Title: Sappho's lyre: archaic lyric and women poets of ancient Greece
Author: Rayor, Diane J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literature in Translation | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets - the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers.Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.   [brief]
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Title: Catullan provocations: lyric poetry and the drama of position 
Author: Fitzgerald, William 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Classics | Comparative Literature | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.   [brief]
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Title: Classical Telugu poetry: an anthology 
Author: Nārāyaṇarāvu, Vēlcēru 1932-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Asian Studies | Hinduism | Poetry | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia | Social Theory | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking anthology opens a window on a thousand years of classical poetry in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The classical tradition in Telugu is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. This authoritative volume, the first anthology of classical Telugu poetry in English, gives an overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. The beautifully translated selections are often dramatic and unexpected in tone and effect, and sometimes highly personal. The authors have provided an informative, engaging introduction, fleshing out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments, and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.   [brief]
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Title: Mental ills and bodily cures: psychiatric treatment in the first half of the twentieth century
Author: Braslow, Joel T 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Science | Psychiatry | Medicine | History and Philosophy of Science | Psychology
Publisher's Description: Mental Ills and Bodily Cures depicts a time when psychiatric medicine went to lengths we now find extreme and perhaps even brutal ways to heal the mind by treating the body. From a treasure trove of California psychiatric hospital records, including many verbatim transcripts of patient interviews, Joel Braslow masterfully reconstructs the world of mental patients and their doctors in the first half of the twentieth century. Hydrotherapy, sterilization, electroshock, lobotomy, and clitoridectomy - these were among the drastic somatic treatments used in these hospitals.By allowing the would-be healers and those in psychological and physical distress to speak for themselves, Braslow captures the intense and emotional interplay surrounding these therapies. His investigation combines revealing clinical detail with the immediacy of "being there" in the institutional setting while decisions are made, procedures undertaken, and results observed by all those involved. We learn how well-intentioned physicians could rationalize and regard as therapeutic treatments that often had dreadful consequences, and how much the social and cultural world is inscribed within the practice of biological psychiatry. The book will interest historians of medicine, practicing psychiatrists, and everyone who knows or has seen what it's like to be in mental distress.   [brief]
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Title: A. Sutzkever: selected poetry and prose 
Author: Sutzkever, Abraham 1913-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Literature in Translation | Poetry
Publisher's Description: The work of A. Sutzkever, one of the major twentieth-century masters of verse and the last of the great Yiddish poets, is presented to the English reader in this banquet of poetry, narrative verse, and poetic fiction. Sutzkever's imposing body of work links images from Israel's present and past with the extinction of the Jews of Europe and with deeply personal reflection on human existence.In Sutzkever's poetry the Yiddish language attains a refinement, richness of sound, and complexity of meaning unknown before. His poetry has been translated into many languages, but this is the most comprehensive presentation of his work in English. Benjamin Harshav provides a biography of the poet and a critical assessment of his writings in the context of his times. The illustrations were originally created for Sutzkever's work by such artists as Marc Chagall, Yosl Bergner, Mane-Katz, Yankl Adler, and Reuven Rubin.   [brief]
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Title: The flight of the mind: Virginia Woolf's art and manic-depressive illness 
Author: Caramagno, Thomas C
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Autobiographies and Biographies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this major new book on Virginia Woolf, Caramagno contends psychobiography has much to gain from a closer engagement with science. Literary studies of Woolf's life have been written almost exclusively from a psychoanalytic perspective. They portray Woolf as a victim of the Freudian "family romance," reducing her art to a neurotic evasion of a traumatic childhood.But current knowledge about manic-depressive illness - its genetic transmission, its biochemistry, and its effect on brain function - reveals a new relationship between Woolf's art and her illness. Caramagno demonstrates how Woolf used her illness intelligently and creatively in her theories of fiction, of mental functioning, and of self structure. Her novels dramatize her struggle to imagine and master psychic fragmentation. They helped her restore form and value to her own sense of self and lead her readers to an enriched appreciation of the complexity of human consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Green thoughts, green shades: essays by contemporary poets on the early modern lyric 
