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Faculty :: Faculty Bookshelf
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Alan Ackerman, ed. Modernist theatre emerges as a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments. A critique, even destruction, of certain types of theatre is, this book shows, a productive force within modernism and a force that led to the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama. Theatre is understood by modernists sometimes as a medium, sometimes as a trope or idea that reconfigures the relationships between ‘actors’ and ‘audiences’ while interrogating each and every aspect of theatrical representation from a variety of perspectives, including aesthetic, political, legal, and technical ones. Against Theatre argues that anti-theatricalism emerges in response to specific kinds of theatre and, by extension, that modernist forms of anti-theatricalism, which attack not necessarily theatre itself but the value of theatricality, nevertheless originate in a historically specific experience of theatre. This fascinating collection includes contributions from leading scholars in the English-speaking world and will be a key resource to anyone interested in modern drama, modernist theatre, modernism, and theatre studies. |
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John H. Astington English Court Theatre 1558-1642 Cambridge University Press, 1999, 2006 Several famous playwrights of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, including Shakespeare, wrote for open-air public theatres and also for the private indoor theatres at the palaces at which the court resided. This book is a full account of such court theatre, and examines the theatrical entertainments for Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. By contrast with the now-vanished playhouses of the time, four of the royal chambers used as theatres survive, and the author attempts to draw as full a picture as he can of such places, the physical and aesthetic conditions under which actors worked in them, and the composition and conduct of court audiences. He both confirms the role of royal patronage in the growth of professional theatre, and offers a new definition of the function of theatrical occasions in creating the cultural profile of the English court. The book includes plans and illustrations of the theatres and an appendix which lists all known court performances of plays and masques between 1558 and 1642. |
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Suzanne Conklin Akbari During the later Middle Ages, new optical theories were introduced that located the power of sight not in the seeing subject, but in the passive object of vision. This shift had a powerful impact not only on medieval science but also on theories of knowledge, and this changing relationship of vision and knowledge was a crucial element in late medieval religious devotion. In Seeing Through the Veil, Suzanne Conklin Akbari examines several late medieval allegories in the context of contemporary paradigm shifts in scientific and philosophical theories of vision. After a survey of the genre of allegory and an overview of medieval optical theory, Akbari delves into more detailed studies of several monumental works of literature, including the Roman de la Rose, Dante’s Vita Nuova, Convivio, and Commedia, and Chaucer’s dream visions and Canterbury Tales. The final chapter, “Division and Darkness,” centres on the legacy of allegory in the fifteenth century. Offering a new interdisciplinary, synthetical approach to late medieval intellectual history and to major works within the literary canon, Seeing through the Veil will be an essential resource to the study of medieval literature and culture, as well as philosophy, history of art, and history of science. |
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Donna Bennett and Russell Brown, eds. An anthology of 85 Canadian poets and fiction writers from the beginnings to the twenty-first century, with critical headnotes and explanatory footnotes. |
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Russell Brown and Donna Bennett, eds. Canadian Short Stories Pearson Education Canada, 2005 An anthology of 39 Canadian short stories from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on recently emerging writers. |
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Alan Bewell Colonial experience was profoundly structured by disease, as expansion brought people into contact with new and deadly maladies. Pathogens were exchanged on a scale far greater than ever before. Native populations were decimated by wave after wave of Old World diseases. In turn, colonists suffered disease and mortality rates much higher than in their home countries. For both groups colonialism ushered in an age of extended epidemiological crisis. Not only disease, but the idea of disease, and the response to it, deeply affected both colonizers and those colonized. In Romanticism and Colonial Disease, I focus on the British response to colonial disease as medical and literary writers, in a period roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, grappled to understand this new world of disease. I find this literature characterized by increasing anxiety about the global dimensions of disease and the epidemiological cost of empire. Colonialism infiltrated the heart of Romantic literature, affecting not only the Romantics' framing of disease but also their understanding of England's position in the colonial world. This book is the first major study of the massive impact of colonial disease on British culture during the Romantic period. It charts the emergence of the idea of the colonial world as a pathogenic space in need of a cure, and examines the role of disease in the making and unmaking of national identities. |
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J. Edward Chamberlin In the last fifty years, a powerful and distinctive body of poetry
has emerged in the West Indies. Still resonating with the curse of
slavery, this poetry shares its roots with rap and reggae, and has
the same hold on the popular imagination. But it has also become part |
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J. Edward Chamberlin Like the landscapes and languages of the world, stories both hold
people together and keep them apart. If This Is Your Land, Where Are
Your Stories? Finding Common Ground illustrates how storytelling
traditions convey the different truths of religion and science, of |
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J. Edward Chamberlin From ancient cave paintings to the calendars we hang in our modern
kitchens and bedrooms, horses have fascinated humans for thousands of
years, finding a place in our lives and our languages, and shaping
the history of societies in war and peace, in work and play. It is a
history that is full of contradictions. Horses that were hunted down
for their meat and skin and bones were also honoured for their grace
and beauty--takh, which translates as "spirit", is the Mongolian
word for a wild horse, and it was there on the central Asian steppes
that humans first domesticated horses. There too the wild and the |
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George Elliott Clarke A ferocious collection of poems addressing blackness, literature, sex, violence, art, politics, and beauty. A companion to the acclaimed Blue (2001), these lyrics go yet further in the direction of America-- African-America, meting out raunch and rage, in most spectacularly uncanadian measures. |
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George Elliott Clarke Each poem 'dialogues' with a full-colour, fine-art, Black nude photographed by Trinidadian-Canadian Ricardo Scipio. This righteously Afrocentric volume revisits the Greek myth of the Muses, rendering them as Black women, all daughters of the Daughter of Music, and representing heroic creativity: Calypso, Soul, Blues, Jazz, Reggae, Poetry, Saint Anastacia of Brazil, Dona Beatrice of the Congo, and the African goddess, Oxum. |
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George Elliott Clarke This internationally celebrated novel is based on the True Crime story of the hangings, for murder, of George and Rufus Hamilton, two 'Africadian' brothers, in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1949. While rendered in what the author dubs "Blackened English," the plot unfolds with the heightened grandeur of tragedy, thereby framing raw, backwoods violence with a classical structure, one that also reveals the ugly reality of anti-Black racism in mid-20th-century Canada. |
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Michael Cobb Though long thought of as one of the most virulently anti-gay genres
of contemporary American politics and culture, in
God Hates Fags,
Michael Cobb maintains that religious discourses have curiously
figured as the most potent and pervasive forms of queer expression
and activism throughout the twentieth century. Cobb focuses on how
queers have assumed religious rhetoric strategically to respond to
the violence done against them, alternating close readings of
writings by James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Jean Toomer, Dorothy
Allison, and Stephen Crane with critical legal and political analyses
of Supreme Court Cases and anti-gay legislation. He also pays deep attention to the political strategies, public declarations, websites,
interviews, and other media made by key religious right organizations
that have mounted the most successful regulations and condemnations
of homosexuality. |
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Eleanor Cook A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens Princeton UP, 2007: paperback, 2009 |
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Eleanor Cook How do enigmas and riddles work in literature? Not just in author A or B or even in the entrancing Old English riddles, but in general. This book offers the first full-length study of how to read them. It revives the old figure of speech known as “enigma” from Aristotle to the seventeenth century, and shows its usefulness. It looks at enigma in the widest sense, as masterplot. It considers questions of riddle and genre, and it proposes a new griph-type class of riddle as scheme. The opening chapter surveys “enigma personified” as sphinx and griffin, resuscitating a lost Graeco-Latin pun on “griffin” that Lewis Carroll used. The history and functions of enigma draw on classical and biblical through to modern writing, while examples concentrate on literature in English, especially modern poetry. Other examples range from European and Middle Eastern literatures to folk-riddling. Three case-studies, on Dante, Carroll, and Wallace Stevens, demonstrate this method of reading in detail. "Seldom is an important book so enjoyable." (Alastair Fowler, _ Yale Review_) |
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Melba Cuddy-Keane Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual & the Public Sphere Cambridge University Press, 2003 Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere situates Virginia Woolf's ideas on literature, reading, and education in the context of on-going controversies circulating in the newspapers, periodicals, and radio broadcasting of her time. Refuting popular conceptions of Woolf's snobbery and elitism, Melba Cuddy-Keane redefines Woolf as a "democratic
highbrow" — a writer intensely engaged in public debates about intellectual culture, adult education, pedagogy, and democratic goals. This study updates Richard Altick's history of the nineteenth-century English common reader by tracing new developments into the first decades of the twentieth century; it also reveals Woolf as a theorist of reading whose understanding of unconscious and conscious processes, dialogic modes, historicism, and evaluative practices anticipates theoretical concepts most often identified with the later twentieth century. |
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Jeannine DeLombard America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators.
