Title: 1910, the emancipation of dissonance 
Author: Harrison, Thomas J 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | European Literature | Art History
Publisher's Description: The year 1910 marks an astonishing, and largely unrecognized, juncture in Western history. In this perceptive interdisciplinary analysis, Thomas Harrison addresses the extraordinary intellectual achievement of the time. Focusing on the cultural climate of Middle Europe and paying particular attention to the life and work of Carlo Michelstaedter, he deftly portrays the reciprocal implications of different discourses - philosophy, literature, sociology, music, and painting. His beautifully balanced and deeply informed study provides a new, wider, and more ambitious definition of expressionism and shows the significance of this movement in shaping the artistic and intellectual mood of the age. 1910 probes the recurrent themes and obsessions in the work of intellectuals as diverse as Egon Schiele, Georg Trakl, Vasily Kandinsky, Georg Lukàcs, Georg Simmel, Dino Campana, and Arnold Schoenberg. Together with Michelstaedter, who committed suicide in 1910 at the age of 23, these thinkers shared the essential concerns of expressionism: a sense of irresolvable conflict in human existence, the philosophical status of death, and a quest for the nature of human subjectivity. Expressionism, Harrison argues provocatively, was a last, desperate attempt by the intelligentsia to defend some of the most venerable assumptions of European culture. This ideological desperation, he claims, was more than a spiritual prelude to World War I: it was an unheeded, prophetic critique.   [brief]
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Title: ABC of influence: Ezra Pound and the remaking of American poetic tradition 
Author: Beach, Christopher
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry | American Studies | American Literature
Publisher's Description: In this first full-length study of Pound's influence on American poetry after World War II, Beach argues that Pound's experimental mode created a new tradition of poetic writing in America. Often neglected by academic critics and excluded from the "canon" of American poetic writing, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and later members of this experimental tradition have maintained the sense of an American avant garde in keeping with Pound's modernist experiments of the 1910s and 1920s. The work of these poets has served as a counterforce to the established traditions of the "American Sublime" and the Anglo-American formalism represented by T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism. ABC of Influence challenges previous discussions of poetic influence, particularly Harold Bloom's oedipal theory of revisionist "misreading," as insufficient for understanding the influence Pound's modernist practice and his relationship to poetic tradition had in defining the postmodernist poetics of Olson, Duncan, and other postwar American writers. The relation of these poets is most clearly seen on a formal level, but it is also evident in thematic elements of their work and in their stance toward poetic convention, the "canon," political and social engagement, and the inclusion of historical and other nonpoetic materials in the poetic text.This book makes a significant contribution to the study of modern American poetry by exploring modernism's legacy and charting new canonical possibilities in American literature. In reading Pound through the works of later poets, it also provides important new insights into Pound's own work and ideas.   [brief]
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Title: Abuses 
Author: Lingis, Alphonso 1933-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Literature | Cultural Anthropology | Social and Political Thought | Psychology | Travel
Publisher's Description: Part travelogue, part meditation, Abuses is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today.A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy - aesthetic and sympathetic - which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me. . . . These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting."Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, Abuses contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, Abuses will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself."   [brief]
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Title: Acting naturally: Mark Twain in the culture of performance 
Author: Knoper, Randall K 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Twain | American Studies
Publisher's Description: The phenomenon of performance is central to Mark Twain's writing and persona. But Twain's performative aspects have usually been dismissed as theatrical and discounted as lowbrow burlesque. Randall Knoper takes Twain's theatricality seriously and shows how Twain's work both echoes and engages the social and cultural problems embodied in nineteenth-century popular entertainments.Knoper draws on theater history, theories of acting and bodily expression, psychology and physiology, scientific accounts of spiritualism, and commercial spectacles to demonstrate Twain's use of "acting" and the "natural" in his creative explorations. This book enlarges our understanding of Mark Twain - the artist and the man - and also provides a window into a culture whose entertainments registered the sexual, racial, economic, and scientific forces that were transforming it.   [brief]
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Title: Acts of implication: suggestion and covert meaning in the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen 
Author: Ehrenpreis, Irvin 1920-
Published: University of California Press,  1981
Subjects: Literature
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Title: Ambiguous angels: gender in the novels of Galdós 
Author: Jagoe, Catherine
