Title: Victorian literature and the Victorian visual imagination 
Author: Christ, Carol T
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Art History | English Literature | Victorian History | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Nineteenth-century British culture frequently represented the eye as the preeminent organ of truth. These essays explore the relationship between the verbal and the visual in the Victorian imagination. They range broadly over topics that include the relationship of optical devices to the visual imagination, the role of photography in changing the conception of evidence and truth, the changing partnership between illustrator and novelist, and the ways in which literary texts represent the visual. Together they begin to construct a history of seeing in the Victorian period.   [brief]
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Title: Music in other words: Victorian conversations Ruth A. Solie
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | Classical Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Victorian History
Publisher's Description: Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, Ruth A. Solie examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. Her essays, giving voice to "what goes without saying" on the subject - that cultural information so present and pervasive as to go unsaid - fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This much-anticipated collection, bringing together new and hard-to-find pieces by an acclaimed musicologist, mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people - English and others - experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. Solie's essays start from topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes - including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility - and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.   [brief]
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Title: The feminine sublime: gender and excess in women's fiction 
Author: Freeman, Barbara Claire
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime.Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime."   [brief]
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Title: The rhetoric of confession: shishōsetsu in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction 
Author: Fowler, Edward
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | Japan | Literary Theory and Criticism | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: The shishosetsu is a Japanese form of autobiographical fiction that flourished during the first two decades of this century. Focusing on the works of Chikamatsu Shuko, Shiga Naoya, and Kasai Zenzo, Edward Fowler explores the complex and paradoxical nature of shishosetsu , and discusses its linguisti . . . [more]
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Title: Secure from rash assault: sustaining the Victorian environment 
Author: Winter, James H 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Victorian History | Ecology | Geography | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Nineteenth-century Britain led the world in technological innovation and urbanization, and unprecedented population growth contributed as well to the "rash assault," to quote Wordsworth, on Victorian countrysides. Yet James Winter finds that the British environment was generally spared widespread ecological damage.Drawing from a remarkable variety of sources and disciplines, Winter focuses on human intervention as it not only destroyed but also preserved the physical environment. Industrial blight could be contained, he says, because of Britain's capacity to import resources from elsewhere, the conservative effect of the estate system, and certain intrinsic limitations of steam engines. The rash assault was further blunted by traditional agricultural practices, preservation of forests, and a growing recreation industry that favored beloved landscapes. Winter's illumination of Victorian attitudes toward the exploitation of natural resources offers a valuable preamble to ongoing discussions of human intervention in the environment.   [brief]
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Title: Pulling the devil's kingdom down: the Salvation Army in Victorian Britain
Author: Walker, Pamela J 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Christianity | Victorian History | Religion | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.   [brief]
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Title: Framing American divorce: from the revolutionary generation to the Victorians
Author: Basch, Norma
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Law | United States History | Gender Studies | Victorian History
Publisher's Description: Divorce has become one of the most widely discussed issues in America. In this innovative exploration of the phenomenon of divorce in American society, Norma Basch uses a variety of analytic perspectives to enrich our understanding of the meaning of divorce during the formative years of both the nation and its law, roughly 1770 to 1870. She provides a fascinating, thoughtful look at divorce as a legal action, as an individual experience, and as a cultural symbol in its era of institutionalization and traces the powerful legacy of the first American divorce experiences for us today.Using a unique methodology, Basch fragments her story into three discrete but chronologically overlapping perspectives. In Part I, "Rules," she analyzes the changing legal and legislative aspects of divorce and the public response to them. Part II, "Mediations," focuses on individual cases and presents a close-up analysis of the way ordinary women and men tested the law in the courts. And Part III, "Representations," charts the spiraling imagery of divorce through various fiction and non-fiction narratives that made their way into American popular culture during the nineteenth century.The composite picture that emerges in Framing American Divorce is a vividly untidy one that exposes the gulf between legal and moral abstractions and everyday practices. Divorce, Basch argues, was always a focal point of conflict between the autonomy of women and the authority of men. Tracing the legal, social, and cultural experience of divorce allows Basch to provide a searching exploration of the limits of nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, romantic love, and marriage, and their legacy for us today. She brings her findings up-to-date with a provocative discussion of the current debate over fault or no-fault divorce.   [brief]
