetorically fashioned and technologically manufactured. Meanwhile, the legacy of medieval romance adventure persisted, making the early novel in French both a new laboratory for Aristotelian immersion and a vehicle for a mysterious and fugitive romanesque. Krause sheds fresh light on this new and rapidly evolving genre: its lifelike personas or “person-fictions”; its material forms, from pocket-sized volumes to vast literary serials; its immersive powers; and its underappreciated role in the production of the modern author. 

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cover of The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons

The Early Poetry of Robert Graves

The Goddess Beckons

By Frank L. Kersnowski

University of Texas Press, 2002

Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society.

In this study of Graves's early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves's early poems of a figure he later called "The White Goddess," a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves's family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.

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cover of The Economy of Glory: From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon

The Economy of Glory

From Ancien Régime France to the Fall of Napoleon

Robert Morrissey

University of Chicago Press, 2013

From the outset of Napoleon’s career, the charismatic Corsican was compared to mythic heroes of antiquity like Achilles, and even today he remains the apotheosis of French glory, a value deeply embedded in the country’s history. From this angle, the Napoleonic era can be viewed as the final chapter in the battle of the Ancients and Moderns. In this book, Robert Morrissey presents a literary and cultural history of glory and its development in France and explores the “economy of glory” Napoleon sought to implement in an attempt to heal the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution.
 
Examining how Napoleon saw glory as a means of escaping the impasse of Revolutionary ideas of radical egalitarianism, Morrissey illustrates the challenge the leader faced in reconciling the antagonistic values of virtue and self-interest, heroism and equality. He reveals that the economy of glory was both egalitarian, creating the possibility of an aristocracy based on merit rather than wealth, and traditional, being deeply embedded in the history of aristocratic chivalry and the monarchy—making it the heart of Napoleon’s politics of fusion. Going beyond Napoleon, Morrissey considers how figures of French romanticism such as Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Hugo constantly reevaluated this legacy of glory and its consequences for modernity. Available for the first time in English, The Economy of Glory is a sophisticated and beautifully written addition to French history.
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cover of The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy

The Egyptian Renaissance

The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy

Brian Curran

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Fascination with ancient Egypt is a recurring theme in Western culture, and here Brian Curran uncovers its deep roots in the Italian Renaissance, which embraced not only classical art and literature but also a variety of other cultures that modern readers don’t tend to associate with early modern Italy. Patrons, artists, and spectators of the period were particularly drawn, Curran shows, to Egyptian antiquity and its artifacts, many of which found their way to Italy in Roman times and exerted an influence every bit as powerful as that of their more familiar Greek and Roman counterparts.

Curran vividly recreates this first wave of European Egyptomania with insightful interpretations of the period’s artistic and literary works. In doing so, he paints a colorful picture of a time in which early moderns made the first efforts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, and popes and princes erected pyramids and other Egyptianate marvels to commemorate their own authority. Demonstrating that the emergence of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of historical knowledge was one of Renaissance humanism’s great accomplishments, Curran’s peerless study will be required reading for Renaissance scholars and anyone interested in the treasures and legacy of ancient Egypt.

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cover of The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance

The Elsewhere

On Belonging at a Near Distance

Adam Zachary Newton

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

"The Elsewhere." Or, midbar-biblical Hebrew for both "wilderness" and "speech." A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of "place, flight, border, and beyond." The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts-cunningly paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways-narrate the paradox of the "near distance."
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cover of The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture

Richard Neer

University of Chicago Press, 2010


In this wide-ranging study, Richard Neer offers a new way to understand the epoch-making sculpture of classical Greece. Working at the intersection of art history, archaeology, literature, and aesthetics, he reveals a people fascinated with the power of sculpture to provoke wonder in beholders.  Wonder, not accuracy, realism, naturalism or truth, was the supreme objective of Greek sculptors. Neer traces this way of thinking about art from the poems of Homer to the philosophy of Plato. Then, through meticulous accounts of major sculpture from around the Greek world, he shows how the demand for wonder-inducing statues gave rise to some of the greatest masterpieces of Greek art. Rewriting the history of Greek sculpture in Greek terms and restoring wonder to a sometimes dusty subject, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the art of sculpture or the history of the ancient world.
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cover of The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels

The Empire Inside

Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels

Suzanne Daly

University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The Empire Inside is unique in its tight focus on the objects from one geographical location, and their deployment in one genre of fiction. This combination results in a powerful study with a wealth of fine formal analyses of literary texts and a similar trove of marvelous historical data."
---Elaine Freedgood, New York University

"In The Empire Inside, Suzanne Daly does a wonderful job integrating an array of primary materials, especially novels and journal essays, to show the extent to which these ‘foreign’ colonial products of India represented absolutely central aspects of domestic life, at once part of the unremarkable everyday experience of Victorians and rich with meanings."
---Timothy Carens, College of Charleston

By the early nineteenth century, imperial commodities had become commonplace in middle-class English homes. Such Indian goods as tea, textiles, and gemstones led double lives, functioning at once as exotic foreign artifacts and as markers of proper Englishness. The Empire Inside: Indian Commodities in Victorian Domestic Novels reveals how Indian imports encapsulated new ideas about both the home and the world in Victorian literature and culture. In novels by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope, the regularity with which Indian commodities appear bespeaks their burgeoning importance both ideologically and commercially. Such domestic details as the drinking of tea and the giving of shawls as gifts point us toward suppressed connections between the feminized realm of private life and the militarized realm of foreign commerce.

Tracing the history of Indian imports yields a record of the struggles for territory and political power that marked the coming-into-being of British India; reading the novels of the period for the ways in which they infuse meaning into these imports demonstrates how imperialism was written into the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century England. Situated at the intersection of Victorian studies, material cultural studies, gender studies, and British Empire studies, The Empire Inside is written for academics, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in all of these fields.

Suzanne Daly is Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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cover of The Enduring Work of Biography: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791–2020

The Enduring Work of Biography

James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791–2020

Greg Clingham

University of Delaware Press, 2026

The Enduring Work of Biography seeks to revitalize appreciation of Boswell’s great biography for a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers. Engaging accessibly and informatively with biographical, historical, critical, and textual matters and drawing on the Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell, Enduring Work discusses Boswell’s collaboration with others (both alive and dead) in researching, writing, revising, proofing, publishing, and promoting his biography of Johnson. Central to Boswell’s concept of life writing is memory, and Enduring Work highlights both its dynamic and collaborative force in the Life of Johnson. This collection is book-ended by an introduction that considers the critical reception of the Life of Johnson and an epilogue that suggests its continuing critical insight and relevance. A closing chapter and two appendixes survey the history of the Life of Johnson as a best-selling book for over two centuries, an extraordinary collaboration between readers and publishers and between Boswell and Johnson themselves that is still evolving. 

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cover of The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso

The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic

Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso

Andrea Moudarres

University of Delaware Press, 2019

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante’s Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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cover of The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815

The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815

Robert D. Mayo

Northwestern University Press, 1962

The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815, explores the popularity of magazines in the nineteenth century and the ways that much of the published fiction of the time appeared serially in these publications. Robert D. Mayo's groundbreaking study remains important to scholars of the nineteenth century as one of the first books to examine in a systematic manner the impact of magazines on reading and the dissemination of fiction in nineteenth-century England.
 
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cover of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism

The English Virtuoso

Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism

Craig Ashley Hanson

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Contrary to twentieth-century criticism that cast them as misguided dabblers, English virtuosi in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were erudite individuals with solid grounding in the classics, deep appreciation for the arts, and sincere curiosity about the natural world. Reestablishing their broad historical significance, The English Virtuoso situates this polymathic group at the rich intersection of the period’s art, medicine, and antiquarianism.
            At the heart of this profoundly interdisciplinary study lies the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which from its founding in 1660 served as the major professional organization for London’s leading physicians, many of them prominent virtuosi. Craig Ashley Hanson reveals that a vital art audience emerged from the Royal Society—whose members assembled many of the period’s most important nonaristocratic collections—a century before most accounts date the establishment of an institutional base for the arts in England. Unearthing the fascinating stories of an impressive cast of characters, Hanson establishes a new foundation for understanding both the relationship between British art and science and the artistic accomplishments of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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cover of The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America

The Enlightenment and the Book

Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America

Richard B. Sher

University of Chicago Press, 2007

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. 

In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. 