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galdós's novels to the "woman question" in Spain, arguing that after 1892 the muted feminist discourse of his early work largely disappears. While his later novels have been interpreted as celebrations of the emancipated new woman, Jagoe contends that they actually reinforce the conservative, bourgeois model of frugal, virtuous womanhood - the angel of the house.Using primary sources such as periodicals, medical texts, and conduct literature, Jagoe's examination of the evolution of feminism makes Ambiguous Angels valuable to anyone interested in gender, culture, and narrative in nineteenth-century Europe.   [brief]
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Title: American literary realism and the failed promise of contract 
Author: Thomas, Brook
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | American Studies | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: In law, the late nineteenth century is often called the Age of Contract; in literature, the Age of Realism. Brook Thomas's new book brings contract and realism together to offer groundbreaking insights into both while exploring the social and cultural crises that accompanied America's transition from industrial capitalism to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth century.Thomas argues that, radically conceived, contract promised to generate an equitable social order - one organized around interpersonal exchange rather than conformity to a transcendental standard. But as the idea of contract took center stage in American culture after the Civil War, the law failed to deliver on this promise, instead legitimating hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Moving expertly from legal analysis to social history, to profoundly recontextualized literary critique, Thomas shows how writers like Twain, James, Howells, and Chopin took up contract as a model, formally and thematically, evoking its possibilities and dramatizing its failures.Thomas investigates a host of issues at the forefront of public debate in the nineteenth century: race and the meaning of equality, miscegenation, marriage, labor unrest, economic transformation, and changes in notions of human agency and subjectivity. Cross-examining a wide range of key literary and legal texts, he rethinks the ways they relate to each other and to their social milieu.As recent political rhetoric demonstrates, the promise of contract is still very much alive. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract challenges conventional critical wisdom and makes a broad, provocative, and nuanced contribution to legal and literary studies, as well as to intellectual and social history. It promises to revise and enrich our understanding of American culture, law, and letters.   [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: The attic: memoir of a Chinese landlord's son 
Author: Cao, Guanlong 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Autobiography | Literature in Translation | China | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: Novelist Guanlong Cao's autobiographical account of growing up in urban Shanghai affords a rare glimpse into daily life during the forty turbulent years following the Communist Revolution. Forced to the bottom of Chinese society as "class enemies," Cao's family eked out a meager existence in a cramped attic. The details of their day-to-day existence - the endless quest for enough food, its preparation, Cao's schooling and friends, the stirrings of sexual desire, his dreams and fantasies - are brought brilliantly to life in spare yet evocative prose. The memoir illuminates a world largely unknown to Westerners, one where human pettiness, cruelty, joy, and tenderness play themselves out against a backdrop of political upheaval and material scarcity.Reminiscent of the concise style of classical Chinese memoirs, Cao's lean, elegant prose heightens the emotional intensity of his story. Perceptive and humorous, his voice is deeply original. It is a voice that demands to be heard - for the historical moment it captures as well as for the personal revelations it distills.   [brief]
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Title: Aunt Safiyya and the monastery: a novel 
Author: Ṭāhir, Bahāʾ 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Fiction
Publisher's Description: This brief, beautifically crafted novel introduces one of the finest contemporary Arab novelists to English-speaking audiences. In it, Bahaa' Taher, one of a group of Egyptian writers - including the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz - noted for their revealing portraits of Egyptian life and society, tells the dramatic story of a young Muslim who, when his life is threatened, finds sanctuary in a community of Coptic monks. It is a tale of honor and of the terrible demands of blood vengeance; it probes the question of how a people or nation can become divided against itself.Taher has a magical gift for evoking the village life of Upper Egypt - a vastly different setting than urban Cairo and a landscape that tourists usually glimpse only from the windows of trains and buses taking them to the Pharaonic sites. Here, where Christians and Muslims have coexisted peacefully for centuries, where the traditions of the Coptic Church are as powerful as those of the Muslims, Taher crafts an intricate and compelling tale of far-reaching implications. With a powerful narrative voice and a genius for capturing the complex nuances of human interaction, Taher brilliantly depicts the poignant drama of a traditional society caught up in the process of change.   [brief]
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Title: Behind the scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the struggle for the Abbey Theatre 
Author: Frazier, Adrian Woods
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Poetry | Theatre
Publisher's Description: Behind the Scenes presents the story of Dublin's famous Abbey Theatre and its major creative personalities: W. B. Yeats, Annie Horniman, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory. Part history, part sociology, part biography, Frazier's work recreates the forces that shaped the Abbey stage, forces that involved the spirited participation of actors, audiences, press, and financiers as well as of the famous poet-playwright who was its co-director. His book unfolds an entertaining and suspenseful tale, centered on the undeniably autocratic personality of W.B. Yeats and with the political struggles of Ireland as a backdrop.   [brief]