Slavery on Trial examines how debates over slavery in the three decades before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media. |
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Gillian Fenwick In the forty years after he left Cambridge Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) published thirty volumes of his own writings and contributed to another twenty books. He wrote hundreds of articles for British and American magazines and worked as editor of the Alpine Journal and the then influential Cornhill Magazine. He was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and wrote nearly three hundred articles in the first series, 1885-1901. By any standards his literary career was successful, epitomising the life of the Victorian man of letters. But he was never completely satisfied with his work. He was self-effacing, adopting the pose of an amateur in a field in which in fact he was a superb professional, and asking “Will not the twentieth century laugh at the nineteenth?” Contrary to his expectations, Leslie Stephen has not been relegated to the learned footnotes, as modern Victorian scholarship and Bloomsbury studies prove. This bibliography and publishing history is a complete account of Stephen’s entire writing and publishing life. It is based on detailed research into his books and articles as well as unpublished autograph material in British and American libraries, museums and publishers’ archives. The emphasis is on the composition, publication history and evolution of the works, and includes stemmatic diagrams showing the transmission of certain texts, as well as details of Stephen’s literary income. This comprehensive account of Leslie Stephen’s writing life offers insight into the man as well as his work. |
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Gillian Fenwick This is the only comprehensive bibliographical study and publishing history of George Orwell (1903-1950), one of the major figures of twentieth-century literature, and still a best-selling author. This bibliography of Orwell's working life as a journalist, reviewer, essayist, novelist, and broadcaster examines all the major editions of Orwell’s books and their reissues, catalogues his journalism from its beginnings in the 1920s up to his death, accounts for his broadcasting and production work at the BBC during the Second World War, and details his extensive published correspondence. It also describes the most important posthumous editions of his works, as well as peripheral items such as juvenilia, movies, tape recordings and even T-shirts. The emphasis is on the genesis and evolution of Orwell’s work, explaining how his books and articles came to be written and the stages of their printing, publication, distribution and reception. The bibliography concentrates on the full details of all George Orwell's books: first editions, later editions and reissues, variants; translations; unauthorised editions. For each major work there are descriptions of all the stages leading up to publication and, where available, details of print-runs, costs and payments to the author. His sometimes difficult relations with his publishers are outlined, with extracts from correspondence. The bibliography is based on extensive library and archival research in Europe and North America, including the George Orwell Archive at University College, London. |
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Gillian
Fenwick Traveling Genius: The
Writing Life of Jan Morris University
of
Jan
Morris has written fifty books, edited
ninety, and published thousands of essays
and reviews. James Morris went to work for The
Times in 1951, and ran down Everest
with news of the successful ascent for the
Coronation Day edition in June 1953. His
career never looked back. Morris has written
important travel books, most notably
Traveling Genius looks beyond the sensation the press still delights in, James Morris's transformation into Jan Morris. It analyses how her writing method works, examining the whole of Morris’s output through detailed archival research and close reading of the texts. |
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Alexandra Gillespie Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a history of the books of
the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and of his follower, the monk John Lydgate,
that were made and circulated in the century after the arrival of the
printing press in England. At its center is a familiar question: what
is an author? The book argues that the answers that medieval culture
had produced to that question were of use to England's early printers
as they managed the risks, problems and opportunities that
characterized the changing late medieval book trade--manuscript and
print. The treatment of texts that were ascribed to Chaucer and
Lydgate in the period 1473-1557 is an index to the sometimes flexible,
sometimes resistant responses of compositors, copyists, decorators,
binders, distributors, patrons, censors, and owners to a gradual, but
profound bibliographical transition. |
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Elizabeth D. Harvey Ventriloquized Voices is a fascinating examination of the appropriation of the feminine voice by male authors. In a historical and theoretical study of English texts of the early modern period, Elizabeth D. Harvey looks at the transvestism at work in texts which purport to be by women but which are in fact written by men. The crossing of gender in these ventriloquized works illuminates the discourses of patronage, medicine, madness and eroticism in English Renaissance society, revealing as it does the construction of sexuality, gender identity, and power. The author skillfully juxtaposes such canonical works as John Donne''s Anniversaries and Spenser''s Faerie Queene with pamphlets on transvestism, midwifery books, and treatises on gynaecology and hysteria. By interrogating the fashioning of gender within a broad range of Renaissance culture, Ventriloquized Voices investigates not only the relationship between men, women and language, but also crucial twentieth-century feminist debates such as essentialism and the female voice. |
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Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection explores the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory sense of touch in early modern culture. If touch is the sense that mediates between the body of the subject and the world, these essays make apparent the frequently disregarded lexicons of tactility that lie behind and beneath early modern discursive constructions of eroticism, knowledge, and art. For the early moderns, touch was the earliest and most fundamental sense. Frequently aligned with bodily pleasure and sensuality, it was suspect; at the same time, it was associated with the authoritative disciplines of science and medicine, and even with religious knowledge and artistic creativity. The unifying impulse of Sensible Flesh is both analytic and recuperative. It attempts to chart the important history of the sense of touch at a pivotal juncture and to understand how tactility has organized knowledge and defined human subjectivity. The contributors examine in theoretically sophisticated ways both the history of the hierarchical ordering of the senses and the philosophical and cultural consequences that derive from it. The essays consider such topics as New World contact, the eroticism of Renaissance architecture, the Enclosure Acts in England, plague, the clitoris and anatomical authority, Pygmalion, and the language of tactility in early modern theater. In exploring the often repudiated or forgotten sense of touch, the essays insistently reveal both the world of sensation that subtends early modern culture and the corporeal foundations of language and subjectivity. |
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Elizabeth D. Harvey, Theresa Krier, eds. The essays in this groundbreaking collection stage conversations between the thought of the controversial feminist philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and premodern writers, ranging from Empedocles and Homer, to Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne. They explore both the pre-Enlightenment roots of Luce Irigaray's thought, and the impact that her writings have had on our understanding of ancient, medieval and Renaissance culture. Luce Irigaray has been a major figure in Anglo-American literary theory, philosophy and gender studies ever since her germinal works, Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One, were published in English translation in 1985. This collection is the first sustained examination of Irigaray's crucial relationship to premodern discourses underpinning Western culture, and of the transformative effect she has had on scholars working in pre-Enlightenment periods. Like Irigaray herself, the essays work at the intersections of gender, theory, historicism and language. This collection offers powerful ways of understanding premodern texts through Irigaray's theories that allow us to imagine our past and present relationship to economics, science, psychoanalysis, gender, ethics and social communities in new ways. |