The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

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cover of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton

The Environmental Unconscious

Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton

Steven Swarbrick

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Bringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis

 

Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.

Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.

As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.

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cover of The Epic Catalogue: List Form and Reception from Beowulf to Paradise Lost

The Epic Catalogue

List Form and Reception from Beowulf to Paradise Lost

Eva von Contzen

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

In The Epic Catalogue, Eva von Contzen offers the first sustained study of the catalogue as form in epic poetry, tracing its functions and meanings across medieval and early modern literature. Ever since the Catalogue of Ships in Homer’s Iliad, catalogues have stood at the heart of epic poetry, yet their status is paradoxical: canonical and indispensable for the genre of epic, but also resistant to narrative flow and therefore both a challenge and a nuisance to audiences. Moving from biblical epic and Milton’s Paradise Lost to Beowulf and early English poetry, von Contzen presents four case studies that examine the catalogue’s role in shaping poetic authority, readerly engagement, and the reception of classical models. Von Contzen’s literary-historical approach bridges classical and vernacular traditions from early English to early modern poetry and sharpens our view of both continuities and ruptures in the epic tradition, challenging conventional narratives of classical reception. Bringing together formalist and cognitive literary methodologies, she argues that catalogues are not inert enumerations but dynamic cognitive forms that invite audiences to think differently about order, memory, and the status of epic itself.
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cover of The Essential Poems

The Essential Poems

Micheal O'Siadhail

Northwestern University Press, 2026

The essential selected works of Ireland’s leading poet, Micheal O’Siadhail

With an illustrious literary career that has spanned over fifty years, renowned poet Micheal O’Siadhail has cemented his place on the international stage. From his debut collection, The Leap Year (1978), to his latest collection, Desire (2023), O’Siadhail captures evolving struggles with love, faith, and humanity. Here, spanning the entirety of his outstanding career, is the essence of his masterful body of work.

The Essential Poems voyages through traditional and innovative poetic forms, investigating love and passion, joy and loss, world-shaping events and personal experiences. O’Siadhail sounds the depths of meaning and evokes wonder, surprise, anguish, and delight. A lyrical meditation on the relationships between humanity and nature, despair and faith, and the richness of courage in the acts of healing completes what proves to be this unforgettable and necessary collection of the inimitable Irish poet.

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cover of The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych: Ecstasies and Elegies

The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych

Ecstasies and Elegies

Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-1937)

Bucknell University Press, 2024

Lemko-Ukrainian poet Bohdan Ihor Antonych (1909-37) is not as well-known as Slavic modernist poets Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Milosz, or their Western European counterparts Eliot, Rilke, and Lorca, but he unquestionably should be. Sometimes compared to Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas, Antonych, who described himself as “an ecstatic pagan, a poet of the high of spring,” created during his brief lifetime powerful and innovative poetry with astonishing metaphorical constructions. Born in the Lemko region of Poland, Antonych adopted Ukrainian as his literary language when he moved to Lviv, and virtually transformed the Ukrainian poetic landscape. This essential collection introduces Antonych’s work to new audiences, and includes a biographical sketch by the translator and a comprehensive introduction by Lidia Stefanowska, one of the world’s leading experts on this remarkable poet.
 
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cover of The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain

The Ethics of Autobiography

Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain

Angel G. Loureiro

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000

In this new book, Angel Loureiro proposes an ethics of autobiography that will change the way the genre is perceived. Previous studies of autobiography have focused primarily on the strategies of self-knowledge or self-creation displayed in writing about self. This emphasis on cognition leaves many unanswered questions, Loureiro asserts, because a fundamental dimension of the genre, what he calls the ethics of autobiography, has escaped critical attention up to now.

To address this oversight, Loureiro draws from his own experiences as well as from a wide range of previous theoretical works on autobiography, especially from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, who believed that the self does not begin as a self-positing consciousness but as a response to an address from the other. On this basis, Loureiro then brilliantly traces the complex interplays between the political, discursive, rhetorical, and ethical dimensions of autobiography.

After laying out these theoretical foundations, Loureiro puts them to work in analyzing four of the most fascinating autobiographies written by Spanish exiles: The Life of Joseph Blanco White, who lived from 1775 to 1841, Memoria de la Melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon (1904-1988), Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa by Juan Goytisolo (born 1931), and Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (born 1923). The lives of these authors, all of whom were exiled for political reasons, were disrupted by some of the most crucial events in Spain's tortuous road to modernity and democracy.

