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Your search for 'Literature' in subject found 210 book(s).
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1. cover
Title: The Berlin novels of Alfred Döblin: Wadzek's Battle with the steam turbine, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Men without mercy, and November 1918 online access is available to everyone
Author: Dollenmayer, David B
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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2. cover
Title: Acts of implication: suggestion and covert meaning in the works of Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen online access is available to everyone
Author: Ehrenpreis, Irvin 1920-
Published: University of California Press,  1981
Subjects: Literature
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3. cover
Title: "Mademoiselle Irnois" and other stories online access is available to everyone
Author: Gobineau, Arthur, comte de 1816-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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4. cover
Title: Precious nonsense: the Gettysburg address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Twelfth night online access is available to everyone
Author: Booth, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature
Publisher's Description: Why do we value literature so? Many would say for the experience it brings us. But what is it about that experience that makes us treasure certain writings above others? Stephen Booth suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. He uses three disparate texts - the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - to demonstrate how poetics triumphs over logic in the invigorating mental activity that enriches our experience of reading. Booth presents his case in a book that is crisply playful while at the same time thoroughly analytical. He demonstrates the lapses in logic and the irrational connections in examples of very different types of literature, showing how they come close to incoherence yet maintain for the reader a reliable order and purpose. Ultimately, Booth argues, literature gives us the capacity to cope effortlessly with, and even to transcend, the complicated and demanding mental experiences it generates for us.This book is in part a witty critique of the trends - old and new - of literary criticism, written by an accomplished and gifted scholar. But it is also a testimony to the power of the process of reading itself. Precious Nonsense is certain to bring pleasure to anyone interested in language and its beguiling possibilities.   [brief]
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5. cover
Title: The Ethnography of reading
Author: Boyarin, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Literature
Publisher's Description: Writing, the subject of much innovative scholarship in recent years, is only half of what we call literacy. The other half, reading, now finally receives its due in these groundbreaking essays by a distinguished group of anthropologists and literary scholars.The essays move well beyond the simple rubric of "literacy" in its traditional sense of evolutionary advancement from oral to written communication. Some investigate reading in exotically cross-cultural contexts. Some analyze the long historical transformation of reading in the West from a collective, oral practice to the private, silent one it is today, while others demonstrate that in certain Western contexts reading is still very much a social activity. The reading situations described here range from Anglo-Saxon England to contemporary Indonesia, from ancient Israel to a Kashaya Pomo Indian reservation.Filled with insights that erase the line between orality and textuality, this collection will attract a broad readership in anthropology, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as in religious, gender, and cultural studies.   [brief]
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6. cover
Title: Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit online access is available to everyone
Author: Judovitz, Dalia
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Literature
Publisher's Description: Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production.Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works including The Large Glass , Fountain and Given 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas. Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, occupied himself with issues of genre, gender, and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture, and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens up modernism to more speculative explorations, while clearing the ground for the aesthetic of appropriation central to postmodernism.   [brief]
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7. cover
Title: Voices of the song lyric in China/ online access is available to everyone
Author: Yu, Pauline 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | China
Publisher's Description: This collection is the first comprehensive treatment of the song lyric ( tz'u ) in China from its origins through the nineteenth century. Engaging issues of form, language, voice, and transmission, these essays explore the changing and frequently problematic situation of the tz'u over centuries of l . . . [more]
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8. cover
Title: Chaucerian play: comedy and control in the Canterbury tales online access is available to everyone
Author: Kendrick, Laura
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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9. cover
Title: The chances of rhyme: device and modernity online access is available to everyone
Author: Wesling, Donald
Published: University of California Press,  1980
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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10. cover
Title: Literary architecture: essays toward a tradition: Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust, Henry James online access is available to everyone
Author: Frank, Ellen Eve
Published: University of California Press,  1983
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
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11. cover
Title: Flight from Eden: the origins of modern literary criticism and theory online access is available to everyone
Author: Cassedy, Steven
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