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Linda Hutcheon Are we living in the age of adaptation? In contemporary cinema, of course, there are enough adaptations —based on everything from comic books to the novels of Jane Austen—to make us wonder if Hollywood has run out of new stories. But if you think adaptation can be understood by using novels and films alone, you’re wrong. Today there are also song covers rising up the pop charts, video game versions of fairy tales, and even theme park rides based on successful movie franchises and vice-versa. We constantly tell and retell stories; we show and reshow stories; we interact and re-interact with stories—and these three different modes of engagement (and their interactions) allow us to rethink how adaptation works—and why. Despite their popularity, however, adaptations are usually treated as secondary and derivative. Whether in the form of a Broadway musical or a hit television show, adaptations are almost inevitably regarded as inferior to the “original.” But are they? Shakespeare transferred his culture’s stories from page to stage, and no one begrudged him his borrowing. This study explores the ubiquity and historical persistence of adaptations in all their various media incarnations—and challenges their constant critical denigration. Adaptation, it argues, has always been a central mode of the story-telling imagination and deserves to be studied in all its breadth and range as both a process (of creation and reception) and a product. A Theory of Adaptation theorizes how adaptation works across all media and genres in a way that attempts at last to put an end to the age-old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park. |
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Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon In Opera: The Art of Dying, a literary theorist and a physician bring together humanistic and scientific perspectives on the lessons on living and dying that the extravagant and artificial art of opera imparts. Our modern narratives of science and technology can only go so far in teaching us about the death that we must all finally face. Opera, an art steeped in death, might help take us (or at least help us conceive of) the rest of the way. Contrasting the experience of mortality in opera to that of dramatic tragedy, this study finds a more apt analogy in the medieval custom of the contemplatio mortis—a dramatized exercise in imagining one’s own death that prepared one for the inevitable end and helped one enjoy more fully the life that remained. From the perspective of a contemporary opera audience, the authors explore, through recent studies of death emanating from medicine and the social sciences, concepts of mortality embodied in the operatic repertoire, ranging from the terror of death (in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites) to the longing for death (in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde), from preparation for the good death (in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen) to the meaning of suicide in different cultures (in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly or Berg’s Wozzeck). In works by Janáček, Ullmann, Britten, and many others, this study examines how death is made to feel logical and even right—morally, psychologically, and aesthetically—as, in the art of opera, we are shown how to rehearse death in order to give life meaning. |
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Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés, eds. and contributors A few decades ago, when the influence of poststructuralist theory became dominant in literary theory, traditional literary history was pushed to the margins by critiques of its teleological assumptions and uncritical acceptance of Eurocentric ideologies. This happened, of course, at the same moment as groups previously disenfranchised by gender, race, sexuality or other “difference” began articulating their own specific literary historical narratives. The inevitable conflict is what led to this collaborative volume which participates not only in a continuing dialogue with the illustrious shades of the past, encountered and engaged while writing literary history, but also in a continuing dialogue among colleagues in the present working together to revisit these areas of both contention and excitement. Each of the five authors tackles a major issue in the contemporary theorizing of literary history in the light of new methodological paradigms and new ideological challenges. Linda Hutcheon writes on “Rethinking the National Model” in the wake of “identity politics” in a postcolonial, diasporic age of globalization. Stephen Greenblatt takes on “Racial Memory and Literary History”, while Mario J. Valdés rethinks “the History of Literary History” itself. Marshall Brown explores the “Scale of Literary History” and Walter D. Mignolo offers a reconsideration of the “Colonial Model”. The personal response of Homi Bhabha concludes this wide-ranging dialogue, as the various authors reflect upon, argue with, and indeed do rethink each other’s formulations. |
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H. J. Jackson and George Whalley, eds. Though he has often been represented as an idle man who failed to produce what was expected of him, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in fact a versatile writer who published in many fields--for example poetry, drama, criticism, theology, science, medicine, journalism, and political theory. The recently completed standard scholarly edition of his Collected Works fills 34 volumes, besides ten volumes of notebooks and six more of letters. Six volumes in the series are dedicated to his marginalia, that is, notes written in the margins of books, which are organized alphabetically from Abbt to Zwick following the names of the authors. These notes constitute a rich source of information about Coleridge's interests and habits of thought as well as about the intellectual climate in which he lived. Lately they have attracted the attention of historians of the book and of reading. The project of the collected edition was master-minded by a Canadian scholar, Professor Kathleen Coburn of the University of Toronto, who also established the Coleridge Collection--a collection of books and papers associated with Coleridge, second only to the holdings of the British Library in London--at Victoria College, where it continues to grow as a valuable archival resource for Romanticists and students of literature in English. |
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H. J. Jackson Working closely as an editor with the famous marginalia of Coleridge got me interested in the whole phenomenon of writing in books and I started to collect other examples from about 1700 to the present, notes by unknown or unidentified readers as well as by celebrated practitioners like Blake, Keats, Macaulay, and Nabokov. Though the habit of writing notes in books is generally frowned on today, for centuries it was encouraged as a useful way of supplementing and activating the words on the page. This preliminary study is not a history, however, but an account of marginalia as a genre, viewed from different aspects. It does sketch out a history but it also describes a geography of readers' notes--what kinds of notes typically appear in what spaces of the book. It provides examples of children's notes, and of the obsessive behaviour of some book owners (or borrowers). It reflects on the modern taboo against writing in books. It surveys many styles of note- writing, and examines a handful of special cases in detail. |
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H. J. Jackson The first book on marginalia having made a sweeping survey of the genre, the second is devoted to a specific time and place--Britain in the Romantic Period, about 1790 to 1830--and aims to demonstrate the potential value of readers' notes as historical documents. The period was chosen because it went through a great increase in readership and a related boom in publishing. It was also a high-water mark in the history of manuscript annotation. Since writing in books was encouraged for various reasons, being regarded as a privilege of ownership but at the same time as a custodial responsibility, practically everyone who read books also occasionally wrote in them, so the surviving records are unusually rich. This book considers the common environment of readers in Britain at the time: the publishing system, the relationship between mainstream presses and the influential periodical reviews, the cost of books, the sharing of books, the fashion for reading and literary conversation. Then it describes different ways in which readers put their books to use for daily work, for socializing, and for show. The accumulated example of anonymous or historically unimportant readers puts into perspective the behaviour of some of the best- known annotators of the time--Walpole, Blake, Piozzi, Coleridge, and Keats. |
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Audrey Jaffe Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction Cornell University Press, 2000 Scenes of Sympathy shows how representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Readings of Dickens, Eliot, Wilde and others discuss the way Victorian spectacles of social difference construct middle class identity, and the way Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. |
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Audrey Jaffe Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience University of California Press, 1991 Vanishing Points uses Dickens's novels and sketches to redefine narrative omniscience and discuss its implications for the construction of Victorian subjectivity. The book describes the construction of omniscience through a series of oppositions: between privacy and publicity, sympathy and irony, self and other, and shows how omniscience attempts to transcend the boundaries of individual consciousness by constructing them elsewhere: in characters. |
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Daniel Heath Justice Asserts the strength and diversity of Cherokee identity through its rich literary tradition. Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. |