The book closes with a discussion of why there have been so few critical examinations of autobiographies written in modern Spain. Loureiro proposes that, even in today's Spain, stifling social and political forces smother ethical responsibility, which is an essential ingredient in creating autobiographies that dare to be more than a humdrum inventory of personal recollections. Only in exile have Spanish authors seemed able to find the conditions to write their lives in a truly responsible manner. This answer to a call that grounds the subject in an other is ultimately the only form of truth available in autobiography.

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cover of The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies

The Ethics of Persuasion

Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies

Brooke Rollins

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida’s Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins argues that some of the most forceful and utilitarian examples of persuasion involve significant ethical dimensions. Using the work of Jacques Derrida, she draws this ethical imperative out from a series of canonical rhetorical texts that have traditionally been understood as insistent or even guileful instances of persuasion. Her reconsideration of highly determined pieces by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato encourages readers to inherit the rhetorical tradition differently, and it pinpoints the important rhetorical dimensions of Derrida’s own work.

Drawing on Derrida’s (non)definition of ethics and his pointed accounts of performativity, Rollins argues that this vital ethical component of many ancient theories, practices, and pedagogies of persuasion has been undertheorized for more than two millennia. Through deconstructive readings of some of these texts, she shows us that we are not simply sovereign beings who both wield and guard against linguistic techniques of rule. Our persuasive endeavors, rather, are made possible by an ethics—an always prior encounter with otherness that interrupts self-presence.
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cover of The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

The Ethics of Witnessing

The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945

Rachel Feldhay Brenner

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies

The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

 
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cover of The Ethos of Drama: Rhetorical Theory and Dramatic Worth

The Ethos of Drama

Rhetorical Theory and Dramatic Worth

Robert L. King

Catholic University of America Press, 2010

For the first time in the history of drama criticism this book uses traditional rhetorical theory to evaluate moral values in plays from Shakespeare's time to the present
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cover of The European Union and the Rise of Regionalist Parties

The European Union and the Rise of Regionalist Parties

Seth K. Jolly

University of Michigan Press, 2015

Rather than weakening the forces of nationalism among member states, the expanding power of the European Union actually fosters conditions favorable to regionalist movements within traditional nation-states. Using a cross-national, quantitative study of the advent of regionalist political parties and their success in national parliamentary elections since the 1960s, along with a detailed case study of the fortunes of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, Seth K. Jolly demonstrates that supranational integration and subnational fragmentation are not merely coincidental but related in a theoretical and predictable way.

At the core of his argument, Jolly posits the Viability Theory: the theory that the EU makes smaller states more viable and more politically attractive by diminishing the relative economic and political advantages of larger-sized states. European integration allows regionalist groups to make credible claims that they do not need the state to survive because their regions are part of the EU, which provides access to markets, financial institutions, foreign policy, and other benefits. Ultimately, Jolly emphasizes, scholars and policy-makers must recognize that the benefits of European integration come with the challenge of increased regionalist mobilization that has the potential to reshape the national boundaries of Europe.

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cover of The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes

The Experimental Group

Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes

Matthew Jesse Jackson

University of Chicago Press, 2010

A compelling study of unofficial postwar Soviet art, The Experimental Group takes as its point of departure a subject of strange fascination: the life and work of renowned professional illustrator and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov.

Kabakov’s art—iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts—delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and their work produced a critical and controversial chapter in the as yet unwritten history of global contemporary art.

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cover of The Faithful Virgins

The Faithful Virgins

E. Polwhele

Iter Press, 2023

The first-ever print edition of a play by one of the first women playwrights in England.

E. Polwhele (c. 1651-c. 1691) was one of the first women to write for the stage in Restoration London. This book presents the first printed edition of Polwhele’s first play, The Faithful Virgins, which until now has existed only in an unsigned manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. A tragicomedy apparently performed in London by the Duke's Company ca. 1669–1671, The Faithful Virgins is altogether different in tone from Polwhele's later, better-known prose comedy, The Frolicks; or, The Lawyer Cheated (1671). The introduction to this modern-spelling edition of The Faithful Virgins discusses the play in terms of radical changes in English stage practices following the restoration of the monarchy after England’s civil war and situates Polwhele’s play within the social and political life of seventeenth-century London.
 
