Title: Consuming the romantic utopia: love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism
Author: Illouz, Eva 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: To what extent are our most romantic moments determined by the portrayal of love in film and on TV? Is a walk on a moonlit beach a moment of perfect romance or simply a simulation of the familiar ideal seen again and again on billboards and movie screens? In her unique study of American love in the twentieth century, Eva Illouz unravels the mass of images that define our ideas of love and romance, revealing that the experience of "true" love is deeply embedded in the experience of consumer capitalism. Illouz studies how individual conceptions of love overlap with the world of clichés and images she calls the "Romantic Utopia." This utopia lives in the collective imagination of the nation and is built on images that unite amorous and economic activities in the rituals of dating, lovemaking, and marriage.Since the early 1900s, advertisers have tied the purchase of beauty products, sports cars, diet drinks, and snack foods to success in love and happiness. Illouz reveals that, ultimately, every cliché of romance - from an intimate dinner to a dozen red roses - is constructed by advertising and media images that preach a democratic ethos of consumption: material goods and happiness are available to all.Engaging and witty, Illouz's study begins with readings of ads, songs, films, and other public representations of romance and concludes with individual interviews in order to analyze the ways in which mass messages are internalized. Combining extensive historical research, interviews, and postmodern social theory, Illouz brings an impressive scholarship to her fascinating portrait of love in America.   [brief]
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Title: A flowering tree: and other oral tales from India A.K. Ramanujan ; edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes 
Author: Ramanujan, A. K 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Fiction | Language and Linguistics | Asian Literature | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted.With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could - servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales.With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.   [brief]
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Title: Propertius in love: the elegies
Author: Propertius, Sextus
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literature in Translation | Poetry | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: These ardent, even obsessed, poems about erotic passion are among the brightest jewels in the crown of Latin literature. Written by Propertius, Rome's greatest poet of love, who was born around 50 b.c., a contemporary of Ovid, these elegies tell of Propertius' tormented relationship with a woman he calls "Cynthia." Their connection was sometimes blissful, more often agonizing, but as the poet came to recognize, it went beyond pride or shame to become the defining event of his life. Whether or not it was Propertius' explicit intention, these elegies extend our ideas of desire, and of the human condition itself.   [brief]
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: Learned girls and male persuasion: gender and reading in Roman love elegy
Author: James, Sharon L
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literature | Poetry | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed - the docta puella, or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers - as plaint and confession - but rather from the viewpoint of the women - thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation - James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.   [brief]
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Title: A carnival of parting: the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand as sung and told by Madhu Natisar Nath of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan 
Author: Nath, Madhu Natisar
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with him.The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting."   [brief]
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Title: Notes on love in a Tamil family
Author: Trawick, Margaret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia
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Title: The disenchanted self: representing the subject in the Canterbury tales 
Author: Leicester, H. Marshall (Henry Marshall) 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: The question of the "dramatic principle" in the Canterbury Tales , of whether and how the individual tales relate to the pilgrims who are supposed to tell them, has long been a central issue in the interpretation of Chaucer's work. Drawing on ideas from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and social theory, Leicester proposes that Chaucer can lead us beyond the impasses of contemporary literary theory and suggests new approaches to questions of agency, representation, and the gendered imagination.Leicester reads the Canterbury Tales as radically voiced and redefines concepts like "self" and "character" in the light of current discussions of language and subjectivity. He argues for Chaucer's disenchanted practical understanding of the constructed character of the self, gender, and society, building his case through close readings of the Pardoner's, Wife of Bath's, and Knight's tales. His study is among the first major treatments of Chaucer's poetry utilizing the techniques of contemporary literary theory and provides new models for reading the poems while revising many older views of them and of Chaucer's relation to his age.   [brief]
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Title: Speak, bird, speak again: Palestinian Arab folktales 