Author: Post, Jonathan F. S 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.   [brief]
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Title: "Peaks of Yemen I summon": poetry as cultural practice in a North Yemeni tribe
Author: Caton, Steven Charles 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Folklore and Mythology | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: In this first full-scale ethnographic study of Yemeni tribal poetry, Steven Caton reveals an astonishingly rich folkloric system where poetry is both a creation of art and a political and social act. Almost always spoken or chanted, Yemeni tribal poetry is cast in an idiom considered colloquial and "ungrammatical," yet admired for its wit and spontaneity. In Yemeni society, the poet has power over people. By eloquence the poet can stir or, if his poetic talents are truly outstanding, motivate an audience to do his bidding. Yemeni tribesmen think, in fact, that poetry's transformative effect is too essential not to use for pressing public issues.Drawing on his three years of field research in North Yemen, Caton illustrates the significance of poetry in Yemeni society by analyzing three verse genres and their use in weddings, war mediations, and political discourse on the state. Moreover, Caton provides the first anthropology of poetics. Challenging Western cultural assumptions that political poetry can rarely rise above doggerel, Caton develops a model of poetry as cultural practice. To compose a poem is to construct oneself as a peacemaker, as a warrior, as a Muslim. Thus the poet engages in constitutive social practice.Because of its highly interdisciplinary approach, this book will interest a wide range of readers including anthropologists, linguists, folklorists, literary critics, and scholars of Middle Eastern society, language, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Poets on painters: essays on the art of painting by Twentieth-century poets
Author: McClatchy, J. D 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | Art | Poetry | Art History
Publisher's Description: What are poets looking at , looking for , when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened languag . . . [more]
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Title: The poet's truth: a study of the poet in Virgil's Georgics 
Author: Perkell, Christine
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: The controversy over Virgil's optimism or pessimism, which has long absorbed readers of his poetry, might fruitfully yield to a perspective which allows contradictions to stand unresolved, to constitute, in fact, the essence of his poems' meaning. So interpreted, the pervasive contradictions of the Georgics are not problems to be solved, but expressions of the poet's vision of fundamental tensions in human experience.Focusing on the figure of the poet in his relationship to the farmer, Professor Perkell studies oppositions between power and beauty, profit and art, matter and spirit, which are critical to the poem's meaning. She points to the poet's privileging of myth over praeceptum , of divine revelation over experiment and practice, and of mystery over solution. The poem's oppositions find ultimate expression in the bougonia , literally false as Georgic precept but metaphorically true as image of Iron Age technology and culture. Through this metaphor, the poet suggests the high value of his own truth and implicitly challenges the values of the agricultural, material poem which the Georgics on its surface professes to be.Shaped by insights of reader-response and structuralist criticism, this new study of the Georgics should interest Classicists and students of literature.   [brief]
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Title: The dissonant legacy of modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the voices of modern Spanish American poetry 
Author: Kirkpatrick, Gwen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Latin American Studies | European Literature | Poetry
Publisher's Description: This is a provocative new reading of a crucial and often misunderstood period of Spanish American literature. Most studies of modernismo have focused on the poetry of Rubén Darío and have noted the movement's aestheticism and its unmistakable French influences. Kirkpatrick concentrates instead on important negations of harmony and the movement's internal dismantling of its own precepts. Major contradictions within the movement itself are revealed through the works of the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig. Extending her analysis to later writers such as Ramón López Velarde, César Vallejo, and Alfonsina Storni, Kirkpatrick shows the changes that foreshadow the more overt experiments of these poets and illuminates the continuity between the modernistas and later generations.   [brief]
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Title: Orphans of Petrarch: poetry and theory in the Spanish Renaissance 
Author: Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: In Spain as elsewhere, Renaissance poets transformed the lyric tradition by using Petrarch as a source of poetic renewal. But political unity and military hegemony, coupled with a sense of cultural inferiority and an obsession with ethnic purity, made Spain different. Drawing on modern critical theory, Ignacio Navarrete offers a new exposition of the development of Spanish Renaissance poetics. Grounded in both philology and cultural theory, Orphans of Petrarch is the first book to integrate the "Spanish difference" into an understanding of Renaissance lyric as a European phenomenon.   [brief]
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Title: Mexican ballads, Chicano poems: history and influence in Mexican-American social poetry 
Author: Limón, José Eduardo
