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Utopia, Limited: Romanticism And Adjustment
by Anahid NersessianWhat is utopia if not a perfect impossible world? Anahid Nersessian reveals the basic misunderstanding of that ideal. Applying the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet, she enlists the Romantics to redefine utopia as an investment in limitation—not a perfect world but one where we get less than we hoped but more than we had.
Touché: The Duel In Literature
by John LeighMany of the West’s best writers fought in duels or wrote about them, seduced by glamour or risk or recklessness. A gift as a plot device, the duel also offered a way to discover how we face fears of humiliation, pain, and death. John Leigh’s literary history of the duel illuminates these and other tensions attending the birth of the modern world.
Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene
by Hamid DabashiFrom antiquity to the Enlightenment, Persian culture has been integral to European history. Interest in all things Persian shaped not just Western views but the self-image of Iranians to the present day. Hamid Dabashi maps the changing geography of these connections, showing that traffic in ideas about Persia did not travel on a one-way street.
The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
by Nikki SkillmanScience has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work
by Eleanor CookCritics and biographers praise Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry but have little to say about how it does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Eleanor Cook examines in detail Bishop’s diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. Writers, readers, and teachers will all benefit.
Baghdad: The City In Verse
by Reuven SnirBaghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day.
Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
by Gillian WhiteGillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.
Lyric Shame: The "Lyric" Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
by Gillian WhiteGillian White argues that the poetry wars among critics and practitioners are shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. “Lyric” is less a specific genre than a way to project subjectivity onto poems—an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere.
The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems And How To Read Them
by Stephen BurtThe variety of contemporary American poetry leaves many readers overwhelmed. The critic, scholar, and poet Stephen Burt sets out to help. Beginning in the early 1980s, where critical consensus ends, he presents 60 poems, each with an original essay explaining how the poem works, why it matters, and how it speaks to other parts of art and culture.
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy And Failure Across The Pacific
by Hua HsuWho gets to speak for China? During the interwar years, when American condescension toward China yielded to fascination with all things Chinese, a circle of writers sparked an unprecedented conversation over U.S.-Chinese relations. Hua Hsu tells how they became ensnared in bitter rivalries over who could claim the title of leading China expert.
To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Tommie ShelbyMartin Luther King, Jr., may be America’s most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. On the fiftieth anniversary of King’s assassination, the man and his activism are as close to public consciousness as ever. But despite his stature, the significance of King’s writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry write that the marginalization of King’s ideas reflects a romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative—an effort not at radical reform but at “living up to” enduring ideals laid down by the nation’s founders. On this view, King marshaled lofty rhetoric to help redeem the ideas of universal (white) heroes, but produced little original thought. This failure to engage deeply and honestly with King’s writings allows him to be conscripted into political projects he would not endorse, including the pernicious form of “color blindness” that insists, amid glaring race-based injustice, that racism has been overcome. Cornel West, Danielle Allen, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and other authors join Shelby and Terry in careful, critical engagement with King’s understudied writings on labor and welfare rights, voting rights, racism, civil disobedience, nonviolence, economic inequality, poverty, love, just-war theory, virtue ethics, political theology, imperialism, nationalism, reparations, and social justice. In King’s exciting and learned work, the authors find an array of compelling challenges to some of the most pressing political dilemmas of our present, and rethink the legacy of this towering figure.
One-Way Street: And Other Writings (Penguin Modern Classics Series #966)
by Walter BenjaminPresented in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture, composed of 60 short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces.
Stranger Magic: Charmed States And The Arabian Nights
by Marina WarnerOur foremost theorist of myth, fairytale, and folktale explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the profound impact of the Arabian Nights on the West, the progressive exoticization of magic, and the growing acceptance of myth and magic in contemporary experience.
The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde Nicholas FrankelOver 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores material, including instances of graphic homosexual content, removed by the novel’s first editor, who feared it would be “offensive” to Victorians.
The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel
by Jerome McGannJerome McGann takes his readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe’s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics. In a bold reassessment, McGann argues that Poe belongs alongside Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.
Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form
by Hillary L. ChuteIn hard-hitting accounts of Auschwitz, Bosnia, Palestine, and Hiroshima’s Ground Zero, comics have shown a stunning capacity to bear witness to trauma. Hillary Chute explores the ways graphic narratives by diverse artists, including Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, and Joe Sacco, document the disasters of war.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work
by Eleanor CookCritics and biographers praise Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry but have little to say about how it does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Eleanor Cook examines in detail Bishop’s diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. Writers, readers, and teachers will all benefit.
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.
Seven Modes of Uncertainty
by C. Namwali SerpellLiterature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience.
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From The Sublime And Beautiful To American Independence
by David BromwichThis biography of statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), covering three decades, is the first to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. David Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.
Theory of the Lyric
by Jonathan CullerWhat sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (The\charles Eliot Norton Lectures #45)
by Umberto EcoIn this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.
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.
Read Write Inc. Comprehension: Module 1 Chicken-Licken (PDF)
by Gill MuntonRead Write Inc. Comprehension is a series of 14 weekly Modules each containing a fiction or non-fiction text and a range of comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and writing activities. The programme has been developed to increase children’s reading fluency, their comprehension of and response to fiction and non-fiction texts, and to improve children’s writing by developing their vocabulary, grammar and spelling knowledge. Detailed lesson plans for these Modules are provided in the Read Write Inc. Comprehension Handbook.
Read Write Inc. Comprehension: Module 2 Anansi and the Four Bananas (PDF)
by Gill MuntonRead Write Inc. Comprehension is a series of 14 weekly Modules each containing a fiction or non-fiction text and a range of comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, spelling and writing activities. The programme has been developed to increase children’s reading fluency, their comprehension of and response to fiction and non-fiction texts, and to improve children’s writing by developing their vocabulary, grammar and spelling knowledge. Detailed lesson plans for these Modules are provided in the Read Write Inc. Comprehension Handbook.