Publisher's Description: Steven Cassedy takes aim at two of the most enduring myths of modern criticism: that it is secular, and that it is new and autonomous. He argues that though modern criticism is often forbiddingly scientific and technical, the modern critic remains something of a mystic. Every school of modern criticism - from structuralism to postmodern criticism - rests on a faith in an "Eden," an irreducible essence, a myth, like the common myth that there is an intrinsic distinction between "poetic" language and "ordinary" language. The modern critic attempts to abandon all mystical faith; this is the "flight from Eden." But it is always in vain.It is traditionally assumed that modern literary criticism and theory came from France, and relatively recently. In fact, according to Cassedy, the entire modern critical consciousness was already formed by the early twentieth century in the minds of writers who were primarily neither professional critics nor philosophers, but poets. Some were French (Mallarmé, and Valéry); others were not (Rilke, Bely, and the Russian avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov). In them we find the same Edenic faith, the same effort to abandon it, and the same failure of that effort.   [brief]
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12. cover
Title: Misogyny, misandry, and misanthropy online access is available to everyone
Author: Bloch, R. Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: These essays, originally comprising an issue of Representations , explore the relation between gender, eroticism, and violence through close analysis of a range of both high and popular cultural forms, from R. Howard Bloch on medieval theology to Carol Clover on contemporary slasher films. Does misogyny differ from misandry? Can author intention be separated from social context? Do good women counterbalance or reenforce the misogyny of negative examples? Is an obsession with women itself misogynistic? These questions are approached from various angles by Joel Fineman, Charles Bernheimer, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Frances Ferguson, Naomi Schor and Gillian Brown. In sum, the authors detail not only the ways in which gender is represented, but also the changes to which representation subjects questions of sexual difference.   [brief]
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13. cover
Title: The hydrogen jukebox: selected writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990
Author: Schjeldahl, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | Art Criticism
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14. cover
Title: Dryden and the tradition of panegyric online access is available to everyone
Author: Garrison, James D
Published: University of California Press,  1975
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
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15. cover
Title: The gold standard and the logic of naturalism: American literature at the turn of the century
Author: Michaels, Walter Benn
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Literature | American Literature
Publisher's Description: The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.   [brief]
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16. cover
Title: The collected essays of Robert Creeley. online access is available to everyone
Author: Creeley, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: For nearly four decades, Robert Creeley has been a popular and often controversial force in American poetry and letters. His essays, written from the 1950s to the 1980s and collected here for the first time, show a poet deeply touched by and in touch with the concerns of his post-war generation. His spare prose illuminates many important literary and artistic figures - Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, John Chamberlain, and others - capturing the essence of their distinctively American achievements.   [brief]
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17. cover
Title: The enchantments of love: amorous and exemplary novels online access is available to everyone
Author: Zayas y Sotomayor, María de 1590-1650
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
Publisher's Description: An instant best-seller in Spain in 1637, The Enchantments of Love is a collection of shrewd and timeless tales in the tradition of Bocaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales . Although some of the tales have appeared in English through the centuries, this delightful translation by H. Patsy Boyer is the first complete text.The structure of the book is provided by a series of lavish soirees at which five men and five women entertain with stories their ailing hostess, the lovely Lysis. Each of the ten tales explores some aspect of "enchantment," or love, between a handsome gallant and a lovely lady. The sharp contrast between the women's and men's stories transmits a subtle, often ironic feminism. Their originality, frankness, and powerful style make them as readable today as they were 350 years ago.The women storytellers emphasize the perspective of female protagonists, all of whom are deceived or abused by their husbands or by suitors. Each is finally driven to perform some act of heroism before finding satisfaction in marriage, or a haven in the convent. The men's stories all point to moral flaws in the characters' behavior: egotism, avarice, shortsightedness, lust, and unfaithfulness.Maria de Zayas portrays every theme from eroticism and brutal rape to the most exalted love. Her success with this book and its sequel, The Disenchantments of Love (1647), is well documented, although the details of her life are sadly lacking. Her bold treatment of the relationships between men and women challenged the literary conventions of her day, and her defense of women has earned her a reputation as a pioneering feminist.   [brief]
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18. cover
Title: A coat of many colors: Osip Mandelstam and his mythologies of self-presentation online access is available to everyone
Author: Freidin, Gregory
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Literature | European Literature
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19. cover
Title: The limits of realism: Chinese fiction in the revolutionary period online access is available to everyone
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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20. cover
Title: Dwelling in the text: houses in American fiction online access is available to everyone
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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