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | Latin American History | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems combines literary theory with the personal engagement of a prominent Chicano scholar. Recalling his experiences as a student in Texas, José Limón examines the politically motivated Chicano poetry of the 60s and 70s. He bases his analyses on Harold Bloom's theories of literary influence but takes Bloom into the socio-political realm. Limón shows how Chicano poetry is nourished by the oral tradition of the Mexican corrido , or master ballad, which was a vital part of artistic and political life along the Mexican-U.S. border from 1890 to 1930.Limón's use of Bloom, as well as of Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, brings Chicano literature into the arena of contemporary literary theory. By focusing on an important but little-studied poetic tradition, his book challenges our ideas of the American canon and extends the reach of Hispanists and folklorists as well.   [brief]
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Title: Picturing Chinatown: art and orientalism in San Francisco
Author: Lee, Anthony W 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | California and the West | Asian American Studies | Photography | Art History
Publisher's Description: This visually and intellectually exciting book brings the history of San Francisco's Chinatown alive by taking a close look at images of the quarter created during its first hundred years, from 1850 to 1950. Picturing Chinatown contains more than 160 photographs and paintings, some well known and many never reproduced before, to illustrate how this famous district has acted on the photographic and painterly imagination. Bringing together art history and the social and political history of San Francisco, this vividly detailed study unravels the complex cultural encounter that occurred between the women and men living in Chinatown and the artists who walked its streets, observed its commerce, and visited its nightclubs. Artistic representations of San Francisco's Chinatown include the work of some of the city's most gifted artists, among them the photographers Laura Adams Armer, Arnold Genthe, Dorothea Lange, Eadweard Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins and the painters Edwin Deakin, Yun Gee, Theodore Wores, and the members of the Chinese Revolutionary Artists' Club. Looking at the work of these artists and many others, Anthony Lee shows how their experiences in the district helped encourage, and even structured, some of their most ambitious experiments with brush and lens. In addition to discussing important developments in modern art history, Lee highlights the social and political context behind these striking images. He demonstrates the value of seeing paintings and photographs as cultural documents, and in so doing, opens a fascinating new perspective on San Francisco's Chinatown.   [brief]
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Title: City for sale: the transformation of San Francisco
Author: Hartman, Chester W
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | Politics | California and the West
Publisher's Description: San Francisco is perhaps the most exhilarating of all American cities--its beauty, cultural and political avant-gardism, and history are legendary, while its idiosyncrasies make front-page news. In this revised edition of his highly regarded study of San Francisco's economic and political development since the mid-1950s, Chester Hartman gives a detailed account of how the city has been transformed by the expansion--outward and upward--of its downtown. His story is fueled by a wide range of players and an astonishing array of events, from police storming the International Hotel to citizens forcing the midair termination of a freeway. Throughout, Hartman raises a troubling question: can San Francisco's unique qualities survive the changes that have altered the city's skyline, neighborhoods, and economy? Hartman was directly involved in many of the events he chronicles and thus had access to sources that might otherwise have been unavailable. A former activist with the National Housing Law Project, San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, and other neighborhood organizations, he explains how corporate San Francisco obtained the necessary cooperation of city and federal governments in undertaking massive redevelopment. He illustrates the rationale that produced BART, a subway system that serves upper-income suburbs but few of the city's poor neighborhoods, and cites the environmental effects of unrestrained highrise development, such as powerful wind tunnels and lack of sunshine. In describing the struggle to keep housing affordable in San Francisco and the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, Hartman reveals the human face of the city's economic transformation.   [brief]
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Title: Inventing the feeble mind: a history of mental retardation in the United States
Author: Trent, James W
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | United States History | Sociology | American Studies | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: James W. Trent uses public documents, private letters, investigative reports, and rare photographs to explore our changing perceptions of mental retardation over the past 150 years. He contends that the economic vulnerability of mentally retarded people (and their families), more than the claims mad . . . [more]
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Title: Polyeideia: the Iambi of Callimachus and the archaic Iambic tradition
Author: Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry
Publisher's Description: This book provides a new literary treatment of an often-overlooked collection of fragmentary poems from the third century B.C.E. Alexandrian poet Callimachus. Callimachus' Iambi form a collection of thirteen poems, which rework archaic Greek iambography and look forward to Roman satire and other genres, especially to such collections as Horace's Epodes. The poems are especially significant as examples of cultural memory since they are composed both as an act of commemorating earlier poetry and as a manipulation of traditional features of iambic poetry to refashion the iambic genre. This book fills a significant gap by providing the first complete translation of several of these fragmentary poems in English, along with line-by-line commentary, notes, and literary analysis. The structure of the book is thematic, with chapters focusing on such topics as poetic voice, fable, ethical criticism, and statuary. Each chapter consists of an introduction, text and selected critical apparatus, translation, and comprehensive thematic discussion. Acosta-Hughes focuses especially on Callimachus' manipulation of traditional features of archaic iambic poetry such as persona loquens, ethical and critical message, and eristic dialogue. He also includes a detailed analysis of the Alexandrian poet's artistic relationship with the earlier iambic poets Archilochus and Hipponax. Polyeideia will interest not only readers of Greek and Hellenistic poetry but also readers of Roman satire and invective verse, as well as those intrigued by the processes of memorializing and fashioning poetic culture.   [brief]
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Title: Unbound voices: a documentary history of Chinese women in San Francisco
Author: Yung, Judy
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian American Studies | Women's Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Unbound Voices brings together the voices of Chinese American women in a fascinating, intimate collection of documents - letters, essays, poems, autobiographies, speeches, testimonials, and oral histories - detailing half a century of their lives in America. Together, these sources provide a captivating mosaic of Chinese women's experiences in their own words, as they tell of making a home for themselves and their families in San Francisco from the Gold Rush years through World War II.The personal nature of these documents makes for compelling reading. We hear the voices of prostitutes and domestic slavegirls, immigrant wives of merchants, Christians and pagans, homemakers, and social activists alike. We read the stories of daughters who confronted cultural conflicts and racial discrimination; the myriad ways women coped with the Great Depression; and personal contributions to the causes of women's emancipation, Chinese nationalism, workers' rights, and World War II. The symphony of voices presented here lends immediacy and authenticity to our understanding of the Chinese American women's lives.This rich collection of women's stories also serves to demonstrate collective change over time as well as to highlight individual struggles for survival and advancement in both private and public spheres. An educational tool on researching and reclaiming women's history, Unbound Voices offers us a valuable lesson on how one group of women overcame the legacy of bound feet and bound lives in America. The selections are accompanied by photographs, with extensive introductions and annotation by Judy Yung, a noted authority on primary resources relating to the history of Chinese American women.   [brief]
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Title: Inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in nineteenth-century France
Author: Dowbiggin, Ian R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Sociology | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: Historically, one of the recurring arguments in psychiatry has been that heredity is the root cause of mental illness. In Inheriting Madness , Ian Dowbiggin traces the rise in popularity of hereditarianism in France during the second half of the nineteenth century to illuminate the nature and evolution of psychiatry during this period.In Dowbiggin's mind, this fondness for hereditarianism stemmed from the need to reconcile two counteracting factors. On the one hand, psychiatrists were attempting to expand their power and privileges by excluding other groups from the treatment of the mentally ill. On the other hand, medicine's failure to effectively diagnose, cure, and understand the causes of madness made it extremely difficult for psychiatrists to justify such an expansion. These two factors, Dowbiggin argues, shaped the way psychiatrists thought about insanity, encouraging them to adopt hereditarian ideas, such as the degeneracy theory, to explain why psychiatry had failed to meet expectations. Hereditarian theories, in turn, provided evidence of the need for psychiatrists to assume more authority, resources, and cultural influence. Inheriting Madness is a forceful reminder that psychiatric notions are deeply rooted in the social, political, and cultural history of the profession itself. At a time when genetic interpretations of mental disease are again in vogue, Dowbiggin demonstrates that these views are far from unprecedented, and that in fact they share remarkable similarities with earlier theories. A familiarity with the history of the psychiatric profession compels the author to ask whether or not public faith in it is warranted.   [brief]
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Title: Seeing double: intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
Author: Stephens, Susan A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context - within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands" - no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.   [brief]
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