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Daniel Heath Justice The Everland. Home of the tree-born Kyn since time immemorial, a deep green world of ancient mystery…and danger. The wyr-powers of the Kyn and the other Eld Folk have preserved this wild region from the ravenous hunger of Humanity for over a thousand years, but those powers are under siege. As the eyes of Men turn once more to the Everland and its rich bounty, the leaders of the Folk gather in Sheynadwiin, the Kyn capital, hoping to find a way to survive the growing storm. She is Tarsa’deshae—the Spearbreaker—a fearless Kyn warrior trained in the Redthorn ways of battle and blood. She knows her place in the Everland’s cycle of life and death, and that knowledge gives her strength and purpose. Yet Tarsa’s ordered world is shattered when an act of courage goes horribly awry, and her spirit awakens to the wild wyr of her ancestors—powers long persecuted by the assimilationist Shields and their allies. As she struggles to reconcile her former life with the call of the rising bloodsong, Tarsa joins the summons of the Sevenfold Council, where she is swept into the struggle between those Folk who would embrace the promises of Men, and those who would hold fast to the rooted understandings of the Eld Green. For all who call the Everland home, there can be no middle path. The days of peace are quickly coming to an end . . . |
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Thomas Keymer, ed. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook Oxford University Press, 2006 The hospitality of Tristram Shandy to competing approaches and divergent readings is not a modern discovery, but in recent decades Sterne’s masterpiece has generated an unusually rich variety of critical accounts. With its focus on questions of reading and interpretation, language and meaning, textuality and fragmentation, and with its playful exploration of human subjectivity and the performance of identity or gender, the work is an obvious host for poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and other kinds of literary theory. New editorial and biographical work has stimulated fresh analysis of Sterne’s place in traditions and genres ranging from Menippean satire to the modern novel, and of his relationship to cultural and intellectual trends including sentimentalism, scepticism and philanthropy. This volume reprints ten of the best recent essays in five sections: Genres, Traditions, Intertexts; Public Performance and Print Culture; Language of the Body; Narrative, Reading, and Meaning; Politics and History. |
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Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor |
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Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee, eds. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830 Cambridge University Press, 2004 This volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change, showing how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes including taste and aesthetics, national identity and empire, and key cultural trends such as sensibility and the gothic. The second part pays close attention to the work of individual writers including Sterne, Blake, Barbauld, Austen and Clare, and to the role of literary circles such as the “Lake” and “Cockney” schools. The wide scope of the collection, juxtaposing canonical authors with those now gaining new attention from scholars, makes it indispensable reading for students of eighteenth-century literature and Romanticism. |
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Anne Lancashire Civic theatre--drama and pageantry sponsored by city and town governing bodies--is prominent in histories of English provincial drama but has been largely ignored for pre-Elizabethan London. This book explodes the widely-held notion that significant London theatre arose only in the age of Shakespeare, when the first commercial playhouses were built there. It outlines the extent and types of early civic theatrical performance, specifically in London, from Roman times to Elizabeth I's accession to the throne in 1558, focusing on Roman amphitheatre shows, medieval and early Tudor plays, mummings, royal entries, and other kinds of street pageantry. With evidence from a multitude of primary sources and extensive use of early chronicle histories, the book raises new questions about this urban, largely political theatre which provided an important foundation for the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Included is a selection of early civic records of theatrical activity, and a reference list of major (and, for comparative purposes, a few minor) royal and other formal entries into London 1400-1558. |
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Victor Li The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity University of Toronto Press, 2006 In recent years the concept of 'the primitive' has been the subject
of strong criticism; it has been examined, unpacked, and shown to
signify little more than a construction or projection necessary for
establishing the modernity of the West. The term 'primitive,'
however, continues to surface in contemporary critical and cultural
discourses, begging the question: Why does primitivism keep
reappearing even after it has been uncovered as a modern myth? |
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Sally-Beth MacLean and Audrey Douglas, eds. REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years University of Toronto Press, 2006 In 2002, the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project marked its twenty-fifth anniversary with a special series of sessions at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds University. The REED sessions were designed to allow critical reflection on the past, present, and future of the project as it entered the twenty-first century. Thirteen essays amplifying the content of selected conference papers, and a fourteenth submitted at the editors’ invitation, make up REED in Review. Contributors to the collection describe the conception and early years of REED, assess the project’s impact on recent and current scholarship, and anticipate or propose stimulating new directions for future research. Individual essays address a wide variety of subjects, from the impact of REED research on Shakespeare textual editing, Robin Hood, patronage, and Elizabethan theatre studies, to a thought provoking redefinition of ‘drama,’ details of recent ground-breaking research in Scottish records, and the broadening possibilities for editorial and research relationships with information technology. The editors’ introduction and a select bibliography, with commentary and a list of REED-related publications by editors and scholars from a variety of disciplines, make up the remainder of this landmark volume. |
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Jill L. Matus Unstable Bodies is a wide-ranging and provocative book that uses bio-medical, social scientific and literary texts to interrogate Victorian concepts of sexual difference. Jill Matus departs from the usual critical focus on Victorian conceptions of the sexes as incommensurably different to emphasize instead the powerful effects in Victorian culture of ideas about sexual instability and approximation. While formulations of mutable or ambiguous sexuality provoked fear and fascination, they also served Victorian middle-class ideology by offering scientific ways of constructing racial class and national identity in terms of the body. Throughout this period fierce public debates raged around issues such as prostitution, infanticide, working-class sexuality, female reproduction, and domesticity. Drawing on texts by Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, Ruth) George Eliot (Adam Bede, Middlemarch) and the Brontës (Agnes Grey, Villete) as well as a range of non-canonical fictional texts, Matus explores the dialogue between literary and other discourses of sexuality. In a series of essays, linked by shared concerns and similar topics, she shows how literary, social and medical texts from the 1840s to the 1870s construct multiple and contesting versions of womanhood, motherhood and female sexuality. Avoiding large claims about the agency of literary texts, the essays in this book explore specific instances in which fictional texts rework and transform topical constructions of the “natural propensities” of women, in part confirming but also sometimes undermining and challenging the assertions about sexuality produced by other discourses. Unstable Bodies deepens our understanding of the way Victorians articulated problems concerning gender and sexual difference, many of which continue to engage us in the late twentieth century. It is an essential reference work for students and scholars working in Victorian literary and cultural studies, feminist studies and the history of sexuality. |
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Jill L. Matus Jill Matus approaches Morrison’s work as a form of cultural memory concerned with obscured or erased history. She argues that Morrison sees African American history—from the times of slavery to the continued racial oppressions of the twentieth century—as a history of traumatic experience, and explores how this powerful storyteller bears witness to a painful yet richly enlivening past. Since Morrison’s novels are known for their great lyric power, but often dwell on scenes of horror, Matus addresses the uneasy relations of memory, pain and pleasure in literature. In so doing she sheds new light on Morrison as a contemporary writer working at a time when literature is urgently being explored for its capacity to memorialize and testify. Matus’s critical study highlights the political and historical contexts of this Nobel Laureate’s work, offers close readings of each of the novels, and concludes with a critical overview of the field of Morrison studies, which students will find extremely valuable. |