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Title: The limits of realism: Chinese fiction in the revolutionary period 
Author: Anderson, Marston
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Chinese intellectuals of the early twentieth century were attracted to realism primarily as a tool for social regeneration. Realism encouraged writers to adopt the stance of the independent cultural critic and drew into the compass of serious literature the disenfranchised "others" of Chinese society. As historical pressures forced new ideological commitments in the late twenties and thirties, however, writers grew suspicious both of the "individualism" implicit in the realist model and of the often superficial nature of the sympathies that their fiction evoked in the middle class. Anderson argues that realism must be defined negatively as a "discourse of limitations" and is of minimal utility in the Chinese search for political and cultural empowerment. He shows how hesitations about the realist model affect the fiction of four representative authors, Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, Mao Dun, and Zhang Tianyi. He also considers the demise of critical realism in the face of a new collectivist understanding of Chinese reality.   [brief]
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Title: The Lioness in bloom: modern Thai fiction about women
Author: Kepner, Susan Fulop 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Fiction | Southeast Asia | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Kepner's selection shows the many ways fiction has mirrored the lives of Thai women over the twentieth century. The spectrum is broad, encompassing the young and the old, the rural and the cosmopolitan, the privileged and the poor. Some writers address previously unacceptable themes: female sexuality, spousal abuse, gender oppression. Others display a scintillating sense of humor. They touch on many themes - injustice, the heartlessness of society, loneliness, the difficult choices that life presents. Susan Kepner's lyrical, faithful translations preserve the tenor and resonances of these voices, many of which will be heard for the first time by English-speaking readers.   [brief]
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Title: Late modernism: politics, fiction, and the arts between the world wars 
Author: Miller, Tyrus 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Art Theory | Cinema and Performance Arts | Politics | Political Theory | History
Publisher's Description: Tyrus Miller breaks new ground in this study of early twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. Whereas modernism studies have generally concentrated on the vital early phases of the modernist revolt, Miller focuses on the turbulent later years of the 1920s and 1930s, tracking the dissolution of modernism in the interwar years.In the post-World War I reconstruction and the worldwide crisis that followed, Miller argues, new technological media and the social forces of mass politics opened fault lines in individual and collective experience, undermining the cultural bases of the modernist movement. He shows how late modernists attempted to discover ways of occupying this new and often dangerous cultural space. In doing so they laid bare the ruin of the modernist aesthetic at the same time as they transcended its limits.In his wide-ranging theoretical and historical discussion, Miller relates developments in literary culture to tendencies in the visual arts, cultural and political criticism, mass culture, and social history. He excavates Wyndham Lewis's hidden borrowings from Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer ; situates Djuna Barnes between the imagery of haute couture and the intellectualism of Duchamp; uncovers Beckett's affinities with Giacometti's surrealist sculptures and the Bolshevik clowns Bim-Bom; and considers Mina Loy as both visionary writer and designer of decorative lampshades. Miller's lively and engaging readings of culture in this turbulent period reveal its surprising anticipation of our own postmodernity.   [brief]
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Title: At the heart of the Empire: Indians and the colonial encounter in late-Victorian Britain 
Author: Burton, Antoinette M 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies | South Asia | Victorian History | Travel | European History | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners - all prominent, educated Indians - represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration.Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.   [brief]
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Title: Dwelling in the text: houses in American fiction 
Author: Chandler, Marilyn R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | American Literature
Publisher's Description: What is a house? And what can architecture tell us about individual psychology, national character and aspiration? The house holds a central place in American mythology, as Marilyn Chandler demonstrates in a series of "house tours" through American novels, beginning with Thoreau's Walden and ending with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping .Chandler illuminates the complex analogies between house and psyche, house and family, house and social environment, and house and text. She traces a historical path from settlement to unsettledness in American culture and explores all the rituals in between: of building, decorating, inhabiting, and abandoning houses. She notes the ambivalence between our desire for rootedness and our romanticization of wide open spaces, relating these poles to the tension between materialism and spirituality in our national character.At a time when housing has become a problem of unprecedented dimensions in America, this look at the place of houses and homes in the American imagination reveals some sources of the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations that underlie the designing and building of the homes we buy, sell, and dream about.   [brief]