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cover of The Fake Husband, A Comedy

The Fake Husband, A Comedy

Flaminio Scala

Iter Press, 2020

Scala’s The Fake Husband offers readers and performers an accessible English script which captures the comic brilliance of the commedia dell’arte. Expanded from an earlier scenario, Il marito (The Husband), the play presents characters originally created by members of the Gelosi troupe, in particular the stars Isabella Andreini and Sylvia Roncagli. Scala’s ability to capture the individual artistry of these women makes this script especially exciting and shows his appreciation of the towering contribution made by the female performers who joined the troupes in the 1560s. Also included is a comprehensive study of Scala’s place in the theatrical world and beyond.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe - The Toronto Series, volume 75
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cover of The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 2

The Family Idiot

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 2

Jean-Paul Sartre

University of Chicago Press, 1987

Seen by many as the culmination of Sartre's thought and project, and viewed by Sartre himself as an attempt to answer the question, "What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?" this monumental work continues to perplex its fascinated critics and admirers, who have argued about its precise nature. However, as reviews of the first volume in this translation agreed, whatever The Family Idiot may be called—"a dialectic" (Fredric Jameson, New York Times Book Review); "biography, philosophy, or politics? Surely . . . all of these together" (Renee Winegarten, Commentary); "a new form of fiction?" (Victor Brombert, Times Literary Supplement); or simply, "mad, of course" (Julian Barnes, London Review of Books)—its prominent place in intellectual history is indisputable.

Volume 2, consisting of the first book of part 2 of the original French work, takes the reader through Flaubert's adolescence well into his evolution as an artist. Sartre's approach to his complex subject, whether jaunty or ponderous, psychoanalytical or political, is captured in all of its rich variety of Carol Cosman's translation.
[more]
cover of The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 3

The Family Idiot

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 3

Jean-Paul Sartre

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Seen by many as the culmination of Sartre's thought and project, and viewed by Sartre himself as an attempt to answer the question, "What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?" this monumental work continues to perplex its fascinated critics and admirers, who have argued about its precise nature. However, as reviews of the first volume in this translation agreed, whatever The Family Idiot may be called—"a dialectic" (Fredric Jameson, New York Times Book Review); "biography, philosophy, or politics? Surely . . . all of these together" (Renee Winegarten, Commentary); "a new form of fiction?" (Victor Brombert, Times Literary Supplement); or simply, "mad, of course" (Julian Barnes, London Review of Books)—its prominent place in intellectual history is indisputable.

Volume 3 consists of "School Years" and "Preneurosis," which are the second and third books of part 2 of the original French work. In vivid detail, Sartre renders Flaubert's secondary-school experiences and relationships: his part in a student rebellion against the faculty, his teenage infatuation with Romantic literature, his friendships and rivalries with his classmates, and the ironies inherent in the schoolboys' bourgeois existence. Sartre then discusses Flaubert's years at law school, where he studied at his father's insistence. This volume also contains Sartre's most sustained analysis of Madame Bovary. Sartre's approach to his complex subject, whether jaunty or judicious, psychoanalytical or political, is captured in all of its rich variety in Carol Cosman's translation.
[more]
cover of The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 4

The Family Idiot

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 4

Jean-Paul Sartre

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Seen by many as the culmination of Sartre's thought and project, and viewed by Sartre himself as an attempt to answer the question, "What, at this point in time, can we know about a man?" this monumental work continues to perplex its fascinated critics and admirers, who have argued about its precise nature. However, as reviews of the first volume in this translation agreed, whatever The Family Idiot may be called—"a dialectic" (Fredric Jameson, New York Times Book Review); "biography, philosophy, or politics? Surely . . . all of these together" (Renee Winegarten, Commentary); "a new form of fiction?" (Victor Brombert, Times Literary Supplement); or simply, "mad, of course" (Julian Barnes, London Review of Books)—its prominent place in intellectual history is indisputable.

Volume 4 consists of part three, books one and two, of the original French work. This volume, the fourth in a projected five-volume English-language edition, includes Sartre's discussion of the onset of Flaubert's illness, or neurosis, in 1844, and a significant reading of his L'Education sentimentale.