Author: Muhawi, Ibrahim 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Anthropology | Literature in Translation | Middle Eastern Studies | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Were it simply a collection of fascinating, previously unpublished folktales, Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales would merit praise and attention because of its cultural rather than political approach to Palestinian studies. But it is much more than this. By combining their respective expertise in English literature and anthropology, Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana bring to these tales an integral method of study that unites a sensitivity to language with a deep appreciation for culture.As native Palestinians, the authors are well-suited to their task. Over the course of several years they collected tales in the regions of the Galilee, Gaza, and the West Bank, determining which were the most widely known and appreciated and selecting the ones that best represented the Palestinian Arab folk narrative tradition. Great care has been taken with the translations to maintain the original flavor, humor, and cultural nuances of tales that are at once earthy and whimsical. The authors have also provided footnotes, an international typology, a comprehensive motif index, and a thorough analytic guide to parallel tales in the larger Arab tradition in folk narrative. Speak, Bird, Speak Again is an essential guide to Palestinian culture and a must for those who want to deepen their understanding of a troubled, enduring people.   [brief]
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Title: For love of the automobile: looking back into the history of our desires
Author: Sachs, Wolfgang
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Science | European History | Technology and Society | German Studies
Publisher's Description: In his cultural analysis of the motor car in Germany, Wolfgang Sachs starts from the assumption that the automobile is more than a means of transportation and that its history cannot be understood merely as a triumphant march of technological innovation. Instead, Sachs examines the history of the automobile from the late 1880s until today for evidence on the nature of dreams and desires embedded in modern culture. Written in a lively style and illustrated by a wealth of cartoons, advertisements, newspaper stories, and propaganda, this book explores the nature of Germany's love affair with the automobile. A "history of our desires" for speed, wealth, violence, glamour, progress, and power - as refracted through images of the automobile - it is at once fascinating and provocative.Sachs recounts the development of the automobile industry and the impact on German society of the marketing and promotion of the motor car. As cars became more affordable and more common after World War II, advertisers fanned the competition for status, refining their techniques as ownership became ever more widespread.Sachs concludes by demonstrating that the triumphal procession of private motorization has in fact become an intrusion. The grand dreams once attached to the automobile have aged. Sachs appeals for the cultivation of new dreams born of the futility of the old ones, dreams of "a society liberated from progress," in which location, distance, and speed are reconceived in more appropriately humane dimensions.   [brief]
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Title: Romance and the "yellow peril": race, sex, and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction
Author: Marchetti, Gina
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema.The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms , then considers later films such as Shanghai Express , Madame Butterfly , and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now.Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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Title: Chaucer's Dante: allegory and epic theater in The Canterbury tales 
Author: Neuse, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Richard Neuse here explores the relationship between two great medieval epics, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . He argues that Dante's attraction for Chaucer lay not so much in the spiritual dimension of the Divine Comedy as in the human.Borrowing Bertolt Brecht's phrase "epic theater," Neuse underscores the interest of both poets in presenting, as on a stage, flesh and blood characters in which readers would recognize the authors as well as themselves. As spiritual autobiography, both poems challenge the traditional medieval mode of allegory, with its tendency to separate body and soul, matter and spirit. Thus Neuse demonstrates that Chaucer and Dante embody a humanism not generally attributed to the fourteenth century.   [brief]
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Title: City steeple, city streets: saints' tales from Granada and a changing Spain 
Author: Slater, Candace
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Literary Theory and Criticism | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Candace Slater's new book focuses on narratives concerning Fray Leopoldo de Alpandeire (1864-1956), a Capuchin friar from Granada and probably the most popular nonconsecrated saint today in all of Spain. In tracing the emergence of a group of contemporary legends about Fray Leopoldo, Slater discusses both the stories she tape-recorded in the streets of Granada and the friar's official biography. She underscores the essential pluralism of the tales, their undercurrent of resistance to institutional authority, and their deep concern for the relationship between past and present. Bearing witness to the subtlety and resilience of even the most apparently conservative folk-literary forms, these stories are not only about the role of saints and miracles in an increasingly secular and industrial society but, first and foremost, also about the legacy of the Franco years.   [brief]
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Title: Morality tales: law and gender in the Ottoman court of Aintab
