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Thomas Hardy: Half A Londoner
by Mark FordBecause Thomas Hardy’s poetry and fiction are so closely associated with Wessex, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner, moving between country and capital throughout his life. This self-division, Mark Ford says, can be traced not only in works explicitly set in London but in his most regionally circumscribed novels.
Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture
by Evan KindleyAfter the 1929 crash, Anglo-American poet-critics grappled with the task of legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Evan Kindley shows, created a new form of labor for writers to perform and gave them unprecedented say over the administration of culture, with consequences for poetry’s role in society still felt today.
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters Of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987
by Malcolm CowleyCritic, poet, editor, chronicler of the Lost Generation, elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) was an eloquent witness to American literary and political life. His letters, mostly unpublished, provide a self-portrait of Cowley and his time and make possible a full appreciation of his long, varied career.
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters Of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987
by Malcolm CowleyCritic, poet, editor, chronicler of the Lost Generation, elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) was an eloquent witness to American literary and political life. His letters, mostly unpublished, provide a self-portrait of Cowley and his time and make possible a full appreciation of his long, varied career.
Track Changes: A Literary History Of Word Processing
by Matthew G. KirschenbaumWriting in the digital age has been as messy as the inky rags in Gutenberg’s shop or the molten lead of a Linotype machine. Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the early adopters, and what made others anxious? Was word processing just a better typewriter, or something more?
The Untold Story of the Talking Book
by Matthew RuberyHistories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out is nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Matthew Rubery uncovers this story, from Edison to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry, and breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctive art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.
The First European: A History Of Alexander In The Age Of Empire
by Pierre BriantEnlightenment thinkers, searching for ancient models to understand contemporary affairs, were the first to critically interpret Alexander the Great’s achievements. As Pierre Briant shows, in their minds Alexander was the first European: an empire builder who welcomed trade with the “Orient” and brought Western civilization to its oppressed peoples.
Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literature
by Aamir R. MuftiWorld literature advocates have promised to move humanistic study beyond postcolonial theory and antiquated paradigms of national literary traditions. Aamir Mufti scrutinizes these claims and critiques the continuing dominance of English as both a literary language and the undisputed cultural system of global capitalism.
Flaubert
by Michel WinockMichel Winock situates Flaubert in France’s century of great democratic transition. Wary of the masses, Flaubert rejected universal suffrage, but above all he hated the vulgar, ignorant bourgeoisie, a class that embodied every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation—and a source of literary inspiration.
Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars And The Disorder Of Things
by Anders Engberg-PedersenAnders Engberg-Pedersen shows how the Napoleonic Wars inspired a new discourse on knowledge in the West. Soldiers returning from battle were forced to reconsider what it is possible to know and how decisions are made in a fog of imperfect knowledge. Chance no longer appeared exceptional but normative—a prism for understanding the modern world.
American Niceness: A Cultural History
by Carrie Tirado BramenThe cliché of the Ugly American—loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic—still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a different national archetype—the nice American—which has been central to ideas of American identity since the nineteenth century.
What Was Literary Impressionism?
by Michael Fried“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.
The Lives of Frederick Douglass
by Robert S. LevineFrederick Douglass’s changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in his many conflicting accounts of events during his journey from slavery to freedom. Robert S. Levine creates a fascinating collage of this elusive subject—revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.
Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book In The Age Of Confessions, 1560-1630
by Ian MacleanThis study of the learned book trade of the late Renaissance reveals how many features of today’s publishing world were in place even then. Beginning in Frankfurt, Maclean surveys the authors, publishers, censors, and sellers who operated in this fraught religious atmosphere and overheated market, and ends with the market’s decline in the 1620s.
Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, And Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Brian BoydWhy Lyrics Last turns an evolutionary lens on lyric verse, placing the writing of verse within the human disposition to play with pattern. Boyd takes as an extended example the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There, the Bard avoids all narrative and demonstrates the power that verse can have when liberated of story.
Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
by Martin Hägglund Martin HägglundNovels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat
by Bob WyssThis practical primer explains the primary issues in writing about the environment, identifies who to go to and where to find sources, and offers examples of writing and reporting the beat. Observations and story excerpts from experienced journalists provide real-world context both for those in the U.S. as well as internationally. Practice story assignments, resources, and a glossary of critical terms gives budding journalists all the tools needed to cover the green beat. Updated with detailed coverage of how companies and climate change have evolved over the past decade, this second edition expands upon the digital sphere and the myriad ways that deadline, multimedia and mobile reporting have changed environmental journalism. Including consideration of issues such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the GMO controversy, this new edition provides a fresh take on the green beat with a newly organized table of contents and a guide to freelance and entrepreneurial journalism anywhere in the world. Contents include: • an overview and history of the environment and journalism, spotlighting the most significant issues in the beat; • guidance on understanding environmental and health science, ranging from issues of risk, to scientific research and studies, to interviewing scientists; • insights into government and regulatory communities and environmental advocates on all sides of the political spectrum and internationally; • assistance in accessing public records and conducting digital and computer-assisted reporting; • guidance in writing the story for print, broadcast and internet audiences; • an examination of the future of journalism and news coverage of the environment in the U.S. and throughout the world.
The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics Of Justice From The Revolution To The Civil War
by Caleb SmithCaleb Smith explores the confessions, trial reports, maledictions, and martyr narratives that juxtaposed law and conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion and shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.
Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between The Wars
by David TrotterThe period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they began to fill up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars.
Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals
by Mark EdmundsonAn ARTery Best Book of the Year An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul. “An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.” —Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education “Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.” —Kirkus Reviews
Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance
by Anthony F. D'EliaIn 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, damning a living man to an afterlife of torment. What had Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts, done to merit this fate? Anthony D’Elia shows how the recovery of classical literature and art during the Italian Renaissance led to a revival of paganism.
Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau And Nineteenth-century Science
by Robert M. ThorsonWalden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.
A New Republic of Letters: Memory And Scholarship In The Age Of Digital Reproduction
by Jerome McGannJerome McGann's manifesto argues that the history of texts and how they are preserved and accessed for interpretation are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the digital age. Theory and philosophy no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. But philology--out of fashion for decades--models these concerns with surprising fidelity.
The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry
by Helen VendlerA Times Higher Education Book of the Week One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume. “It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.” —Charles Simic, New York Review of Books “Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.” —Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review “Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.” —John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600-2000 (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures #16)
by George Reid AndrewsTwo-thirds of Africans, both free and enslaved, who came to the Americas from 1500 to 1870 came to Spanish America and Brazil. Yet Afro-Latin Americans have been excluded from narratives of their hemisphere’s history. George Reid Andrews redresses this omission by making visible the lives and labors of black Latin Americans in the New World.