Sartre's approach to his complex subject, whether jaunty or judicious, psychoanalytic or political, is captured in all of its rich variety in Carol Cosman's translation.
[more]
cover of The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 5

The Family Idiot

Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 5

Jean-Paul Sartre

University of Chicago Press, 1993

With this volume, the University of Chicago Press completes its translation of a work that is indispensable not only to serious readers of Flaubert but to anyone interested in the last major contribution by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers.

That Sartre's study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, is a towering achievement in intellectual history has never been disputed. Yet critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel or biography or "criticism-fiction" which is the summation of Sartre's philosophical, social, and literary thought. In the preface, Sartre writes: "The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method. The subject: what, at this point in time, can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case."

Sartre discusses Flaubert's personal development, his relationship to his family, his decision to become a writer, and the psychosomatic crisis or "conversion" from his father's domination to the freedom of his art. Sartre blends psychoanalysis with a sociological study of the ideology of the period, the crisis in literature, and Flaubert's influence on the future of literature.

While Sartre never wrote the final volume he envisioned for this vast project, the existing volumes constitute in themselves a unified work—one that John Sturrock, writing in the Observer, called "a shatteringly fertile, digressive and ruthless interpretation of these few cardinal years in Flaubert's life."

"A virtuoso perfomance. . . . For all that this book does to make one reconsider his life, The Family Idiot is less a case study of Flaubert than it is a final installment of Sartre's mythology. . . . The translator, Carol Cosman, has acquitted herself brilliantly."—Frederick Brown, New York Review of Books

"A splendid translation by Carol Cosman. . . . Sartre called The Family Idiot a 'true novel,' and it does tell a story and eventually reach a shattering climax. The work can be described most simply as a dialectic, which shifts between two seemingly alternative interpretations of Flaubert's destiny: a psychoanalytic one, centered on his family and on his childhood, and a Marxist one, whose guiding themes are the status of the artist in Flaubert's period and the historical and ideological contradictions faced by his social class, the bourgeoisie."—Fredric Jameson, New York Times Book Review

Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and The Freud Scenario, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press.




[more]
cover of The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, An Abridged Edition

The Family Idiot

Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, An Abridged Edition

Jean-Paul Sartre

University of Chicago Press, 2023

An approachable abridgment of Sartre’s important analysis of Flaubert.
 
From 1981 to 1994, the University of Chicago Press published a five-volume translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, a sprawling masterwork by one of the greatest intellects of the twentieth century. This new volume delivers a compact abridgment of the original by renowned Sartre scholar, Joseph Catalano.
 
Sartre claimed that his existential approach to psychoanalysis required a new Freud, and in his study of Gustave Flaubert, Sartre becomes that Freud. The work summarizes Sartre’s overarching aim to reveal that human life is a meaningful adventure of freedom. In discussing Flaubert’s work, particularly his classic novel Madame Bovary, Sartre unleashes a fierce critique of modernity as nihilistic and demeaning of human dignity.
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cover of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: The Stoke Newington Edition

The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Stoke Newington Edition

Maximillian E. Novak

Bucknell University Press, 2022

Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was almost always published together with The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Only after 1950 was the first volume printed alone—a shorter work for some classes. But in addition to fulfilling the promise of the first volume, The Farther Adventures is an exciting adventure novel by itself. Crusoe returns to his island to learn about his colony, and then travels to Madagascar, India, and China before returning to England after some exciting encounters. Complete with an introduction, line notes, and full bibliographical notes, this is an edition like no other.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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cover of The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory

The Fate of the Self

German Writers and French Theory

Stanley Corngold

Duke University Press, 1994

Much recent critical theory has dismissed or failed to take seriously the question of the self. French theorists—such as Derrida, Barthes, Benveniste, Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss—have in various ways proclaimed the death of the subject, often turning to German intellectual tradition to authorize their views. Stanley Corngold’s heralded book, The Fate of the Self, published for the first time in paperback with a spirited new preface, appears at a time when the relationship between the self and literature is a matter of renewed concern. Originally published in 1986 (Columbia University Press), the book examines the poetic self of German intellectual tradition in light of recent French and American critical theory. Focusing on seven major German writers—Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger—Corngold shows that their work does not support the desire to discredit the self as an origin of meaning and value but reconstructs the allegedly fragmented poetic self through effects of position and style. Offering new and subtle models of selfhood, The Fate of the Self is a source of rich insight into the work of these authors, refracted through poststructuralist critical perspectives.
[more]
cover of The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet

The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet

Sandra Pierson Prior

Michigan State University Press, 1996

This book differs from most previous studies of the Pearl poet by treating all of his works as a whole. Prior’s purpose is to identify the underlying poetics of this major body of English poetry. Drawing on both the visual imagery of medieval art (the study includes 18 full-page illustrations) and the verbal imagery of the Bible and other literary sources, Prior shows how the poet’s "fayre formez" are the result of a coherent and self-conscious view of the artist’s craft.

[more]
cover of The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction

The Feeling of Letting Die

Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction

Jennifer MacLure

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism’s death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows.

Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism’s death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat.

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cover of The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature

The Feeling of Reading

Affective Experience and Victorian Literature

Edited by Rachel Ablow

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"A terrifically engaging collection of essays, which exemplifies the very best recent work in the history of reading and affect. The distinguished contributors explore ‘the feeling of reading' throughout Victorian literature, showing how a broad range of works---novels, lyrics, critical essays---not only represent but also analyze and evoke the surprisingly varied experience of immersing oneself in a book. It's rare to encounter a collection of such consistently high quality: the feeling of reading it is one of rich and manifold pleasure."
---James Eli Adams, Columbia University

"This gathering of state-of-the-art work generates a convincing and compelling vision of the emerging state of the field."
---Daniel Hack, University of Michigan

The Feeling of Reading is the first collection to address how we think of reading today through a focus on Victorian reading practices and the individual experience of reading in the nineteenth century. It brings together essays from some of the most established writers in the field with contributions from younger scholars to provide new ways of thinking about this definitive moment. The collection moves from the general to the particular: from excavations of the material and intellectual conditions of Victorian reading to the consequences of such excavations in readings of individual texts. All of the contributors engage the crucial critical question of the shaping of readerly feeling. In addition, they address a set of interlocking issues central to understanding Victorian reading: Kate Flint explores the material and social settings of reading; Nicholas Dames and Leah Price consider the concrete realities of books and periodicals; and the consequences of the mass circulation of texts are explored by Flint, John Plotz, and Rachel Ablow. The temporality of consumption appears in the contribution of Dames as well as those of Catherine Robson and Herbert F. Tucker, who also address the implications of meter; and Ablow, Plotz, Stephen Arata, and Garrett Stewart investigate the notion of identification.

Rachel Ablow is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Cover design and art by Julian Montague

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cover of The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos: Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution

The Fevered Novel from Balzac to Bernanos

Frenetic Catholicism in Crisis, Delirium and Revolution

Francesco Manzini

University of London Press, 2010

This book examines a corpus of frenetic novels – by Balzac, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Zola, Huysmans, Bloy and Bernanos – that foreground the motif of fever within a recurring masterplot: a pious young woman, just discovering her sexuality, finds herself torn between two father-figures, a doctor (typically a blood relative, often the biological father) and a priest (the spiritual father). She contracts a disease of uncertain origin, made manifest by a series of fevers that require interpretation in the light of contemporary religious, medical and literary discourses. Manzini traces the motifs of fever and frenzy back to Rousseau, the Gothic novel and Frenetic Romanticism, as well as forward to their recuperation within Surrealism, in order to produce an original history of Frenetic Catholicism in the age of realism.
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cover of The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s

The Fin-de-Siècle Poem

English Literary Culture and the 1890s

Joseph Bristow

Ohio University Press, 2005

Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief. The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W. B. Yeats, who dominated the literary scene of the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson. The Fin-de-Siècle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how women poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.
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cover of The Flowers of Tarbes: or, Terror in Literature

The Flowers of Tarbes

or, Terror in Literature

Jean Paulhan

University of Illinois Press, 2005

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cover of The Forces of Form in German Modernism

The Forces of Form in German Modernism

Malika Maskarinec

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The Forces of Form in German Modernism charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. 

Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Döblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness.

The Forces of Form in German Modernism makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.
 