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Jill L. Matus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell Cambridge University Press, 2006 In the last few decades, Elizabeth Gaskell has become a figure of growing importance in the field of Victorian literary studies. She produced work of great variety and scope in the course of a highly successful writing career that lasted for about twenty years from the mid-1840s to her unexpected death in 1865. A gifted story-teller, with a zest for anecdote, legend, and social observation, she was innovative and experimental in her use of genre, particularly in the realm of shorter fiction. She is significant also in the history of biography, where her controversial contribution, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was instrumental in changing conceptions of that genre. Generations of readers have valued her for her geniality, sympathy and imaginative expressiveness, but critics are increasingly coming to acknowledge that her work is neither artless nor transparent. They are also granting growing recognition to her intellectuality, her familiarity with matters of scientific, economic, and theological enquiry, and her narrative sophistication. This Companion features chapters on individual novels as well as more general topics (Gaskell, gender and the family; Gaskell and social transformation; Gaskell and the Unitarian context). Edited by Jill Matus, with contributions from well-known scholars such as Patsy Stoneman, John Chapple, Linda K. Hughes, Audrey Jaffe, Susan Hamilton, Nancy Henry, Linda H. Peterson, Nancy S.Weyant, Marion Shaw, and Deirdre d’Albertis, the Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell will be invaluable for students and scholars of Gaskell and Victorian fiction. |
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Andrea Most From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor,Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein,Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power. |
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Nick Mount In the last decades of the nineteenth century, an extraordinary literary exodus drained English Canada of over half its writers and all but a few of its present and future literary celebrities. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York is the story of these expatriate writers: of who they were, why they left, what they achieved, and how they changed Canadian literary history. By the 1890s New York City was the undisputed leader of publishing in North America and the centre of an emerging continental literary market. Here, especially, expatriate Canadian writers found for the first time not only a large and receptive literary market, but models of Canadian literary success, from Bliss Carman's Vagabond poems to Ernest Thompson Seton's wildly popular animal stories and Palmer Cox's legion of Brownies. More important for Canadian literature, the recognition the expatriates received from non-Canadian publishers, reviewers, and readers helped legitimize the writing, publishing, and reading of imaginative literature in Canada. In their own time, Canada's expatriates were recognized and thanked for their achievements, but the arrival of the domestic literature they themselves had made possible rekindled nationalist imperatives to distinguish Canadian writing from other literatures, especially American, a project that slowly eliminated most of the expatriates and their work from the emerging Canadian canon. In the end, the expatriates gave Canada more than a literature: they gave it a past in which critics could find both the Canada they wanted and the Canada they did not. |
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Ato Quayson Proposes an entirely new socially and politically conscious way of reading. |
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Ato Quayson Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole
Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly
cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of
physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and
moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures
of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms
"aesthetic nervousness." The disabled remind the able-bodied that the
body is provisional and temporary and that normality is wrapped up in |
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Ato Quayson This anthology gathers together of the best critical work on African literature and on larger questions of literary history, the sociology of literature, criticism and theory. It represents the a collection of the best that has been thought and written about African literary culture and the modern imagination. |
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John Reibetanz This collection of poems, the author’s fourth, takes its impetus from the confrontation between civilization and nature imaged in its cover art, a photograph taken by William Notman in 1897. The photograph (like the poem based on it) depicts a woman in elaborate nineteenth-century costume staring into the hollow centre of a towering old-growth cedar in Stanley Park. She is a kind of midland swimmer, as she contemplates the inner ocean of the tree. Movement through the six sections of the collection as a whole (and in part through each section) is from country to city, from past to present, and from art to an attempt to unearth the art in life. One poem, “A Chain for Stephanie” – which juxtaposes experiences in classical Rome with those of the author’s childhood and his daughter’s – was a final selection for the 1995 National Magazine Awards in Poetry. Another, “The Call,” was among the winning entries for the League of Canadian Poets’ seventh national poetry competition. |
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John Reibetanz Mining for Sun Brick Books, 2000 Opening out to more narrative structures, this collection contains fewer poems than its immediate predecessor, but they are longer and more various. They are also more politically implicated, confronting such issues as the displacement of North American aboriginal peoples, child and urban poverty, and intolerance. Perhaps in response to such engagement, Mining for Sun was selected in May, 2001 as one of the six collections (out of over 150 considered) on the shortlist of the Re-Lit Awards. |
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John Reibetanz Near Relations McClelland and Stewart, 2005 This collection extends the efforts of Mining for Sun to incorporate interests and approaches usually associated with narrative, without losing the concentration and intensity of poetic form. The title suggests an affinity with contemporary short fiction; and the fiction of such writers as Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and Ann Beattie has been an informing inspiration. The poems most often focus on urban scenes and characters; and they attempt to do so with that awareness of the inextricable nature of the personal and the social/political which which drove the author to translate Brecht’s “Buckow Elegies” in the 1980s. The collection first probes pivotal moments in the lives of his family. Then, following the same creative urge celebrated in the folksongs of his mother’s Irish heritage and the blues of Louis Armstrong, they move into a world of intersecting fictional relations, unfolding a broad range of characters. One of the poems, “Night Thoughts,” was awarded First Prize in the international Petra Kenney Poetry Competition. |
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Julia M. Reibetanz This study offers a full reading of T. S. Eliot’s most complex long poem. It explores the poem in detail, arguing from its primary constitutive elements to its overall structure and argument. Prosody is an important focus of the reading. Eliot’s metrical practice is examined in the light of his stated aim to create a new accentual line. The poem is also read in the light of its debt to the long tradition of English landscape poetry, especially the greater Romantic lyric. As poetry of place, the Quartets define themselves through the actual physical landscapes in which they are grounded. But they also define themselves through the landscapes of thought which Eliot inherited from the vast scope of his reading. His debt especially to the mystical treatises of St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul, and to the Bhagavad Gita are closely investigated. In the largest sense, the Quartets are read as meditative lyrics, in which the narrative of thought subsumes both philosophical argument and symbolist perception, forging a unity of the “way down” and the “way up,” of the “fire” and the “rose.” |
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Magdalene Redekop This is the first study of the work of Alice Munro to focus on her obsession with mothering, and to relate it to the hallucinatory quality of her magic realism. A bizarre collection of clowning mothers parade across the pages of Munro's fiction, playing practical jokes, performing stunts, and dressing in thrift shop disguises that recycle vintage literary images. Paying close attention to their mimicries, Magdalene Redekop studies this parade with the aim of gaining increased understanding of Munro's evolving comic vision. As the outlines of her aesthetic are delineated, it becomes clear that it involves a new way of looking at autobiography and a new way of looking at narrative sequence. "A playful and learned reading of Munro's writing, that provokes anew the delight readers experience in the elusive complexity of both her subtle formal craft and her consistent moral, as well as aesthetic self-questioning. Engaged and engaging, this study makes both reading and storytelling--like mothering and clowning--into expressions of power and responsibility alike. Accept its invitation to a carnivalesque adventure in reading and writing, in the unresolvable pleasures and pains of living the processes of art." |