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Title: Mother without child: contemporary fiction and the crisis of motherhood 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | American Literature | Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today.   [brief]
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Title: Fiction as history: Nero to Julian 
Author: Bowersock, G. W. (Glen Warren) 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Classics | Literature | European History | Classical Religions | Christianity | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: Using pagan fiction produced in Greek and Latin during the early Christian era, G. W. Bowersock investigates the complex relationship between "historical" and "fictional" truths. This relationship preoccupied writers of the second century, a time when apparent fictions about both past and present were proliferating at an astonishing rate and history was being invented all over again. With force and eloquence, Bowersock illuminates social attitudes of this period and persuasively argues that its fiction was influenced by the emerging Christian Gospel narratives.Enthralling in its breadth and enhanced by two erudite appendices, this is a book that will be warmly welcomed by historians and interpreters of literature.   [brief]
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Title: Foundational fictions: the national romances of Latin America
Author: Sommer, Doris 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Latin American Studies | Gender Studies
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Title: Encounter: a novel of nineteenth-century Korea
Author: Han, Mu-suk 1918-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Asian Literature | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This historical novel, Encounter ( Mannam ), by Hahn Moo-Sook, one of Asia's most honored writers, is a story of the resilience in the Korean spirit. It is told through the experiences of Tasan, a high-ranking official and foremost Neo-Confucian scholar at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of Tasan's fascination with Western learning, then synonymous with Catholicism, he is exiled to a remote province for 18 years. In banishment he meets people from various social and religious backgrounds - Buddhist monks, peasants, shamans - whom he would not otherwise have met. The events of Tasan's life are effectively used to depict the confluence of Buddhist, Neo-Confucian, Taoist, and shamanistic beliefs in traditional Korea.A subplot involves three young sisters, the daughters of a prominent Catholic aristocrat, and affords the reader vivid glimpses into Yi-dynasty women's lives, particularly those of palace ladies, scholars' wives, tavern keepers, shamans, and slaves. In contrast to the long-held Confucian stereotype of female subservience, this story illustrates the richness of women's contribution to Korean culture and tradition. Encounter' s detailed narrative provides a broad and informed view of nineteenth-century Korea, making it a highly useful book for courses on Korean literature and society. It will also be an engaging read for lovers of historical fiction.   [brief]
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Title: Apartment stories: city and home in nineteenth-century Paris and London
Author: Marcus, Sharon 1966-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Literature | European History | Urban Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator - the portière who supervised the apartment building.   [brief]
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Title: Golden days
Author: See, Carolyn
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Available again in paperback, Golden Days is a major novel from one of the most provocative voices on the American literary scene. Linking the recent past with an imagined future, Carolyn See captures life in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s. This marvelously imaginative, hilarious, and original work . . . [more]
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Title: The ford
Author: Austin, Mary Hunter 1868-1934
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | California and the West
Publisher's Description: Mary Austin's 1917 novel illuminates one of the crucial issues in California history - the usurpation of water from the Owens Valley. Ranging from the eastern Sierra to the financial district in San Francisco, the plot portrays the frenzied speculation in land and resources, labor protests, and femi . . . [more]
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Title: Chaucer and the fictions of gender 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Gender Studies | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Hansen challenges both the long-standing myth of Chaucer as the tolerant, wise Father of English poetry and the recent arguments that Chaucer was a protofeminist, subversive of the misogyny of his day. Hansen argues that these mistaken interpretations inhibit readings of Chaucer that respond to feminist and other poststructuralist critiques of traditional literary scholarship.Hansen suggests that the woman's voice in Chaucer reflects an urgent problem of gender identity for two kinds of men, both feminized by fourteenth-century courtly conventions: those who love women, and those who traffic in stories about women. She maintains that Chaucer destabilizes the notion of fixed gender difference but then privileges masculine identity by reconstructing the feminine in orthodox ways. Hansen exhorts readers of Chaucer, and students of the history of gender, to approach Chaucer's fictions with a more sophisticated awareness of their complexity and timeliness.   [brief]
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