Results by title

In this highly individual study, Avrom Fleishman explores a wide range of literary references to human culture—the culture of ideas, facts, and images. Each critical essay in Fiction and the Ways of Knowing takes up for sustained analysis a major British novel of the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The novels are analyzed in the light of social, historical, philosophical, and other perspectives that can be grouped under the human sciences.

The diversity of critical contexts in these thirteen essays is organized by Avrom Fleishman's governing belief in the interrelations of literature and other ways of interpreting the world. The underlying assumptions of this approach—as explained in his introductory essay—are that fiction is capable of encompassing even the most recondite facts and recalcitrant ideas; that fiction, though never a mirror of reality, is linked to realities and takes part in the real; and that a critical reading may be informed by scientific knowledge without reducing the literary work to a schematic formula.

Fleishman investigates the matters of fact and belief that make up the designated meanings, the intellectual contexts, and the speculative parallels in three types of novel. Some of the novels discussed make it clear that their authors are informed on matters beyond the nonspecialist's range; these essays help bridge this information gap. Other fictional works are only to be grasped in an awareness of the cultural lore tacitly distributed in their own time; a modern reader must make the effort to fathom their anachronisms. And other novels can be found to open passageways that their authors can only have glimpsed intuitively; these must be pursued with great caution but equal diligence.

The novels discussed include Little Dorrit, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, he Return of the Native, and The Magus. Also examined are Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, Northanger Abbey, To the Lighthouse, Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, and A Passage to India.

The Ways of the Desert, translated from the French, offers an introduction to the North African Arab nomads—their way of life, customs, dress, and religion. The companion to this volume, The Horses of the Sahara, provides a detailed description and history of the great breeds of Arab horses. While part of this book is devoted to descriptions of the various animals that are both hunted and used for hunting, its appeal goes well beyond its attraction for those with a special interest in the lore of desert hunt and chase. General Daumas and his major collaborator-informant, the Emir Abd-el-Kader, together provide sensitive insights into the total culture of the North African desert people of the nineteenth century.

Both spiritual and material aspects of desert life are encompassed in this work, which ranges from translations of Arab poetry to descriptions of the uses of the fat and remains of the ostrich. The patterns of conviction and conduct described form an important part of the rich cultural heritage of the modern Maghreb nations.

The way of life described in this book is often presented from what comes very close to being an inside point of view. Occasionally Daumas feels obliged to disapprove of certain practices or beliefs or to criticize his Arab friends, but in large part his underlying sympathy for the Arab people permits his informants to speak clearly through his pen.

General Melchior Joseph Eugene Daumas took part in the conquest of Algeria by France and, for his distinguished service, was named Director of the Bureau of Algerian Affairs in the French Ministry of War. During the campaigns and the occupation that followed, he studied and attempted to understand the native peoples with an objectivity and sympathy unusual among the colonialists of the period. He recorded a way of life that has changed much since the nineteenth century, and much of what he recorded has since been lost. His account, as well as being an important source for the historian and ethnographer, provides for the general reader a fascinating record of the vanishing ways of the desert.

Rethinking darkness through the politics and possibilities of vision

Darkness is widely misunderstood, argues Kyle Parry. We take darkness as the enemy of sight, yet we can’t see without it. We call the worst parts of our lives dark, yet we wouldn’t be here without wombs, skulls, oceans, the moon, and other shadowed places. Ways of Seeing After Dark contends that darkness is not absence but presence, shaping how worlds are sensed, inhabited, and understood. Darkness brings peril, but it is also a fundamental, if increasingly threatened, condition of living together on this planet.

Tracing links between John Berger’s influential Ways of Seeing and his more poetic later writings, Parry recasts contemporary conditions defined by light pollution, digital mediation, and racialized regimes of seeing. In dialogue with artists, critics, and astronomers, Ways of Seeing After Dark examines how fear of darkness is built rather than universal and how such training intersects with broader social structures, including racism and capitalism. Showing how “felt darkness displaces physical darkness” and “brighter nights bring darker days,” Parry reveals the dark as a multifaceted phenomenon with political and perceptual significance, calling for new ways of seeing with and through the night.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Winner of FC2’s Catherine Doctorow Prize in Innovative Fiction

Some disappearances are chosen. Others are survived.

The stories in Victoria Lancelotta’s Ways to Disappear excavate the unexamined places between dread and desire, promise and threat, where the body is both prison and salvation. Populated by the grieving and the exultant and those who see no difference between the two, by men and women who are only a little bit broken and boys and girls who can’t wait to be, by souls untethered, rootless, yet bound by blood and flesh, Lancelotta’s characters are driven by the irresistible need to be a bigger part of the worlds they each inhabit, by turns strange and commonplace. In language lush and jagged, never sentimental, these stories scrutinize the exhaustion and enchantment of the everyday: houses seething with resentment and devotion, cars dream-full and hurtling the children in them into a world they think they know but can’t imagine; front porches, back yards, luxury hotels, and truck stops. Lancelotta understands that sometimes people check their wounds not to see if they’ve healed, but to be sure they’re still there.