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Ann Saddlemyer This is the first full biography of George Yeats. With the generous co-operation of the family, her friends, and Yeats scholars throughout the world, it draws upon hitherto unpublished material and other documents to establish the role this remarkably intelligent and extraordinarily knowledgeable woman played in her husband's life and work. For six years before her marriage Georgie Hyde Lees was a serious student of the occult and medieval philosophy, knowledge which led to the automatic writing that formed a basis for A Vision and most of Yeats's later writings. In addition she worked closely with the Dublin Drama League, for a number of years ran the embroidery section of Cuala, and then on the death of her husband and his sister Elizabeth became editor and publisher of the Cuala Press. A discriminating critic and accomplished linguist who was far more familiar with contemporary European literature than her husband, she numbered among her close friends the playwright Lennox Robinson, the poet and art critic Thomas MacGreevy, the short story writer Frank O'Connor, and the young poet John Montague. Ezra Pound and the musicians Jelly d'Aranyi and Walter Rummel, were close friends throughout her life. After Yeats's death she was in sole charge of his work and manuscripts, for thirty years knowledgeably steering the 'Yeats industry' through her advice and assistance to such critics as Ellmann, Jeffares, Bradford, Virginia Moore and a host of younger scholars. |
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Ann Saddlemyer This book is the final volume in the OHHS series, and the second volume in the first comprehensive history of theatre in Ontario, both edited by Ann Saddlemyer. |
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Ann Saddlemyer J.M.Synge The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays Oxford University Press, 1995 (World's Classics Series)213 A volume in the Oxford World Classics Drama series, freshly edited with critical introduction, wide-ranging notation and bibliography. |
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Nicholas Sammond Who made the normal American child? In Babes in Tomorrowland, Nicholas Sammond traces a path back to the sources of that child—one that links Margaret Mead to the Mickey Mouse Club and behaviorism to Bambi—to demonstrate that the production of a generically normal American child in the early twentieth century was as much the work of popular media as it was of developmental science. To locate that child, Sammond draws on popular child-rearing manuals and periodicals, mainstream sociological texts, and advertisements that targeted a burgeoning youth market. He also examines the films, TV programs, and ancillary products—everything from milk bottles, to school supplies, to wristwatches—of Walt Disney Productions, and the publicity Disney used to pitch its products. Sammond delineates the institutional and discursive ties that bound industry to science to the home, revealing a child that was as much the creature of popular media as the victim of its excesses. By carefully studying how the science of human development was translated into the practice of child-rearing, and how magazines and child-rearing manuals described the child as the crucible of an ideal American culture, Sammond demonstrates how Walt Disney Productions’ greatest creation—Walt Disney—was made to embody that cultural ideal, and how his products were described as imbued with his spirit. Sammond argues that, contrary to popular belief, Disney didn’t annex childhood…at least not without a lot of help from the locals (or their parents). Without a fantasy of an ideally normal American child and the belief that movies and television either helped or hindered its creation, Disney might never have found its market niche as the paragon of family entertainment. At the same time, though, without media producers such as Disney, representations of that ideal child would not have circulated as freely in American popular culture. Moving beyond arguments that children are irrevocably shaped by the media they consume, Sammond demonstrates how arguments about the effects of media created both Walt Disney and the normal child he served, the embodiment of a future made in his image. Winner of the 2006 Katherine Singer Kovacs award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Given for outstanding scholarship in film and media studies that significantly advances scholarly thinking in the field.
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Nicholas Sammond, ed. The antagonists—shaved, oiled, pierced, and tattooed; the glaring lights; the pounding music; the shouting crowd: professional wrestling is at once spectacle, sport, and business. Steel Chair to the Head provides a multifaceted look at the popular phenomenon of pro wrestling. The contributors combine critical rigor with a deep appreciation for wrestling as a unique culture form, the latest in a long line of popular performance genres. They examine wrestling as it happens in the ring, is experienced in the stands, is portrayed on television, and is discussed in online chat rooms. In the process, they reveal wrestling as an expression of the contradictions and struggles that shape American culture. The essayists include scholars in anthropology, psychology, film studies, communication studies, and sociology, one of whom used to wrestle professionally. Classic studies of wrestling by Roland Barthes, Carlos Monsiváis, Sharon Mazer, and Henry Jenkins appear alongside original essays. Whether exploring how pro wrestling inflects race, masculinity, and ideas of reality and authenticity; how female fans express their enthusiasm for male wrestlers; or how lucha libre provides insights into Mexican social and political life, Steel Chair to the Head gives due respect to pro wrestling by treating it with the same thorough attention reserved for more conventional forms of cultural expression.
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Cannon Schmitt Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997 Alien Nation reads the Gothic as a genre that encapsulates a powerful and enduring cultural narrative for nineteenth-century Britain. Gothic fictions depend for their effects upon varieties of estrangement, from the breakdown of communication between genders and classes to the baffled efforts of modernity to make sense of its own feudal past. While no single thread unites these orders of misunderstanding, I argue that nationality organizes much of what is characteristically Gothic. “Nation” here carries a double valence. On one hand, Gothics--both classics of the genre, such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), and later works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)--pose as semi-ethnographic texts in their representation of Continental Europe or the Far East as fundamentally un-English, sites of depravity. On the other, a persuasive notion of Englishness was itself constructed in these novels. This construction initially functioned by means of a threatened female figure (the quintessential Gothic heroine) who ostensibly embodied a peculiarly English subjectivity. Later, threatened femininity came to stand in synecdochically for the nation as a whole, a development that clarifies the usefulness of Gothic plotting to England’s efforts to imagine itself. In journalistic accounts of imperial conflicts such as the Sepoy Mutiny and the Opium Wars, for instance, the figure of the Gothic heroine was pulled from the pages of fiction and pressed into the service of the nation-state. |
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Cannon Schmitt and
Nancy Henry, eds. Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture Indiana University Press, 2008 The watchword of this volume in its entirety is transformation. Rapid changes in Victorian financial markets and investment practices reflected and influenced broader social changes: political and moral reform, the struggle for women’s rights, the growth of empire. The Victorians developed new kinds of financial writing in a flourishing press as well as in manuals, advice books, advertising, and novels; new knowledge was produced and consumed by a growing number of readers--shareholders and non-shareholders alike. Impossible any longer to consider as a thing apart, investment cut across all aspects of life: the financial sphere overlapped with the domestic sphere, overseas expansion promised to fund comfortable retirement, speculation rewrote the plots and themes of Victorian fiction and reshaped its form. Victorian Investments bears witness to such transformations even as it manifests a corresponding transformation in critical approaches to studying and understanding the multiple and complex intersections between culture and high finance. Contributors include Timothy Alborn, Ian Baucom, Martin Daunton, Nancy Henry, David C. Itzkowitz, Audrey Jaffe, Donna Loftus, Mary Poovey, George Robb, and Cannon Schmitt. |
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Cannon Schmitt Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America Cambridge University Press, 2009 When the young Charles Darwin landed on the shores of Tierra del Fuego in 1832, he was overwhelmed: nothing had prepared him for the sight of what he called "an untamed savage." The shock he felt, repeatedly recalled in later years, definitively shaped his theory of evolution. In this study, I show how Darwin and other Victorian naturalists transformed such encounters with South America and its indigenous peoples into influential accounts of biological and historical change. Redefining what it means to be human, they argue that the modern self must be understood in relation to a variety of pasts--personal, historical, and ancestral--conceived of as savage. Darwin and the Memory of the Human reshapes our understanding of Victorian imperialism, revisits the implications of Darwinian theory, and demonstrates the pertinence of nineteenth-century biological thought to current theorizations of memory. |
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Dana Seitler Atavistic Tendencies: the Culture of Science in American Modernity University of Minnesota Press, 2008
The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several generations of absence. In this work, Dana Seitler explores the ways in which modernity itself is an atavism, shaping a historical and theoretical account of its dramatic rise and impact on Western culture and imagination.