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cover of The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France

The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France

Julia V. Douthwaite

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite explores how the works within this enormous corpus announced the new shapes of literature to come and reveals that vestiges of these stories can be found in novels by the likes of Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and L. Frank Baum.
 
Deploying political history, archival research, and textual analysis with eye-opening results, Douthwaite focuses on five major events between 1789 and 1794—first in newspapers, then in fiction—and shows how the symbolic stories generated by Louis XVI, Robespierre, the market women who stormed Versailles, and others were transformed into new tales with ongoing appeal. She uncovers a 1790 story of an automaton-builder named Frankénsteïn, links Baum to the suffrage campaign going back to 1789, and discovers a royalist anthem’s power to undo Balzac’s Père Goriot. Bringing to light the missing links between the ancien régime and modernity, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France is an ambitious account of a remarkable politico-literary moment and its aftermath.
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cover of The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

The French Atlantic Triangle

Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade

Christopher L. Miller

Duke University Press, 2008

The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.

[more]
cover of The French Joyce

The French Joyce

Geert Lernout

University of Michigan Press, 1992

The French Joyce is the first book to trace the French critical reception of James Joyce’s work. Serious French interest in the lrish writer coincided with the rise of poststructuralism, and Geert Lernout pays particular attention to Joycean criticism by Lacan, Derrida, and Cixous, who have provided the basis for psychoanalytical, philosophical, and feminist readings. The author provides a provocative critique of poststructuralist readings as well as a lucid historical review of the French intellectual climate from the sixties to the present.
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cover of The French Writers' War, 1940-1953

The French Writers' War, 1940-1953

Gisèle Sapiro

Duke University Press, 2014

The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.
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cover of The Fulfillment of the Scriptures: Abraham, Moses, and Piers

The Fulfillment of the Scriptures

Abraham, Moses, and Piers

Ruth W. Ames

Northwestern University Press, 1970

Ruth M. Ames’s The Fulfillment of Scriptures approaches Langland’s key medieval text, Piers Plowman, using critical literary methods developed in interdisciplinary programs that explore the intersections of religion and literature. Ames draws on the history of the development of Christian doctrine as she explores the ways that the allegory of Piers parallels the story of Jesus in Christian doctrine. Ames’s work offers a significantly new critical reading of Piers Plowman, influencing interpretations of medieval literature.
[more]
cover of The Future of Germanistik in the USA: Changing Our Prospects

The Future of Germanistik in the USA

Changing Our Prospects

John A. McCarthy

Vanderbilt University Press, 1996

[more]
cover of The Gallant Spaniard

The Gallant Spaniard

Miguel de Cervantes; Translated by Philip Krummrich

Vanderbilt University Press, 2023

There are surprising omissions in the translated body of Spanish Golden Age literature, including in the corpus of Miguel de Cervantes. We have many highly competent translations of Don Quixote, but until now not a single English version of his play The Gallant Spaniard. Although Cervantes’s dramatic works have always attracted less attention than his narrative fiction, there has been significant critical interest in this play in recent years, due in no small part to its unique portrayal of Christian-Muslim relations. Critics have argued persuasively about the value of The Gallant Spaniard in the service of a more general understanding of Cervantes in his last years, specifically in regard to his views on this cultural divide.

This edition, translated by Philip Krummrich, consists of a critical introduction and a full verse translation of the play with notes.
[more]
cover of The Garden Party: Poems

The Garden Party

Poems

Megan J. Arlett

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A stroll through deceptively tranquil spaces and the restlessness of social convention

Depicting the uneasy performance of class and femininity in the stilted, suffocating spaces of a social life suffused with English propriety, Megan J. Arlett’s The Garden Party is a poetic meditation on desire and agency. From the imagined space of the titular garden party to the interior of an art gallery, from the rolling hills of Sussex to Trinidad under British colonial rule, Arlett paints the conventions of polite society as both strange and arbitrary, allowing the restlessness of the poems’ speakers to rise to the surface. Through free verse, received forms, and ekphrasis, these poems stage a conversation with other artists, eras, and art media, moving through natural and constructed locations that are sometimes historical and often imagined. This collection considers what it means to love a place despite its histories and flaws and offers ways of navigating this tension through art. The Garden Party is a striking yet quiet rebellion against order and expectation.

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