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Title: The Berlin novels of Alfred Döblin: Wadzek's Battle with the steam turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without mercy, and November 1918 
Author: Dollenmayer, David B
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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Title: The best of the Argonauts: the redefinition of the epic hero in book one of Apollonius's Argonautica 
Author: Clauss, James Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Literature | Classical Literature and Language | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: This revelatory exploration of Book One of the Argonautica rescues Jason from his status as the ineffectual hero of Apollonius' epic poem. James J. Clauss argues that by posing the question, "Who is the best of the Argonauts?" Apollonius redefines the epic hero and creates, in Jason, a man more realistic and less awesome than his Homeric predecessors, one who is vulnerable, dependent on the help of others, even morally questionable, yet ultimately successful.In bringing Apollonius' "curious and demanding poem" to life, Clauss illuminates two features of the poet's narrative style: his ubiquitous allusions to the poetry of others, especially Homer, and the carefully balanced structural organization of his episodes. The poet's subtextual interplay is explored, as is his propensity for underscoring the manipulation of the poetry of others through ring composition.   [brief]
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Title: Books of the brave: being an account of books and of men in the Spanish Conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century New World 
Author: Leonard, Irving Albert 1896-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Comparative Literature | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Since its original publication in 1949, Irving A. Leonard's pioneering Books of the Brave has endured as the classic account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World. Leonard's study documents the works of fiction that accompanied and followed the conquistadores to the Americas and goes on to argue that popular texts influenced these men and shaped the way they thought and wrote about their New World experiences.For the first time in English, this edition combines Leonard's text with a selection of the documents that were his most valuable sources - nine lists of books destined for the Indies. Containing a wealth of information that is sure to spark future study, these lists provide the documentary evidence for what is perhaps Leonard's greatest contribution: his demonstration that royal and inquisitorial prohibitions failed to control the circulation of books and ideas in colonial Spanish America.Rolena Adorno's introduction signals the lasting value of Books of the Brave and brings the reader up to date on developments in cultural-historical studies that have shed light on the role of books in Spanish American colonial culture. Adorno situates Leonard's work at the threshold between older, triumphalist views of Spanish conquest history and more recent perspectives engendered by studies of native American peoples.With its rich descriptions of the book trade in both Spain and America, Books of the Brave has much to offer historians as well as literary critics. Indeed, it is a highly readable and engaging book for anyone interested in the cultural life of the New World.   [brief]
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Title: Caught in the act: theatricality in the nineteenth-century English novel 
Author: Litvak, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introdu . . . [more]
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Title: Cervantes and the burlesque sonnet 
Author: Martín, Adrienne Laskier
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Until now the great renown of Cervantes as a prose humorist has eclipsed his skill as a humorous poet. Cervantes and the Burlesque Sonnet amply illustrates the comic genius of Cervantes the poet, and at the same time establishes criteria by which comic poetry can be analyzed and evaluated.Adrienne Martín identifies Cervantes's pivotal role within the history of the European burlesque sonnet, whose unique aesthetic conventions lead her to a new definition of Renaissance literary humor as the self-conscious expression of human folly. In Don Quixote , and in the Don Quixote sonnets, Cervantes not only adopts and refines this notion of madness but also transforms the burlesque sonnet tradition inherited from Italy and from his predecessors in Spain by intermingling several different comic currents.Cervantes uses humor to point out our complex, paradoxical, quintessentially human nature and brings renewed vigor, critical and intellectual depth, different concerns, and an original tone to the burlesque. He frees comic poetry from its traditional marginal status and facilitates the subsequent explosion of burlesque and satire seen in Spain's baroque poets. Excellent translations of more than sixty Italian and Spanish sonnets enhance Martín's fine analysis.   [brief]
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Title: The chances of rhyme: device and modernity 
Author: Wesling, Donald
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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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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Title: Chaucerian play: comedy and control in the Canterbury tales 
Author: Kendrick, Laura
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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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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