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Josef Skvorecky The Engineer of Human Souls was the first translated novel to win the Governor-General’s Award for fiction. A powerfully resonant epic novel, it bridges the Old World and the New, and ranges from 1939 to the present, from the Europe of the Second World War to contemporary North America. It is a key segment in Skvorecky’s multi-volume sequence of novels dealing with the history of his homeland from the revolution of 1848 (The Bride of Texas, Dvorak in Love) to the fall of the ‘the evil empire’ (Two Murders in My Double Life). More historical and political than Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, it nevertheless has similar ambitions. The hero of the sequence, Danny Smiricky, is a Czech writer who fled his country in 1968 to find asylum in Canada in the sheltered world of Edenvale College in Toronto. His New World is an Eden which he sees with old world eyes: he is touched and exasperated by its political innocence, wryly amused by the hilarious counter-revolutionary schemes of his fellow Czechs, tormented by the Soviet secret agents who dog his footsteps, and not unreceptive to the flirtations of his prettiest students. At the same time, like all exiles and émigrés, he is undone by memories of a homeland as lost to him as his youth--of Nadia, the doomed factory girl who was his co-saboteur and, to his great surprise and astonished delight, his first lover; of his career as a skirt-chasing feckless hero of the Resistance in a small Bohemian town under Nazi occupation. These memories dovetail with countless others involving a large gallery of finely realized characters. This rich and complex montage is at once Danny’s story and the whole sorrowful history of East and West in the troubled middle years of the century. Beautifully told, The Engineer of Human Souls is a wise, funny, bawdy and marvellous novel. It is also one of the great historical novels of its time. As Milan Kundera wrote, ‘It marks an exceptional moment in history. A magnum opus in all respects.’ And he should know. He was there. |
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Josef Skvorecky Hailed on publication in the New York Times as ‘Skvorecky’s New World Symphony,’ The Bride of Texas is a magnificent novel of love in time of war and revolution, of freedom and tragedy, set against the rich, broad canvas of the American Civil War. At the heart of the novel is a little known fact of history: the formation of a militia by a motley band of Czech immigrants who took up the cause of freedom and fought, for a wide variety of reasons, under General William Tecumseh Sherman on his famous march across the South to Atlanta. Skvorecky takes the reader into a world of emigrés finding their way in a new homeland with the feudal chaos of the Hapsburg Empire in the era of European revolutions behind them; he evokes the panorama of American life in the mid-19th century, and the clashing armies of the Civil War with all its colour, sounds, smells, confusion, romance, tall tales and tragedy. At the novel’s core is a group of interrelated stories: the twin love stories of a brother and sister–Lida, new to Texas, young and lovely, who manoeuvres the plantation owner’s son into marrying her; and Cyril who falls in love with a black woman, Dinah, self-taught and aware but doomed by the inhuman system of slavery. Interwoven with these are the life stories of figures like Sergeant Kapsa, forced to flee Europe after killing his commanding officer with whose wife he was having an affair, and General Ambrose Burnside, famous for his whiskers, whose closing down of a Chicago newspaper first launched the battle over freedom of the press in time of war. The Bride of Texas is a teeming, romantic, epic novel that brings to life the swirl of events around the Civil War and the people whose lives were swept up in it and changed forever, as was their country. For those interested in Skvorecky’s body of work, it’s worth noting that The Bride of Texas is the earliest in a series of stories and novels that engage Czech life and history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. |
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Josef Skvorecky Two Murders in My Double Life Key Porter, 1999 Josef Skvorecky has always had an interest in mystery fiction. He has written essays about it, and he has been a mystery writer, best known for his series of stories and novels about Lieutenant Boruvka who appears both in Czechoslovakia and Canada. Two Murders in My Double Life is set in Toronto at a university that resembles the one at which Skvorecky taught for two decades after his departure from Czechoslovakia in 1968. The semi-autobiographical narrator of this strikingly original and quietly experimental novel lives with amused and melancholy resignation in two worlds. His life with his wife Sidonia–loosely based on his wife the actress, editor and novelist Zdena Salivarova–among their fellow exiles and émigrés from ‘the country where we used to live’ is full of old feuds, loves, gossip and friendships that have survived wars, revolutions and exiles. In his new life, the narrator is a professor of detective fiction at a small Canadian college, and he proves to be an arch observer of all the foibles and follies of higher learning: spoiled students and professors, petty professional rivalries, and self-serving political correctness. When another professor’s husband is murdered, the narrator gets to hone his sleuthing skills by observing the hunt for the killer which features a young female policewoman, a scheming beauty queen, and a plethora of ‘the usual suspects.’ But this remarkable novel counterpoints these events to what is happening in Czechoslovakia after the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989. The narrator has more on his mind than local politics and crime. In the aftermath of the political reforms in the old country, he and Sidonia find themselves battling for their reputations. A long-ago innocent lapse of judgment has now embroiled Sidonia in a controversy that is driving her into a deep depression. Their lives are entangled in an insidious web of lies whose source is in the old files of the security police of the now-fallen communist state. This mystery novel is a brilliantly stylish tour the force, profoundly witty and darkly funny. It shows an international master at the height of his powers and producing a late masterpiece. |
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Sam Solecki Prague Blues is the first book-length study of the fiction of the Czech-Canadian writer Josef Skvorecky (b. 1924) who has been described by George Steiner in The New Yorker as ‘one of the major literary figures of our time’ and who won the Neustadt Prize in 1980 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. This critical overview of Skvorecky’s career suggests that the novelist is a central figure not only in the literature of Central Europe but in the writing of the West, and that his novels, from the now classic The Cowards (1958) to The Miracle Game (1972) and the award-winning The Engineer of Human Souls (1977) constitute an irreplaceable fictional chronicle of the past half-century of European society and history. Solecki suggests that Skvorecky is essentially a comic and anti-political writer who, because of the irony of historical circumstances, developed almost against his will into an important political novelist. He argues that at the heart of the novelist’s comic and often satiric fiction is a fundamentally religious vision that offers a defence of the individual and of certain average human values against the dogmas of totalitarian ideologies. In this he writes in the tradition that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. In addition to interpretations of the major novels and stories, Prague Blues contains a biographical chronicle of Skvorecky’s career. |
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Sam Solecki Ragas of Longing offers the first book-length study of Michael Ondaatje’s poetry and its place within his overall body of work. Relating the poetry to various poetic traditions from classical Sanskrit and Tamil to postmodern, the book presents a chronologically arranged critical reading of Ondaatje’s six volumes. Among the study’s concerns are the relationship between the poet’s life and work, his poetic debts and development, his theory of poetry and his central themes. It also includes close readings of Ondaatje’s monographs on Leonard Cohen and Edwin Muir, the Scots poet and critic. The book suggests that Ondaatje’s poetry can be seen as constituting a relatively cohesive personal canon that has evolved with each book building on its predecessors while simultaneously preparing the ground for its successor. The author argues that Ondaatje’s writing has a narrative unity and trajectory determined by crucial events in his life, especially the breakup of his family and his subsequent exile from his father and Ceylon. The result is a body of work whose vision is post-Christian, postmodern, and, despite an often humorous tone, fundamentally tragic. |