Author: Peirce, Leslie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this skillful analysis, Leslie Peirce delves into the life of a sixteenth-century Middle Eastern community, bringing to light the ways that women and men used their local law court to solve personal, family, and community problems. Examining one year's proceedings of the court of Aintab, an Anatolian city that had recently been conquered by the Ottoman sultanate, Peirce argues that local residents responded to new opportunities and new constraints by negotiating flexible legal practices. Their actions and the different compromises they reached in court influenced how society viewed gender and also created a dialogue with the ruling regime over mutual rights and obligations. Locating its discussion of gender and legal issues in the context of the changing administrative practices and shifting power relations of the period, Morality Tales argues that it was only in local interpretation that legal rules acquired vitality and meaning.   [brief]
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Title: Revolutionizing the family: politics, love, and divorce in urban and rural China, 1949-1968
Author: Diamant, Neil Jeffrey 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Politics | China | Sociology | Asian History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationships in significant--but often unintended--ways throughout the Maoist period. His evidence reveals a confused and often conflicted state apparatus, as well as cases of Chinese men and women taking advantage of the law to justify multiple sexual encounters, to marry for beauty, to demand expensive gifts for engagement, and to divorce on multiple occasions. Moreover, he finds, those who were best placed to use the law's more liberal provisions were not well-educated urbanites but rather illiterate peasant women who had never heard of sexual equality; and it was poor men, not women, who were those most betrayed by the peasant-based revolution.   [brief]
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Title: Love customs in eighteenth-century Spain 
Author: Martín Gaite, Carmen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Gender Studies
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Title: Re-reading Sappho: reception and transmission
Author: Greene, Ellen 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Re-Reading Sappho reflects the recent fascination with Sappho's "afterlife." The essays examine the changing interpretations of scholars and writers who have read the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry. As the contributors explore the ways that each generation creates its own Sappho, the Sapphic tradition itself becomes an index to changing sensibilities and cultural norms about sexuality, gender roles, and notions of fema le authorship.A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.   [brief]
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Title: Time and the crystal: studies in Dante's Rime petrose 
Author: Durling, Robert M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: The Rime petrose , Dante's powerful lyrics about a woman as beautiful and as hard as a precious stone, are generally acknowledged to be an important moment in his stylistic development. In this first full-length investigation of the poetics of the petrose and of their relation to the Divine Comedy , Durling and Martinez uncover much new material, especially from medieval science (astrology and mineralogy), philosophy, and theology. The authors argue that the Rime petrose represent a major turning point in Dante's conception of a "microcosmic poetics" that became the fundamental mode of the Commedia . They demonstrate how Dante here attempts his first full account of his relation to the universe as a whole.This work offers many new insights into the intrinsic significance of these remarkable poems and their place in Dante's development - especially far-reaching are the implications for the interpretation of the Divine Comedy . The book will be of interest not only to students of Dante but also to intellectual historians, historians of science, students of poetics and poetic theory, and to all those interested in medieval literature.   [brief]
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Title: Divine passions: the social construction of emotion in India 
Author: Lynch, Owen M 1931-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | South Asia | History
Publisher's Description: Naked holy men denying sexuality and feeling; elderly people basking in the warmth and security provided by devoted and attentive family members; fastidious priests concerned solely with rules of purity and minutiae of ritual practice; puritanical moralists concealing women and sexuality behind purdah's veils - these are familiar Western stereotypes of India. The essays in Divine Passions , however, paint other, more colorful and emotionally alive pictures of India: ecstatic religious devotees rolling in temple dust; gray-haired elders worrying about neglect and mistreatment by family members; priests pursuing a lusty, carefree ideal of the good life; and jokers reviling one another with bawdy, sexual insults at marriages.Drawing on rich ethnographic data from emotion-charged scenarios, these essays question Western academic theories of emotion, particularly those that reduce emotions to physiological sensations or to an individual's private feelings. Presenting an alternative view of emotions as culturally constructed and morally evaluative concepts grounded in the bodily self, the contributors to Divine Passions help dispel some of the West's persistent misconceptions of Indian emotional experience. Moreover, the edition as a whole argues for a new and different understanding of India based on field research and an understanding of the devotional (bhakti) tradition.   [brief]
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Title: A courtship after marriage: sexuality and love in Mexican transnational families
Author: Hirsch, Jennifer S
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Latino Studies | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From about seven children per woman in 1960, the fertility rate in Mexico has dropped to about 2.6. Such changes are part of a larger transformation explored in this book, a richly detailed ethnographic study of generational and migration-related redefinitions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in r . . . [more]
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