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Sam Solecki, ed. Published four years after the poet’s death, Yours, Al can be read as an unexpurgated companion to his 1997 autobiography, Reaching for the Beaufort Sea, and his collected poems, Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (2000). Like any body of interesting correspondence, they offer a perspective on the life and times of an individual from a viewpoint unavailable to anyone else. If, to quote the title of one of Purdy’s last books, No One Else Is Lawrence!, it is also true that no one else is quite like Purdy. And we read letters, whether Lawrence’s or Purdy’s, to encounter those very qualities that make him unique, or in Mary Wordsworth’s more figurative phrase, "to see the breathing of the inmost heart upon paper." What we discover are the various, sometimes contradictory aspects of a great writer’s self caught in the voices and personae of letters written to various people at different times and on different occasions. We get a more complex, almost cubist self-portrait in various styles and in nearly countless typefaces than we find in an autobiography (or biography). In Purdy’s case, the "picture" is the result of thousands of individual texts produced over a period of half a century and it illustrates Proust’s suggestion that "On ne se réalise que successivement," a notion that finds some incidental confirmation in Purdy’s uncertainty for many years in his letters and his books about his name: was he Alfred Wellington Purdy, Alfred W. Purdy, A.W. Purdy, Alfred Purdy or Al? In this fascinating collection we find Purdy in dialogue with individuals as different as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Northrop Frye, Jack McClelland and Pierre Trudeau. |
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Paul
Stevens and Viviana Comensoli, eds. and
contributors
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Paul Stevens and David
Loewenstein, eds. and contributors |
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Paul Stevens
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Rosemary Sullivan Villa Air-Bel HarperCollins and John Murray, 2006 The true story of a remarkable place and time and of a group of legendary artists, intellectuals, scientists, musicians, writers, philosophers, and political leaders who found shelter and sanity in a world turned murderous. France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler’s Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Victor Serge, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, and scores of other cultural elite denounced as enemies of the Third Reich, fear and uncertainty define daily life. One wrong glance, one misplaced confidence could mean arrest, deportation, and death. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a chateau outside Marseilles where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive. Financed by the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, unlikely heroes -- feisty graduate student Marian Davenport, Harvard-educated classical scholar Varian Fry, beautiful and compelling heiress Mary Jayne Gold, and brilliant young Socialist and survivor of the Battle of Dunkerque, Danny Bénédite as well as his British wife Theo -- cajole, outwit, and use every means possible to stave off the Nazis and newly-installed Vichy government officials circling closer with each passing day. The chateau was a vibrant artistic salon, home to lively debates and clandestine affairs, to Sunday art auctions and subversive surrealist games. Relationships within the house were tense and arguments were common, but the will to survive kept the covert operation under wraps. Beyond the chateau’s luscious façade war raged, yet hope reverberated within its halls. With the aid of their young rescuers, these diverse individuals, intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified, were able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Villa Air-Bel is a powerfully told, meticulously researched true story. Rosemary Sullivan explores the diaries, memoirs and letters of the individuals involved while uncovering their private worlds and the web of relationships they developed. Filled with suspense, drama and intrigue Villa Air-Bel is an excellent work of narrative nonfiction that delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history |
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David Townsend, trans. and ed. Walter of Châtillon, The Alexandreis: A Twelfth Century Epic Broadview Press, 2006 Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century best-seller: scribes produced over two hundred manuscripts. The poem follows Alexander from his first successes in Asia Minor, through his conquest of Persia and India, to his progressive moral degeneration and his poisoning by a disaffected lieutenant. The Alexandreis exemplifies twelfth-century discourses of world domination and the exoticism of the East. But at the same time it calls such dreams of mastery into question, repeatedly undercutting as it does Alexander’s claims to heroism and virtue—and by extension, similar claims by the great men of Walter’s own generation. This extraordinarily layered and subtle poem stands as a high-water mark of the medieval tradition of Latin narrative literature. |
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Germaine Warkentin Decentring the Renaissance University of Toronto Press, 2001 Much has been written about the effect early European discoverers and explorers had on Canada, but little on the effect Canada and its Native peoples had on the discoverers and explorers. Decentring the Renaissance contemplates that reversal of perspective from north of the border, where Spanish influence was thin and Britain and France contended for hegemony. It brings together essays by Natalie Zemon Davis, Selma Barkham, Denys Delage, Réal Ouellet, Anne Lake Prescott, Olive Dickason and others, from a ground-breaking 1996 conference organized by Germaine Warkentin. |
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Christopher Warley Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society, a way to try to come to grips with the broad social transformations taking place at the end of the sixteenth century. By stressing the struggle over social classification, the book revises studies that have tied the influence of sonnet sequences to either courtly love or to Renaissance individualism. Drawing on Marxist aesthetic theory, it offers detailed examinations of sequences by Lok, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. It will be valuable to readers interested in Renaissance and genre studies, and post-Marxist theories of class. |
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Karen A. Weisman Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994 In Imageless Truths Karen Weisman offers a new reading of Shelley's work in the context of the poet's changing constructions of poetic fictions. Shelley's understanding of language in general, and of fictions and their rhetorical tropes in particular, evolved throughout his career, and Weisman argues that it is in his self-consciousness over these transformations that we can find the primary motivating factor in the poet's philosophical and literary development. Weisman discerns in Shelley an ongoing quest for a mode of fiction-making that can accommodate both the poet's belief in a metaphysical ultimate and his anxiety over the implications of grounding poetic fictions too firmly in the details of quotidian existence. If Shelley's awareness of fictionality is a major element in the poetry, it is an awareness that comes with the troubled sense of the limits of fiction. |
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Dan White Religious diversity and ferment characterize the period that gave rise to Romanticism in England. It is generally known that many individuals who contributed to the new literatures of the late eighteenth century came from Dissenting backgrounds, but we nonetheless often underestimate the full significance of nonconformist beliefs and practices during this period. Daniel White provides a clear and useful introduction to Dissenting communities, focusing on Anna Barbauld and her familial network of heterodox "liberal" Dissenters whose religious, literary, educational, political, and economic activities shaped the public culture of early Romanticism in England. He goes on to analyze the roles of nonconformity within the lives and writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, offering a Dissenting genealogy of the Romantic movement.
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