Title: Spectacle and society in Livy's history 
Author: Feldherr, Andrew 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Classical History | Comparative Literature | Literature
Publisher's Description: Public spectacle - from the morning rituals of the Roman noble to triumphs and the shows of the Arena - formed a crucial component of the language of power in ancient Rome. The historian Livy (c. 60 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), who provides our fullest description of Rome's early history, presents his account of the growth of the Roman state itself as something to be seen - a visual monument and public spectacle. Through analysis of several episodes in Livy's History , Andrew Feldherr demonstrates the ways in which Livy uses specific visual imagery to make the reader not only an observer of certain key events in Roman history but also a participant in those events. This innovative study incorporates recent literary and cultural theory with detailed historical analysis to put an ancient text into dialogue with contemporary discussions of visual culture.In Spectacle and Society in Livy's History , Feldherr shows how Livy uses the literary representation of spectacles from the Roman past to construct a new sense of civic identity among his readers. He offers a new way of understanding how Livy's technique addressed the political and cultural needs of Roman citizens in Livy's day. In addition to renewing our understanding of Livy through modern scholarship, Feldherr provides a new assessment of the historian's aims and methods by asking what it means for the historian to make readers spectators of history.   [brief]
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Title: The rest is silence: death as annihilation in the English Renaissance 
Author: Watson, Robert N
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: How did the fear of death coexist with the promise of Christian afterlife in the culture and literature of the English Renaissance? Robert Watson exposes a sharp edge of blasphemous protest against mortality that runs through revenge plays such as The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet , and through plays of procreation such as Measure for Measure and Macbeth . Tactics of denial appear in the vengefulness that John Donne directs toward female bodies for failing to bestow immortality, and in the promise of renewal that George Herbert sets against the threat of closure.Placing these literary manifestations in the context of specific Jacobean deathbed crises and modern cultural distortions, Watson explores the psychological roots and political consequences of denying that death permanently erases sensation and consciousness.   [brief]
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Title: Resistant structures: particularity, radicalism, and Renaissance texts 
Author: Strier, Richard
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature | English Literature
Publisher's Description: Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must - or cannot - say or do.The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.   [brief]
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Title: Rabelais's carnival: text, context, metatext 
Author: Kinser, Sam
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | European Literature | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: How is it possible, after four centuries, that a major episode in Rabelais's novels remains systematically misread? The episode, which playfully and grotesquely treats the relation of Carnival to Lent, occurs in Rabelais's Fourth Book , his last and most artfully crafted novel. Samuel Kinser argues that the text has been distorted because critics have not attended to the episode's performative as well as literary contexts, overlooking the innovative use Rabelais made in his work of his immediate world. In this original interpretation of the Fourth Book , Kinser evokes the gestures, games, and visual, oral, bodily semantics of Carnival and Lent as they were performed in Rabelais's day. He also underscores the importance to Rabelais of the invention of printing, an innovation which revolutionized the relationships of author and reader. Understanding this and fearing it, Rabelais adopted an extraordinary set of disguises as an author, disguises which in their bewildering interplay constitute the truest sense of his carnival.   [brief]
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Title: Transpacific displacement: ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature
Author: Huang, Yunte
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Asian Literature | Comparative Literature | Poetry | Anthropology | Asian Studies | China
Publisher's Description: Yunte Huang takes a most original "ethnographic" approach to more and less well-known American texts as he traces what he calls the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia. Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, <I>Transpacific Displacement </I>opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang relates Imagism to earlier linguistic ethnographies of Asia and to racist representations of Asians in American pop culture, such as the book and movie character Charlie Chan, then shows that Asian American writers subject both literary Orientalism and racial stereotyping to double ventriloquism and countermockery. Going on to offer a provocative critique of some textually and culturally homogenizing tendencies exemplified in Maxine Hong Kingston's work and its reception, Huang ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, which he views as new ethnographies that maintain linguistic and cultural boundaries.   [brief]
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Title: The custom of the castle: from Malory to Macbeth 
Author: Ross, Charles Stanley
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | European History | English Literature | Medieval Studies | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: The "custom of the castle" imposes strange ordeals on knights and ladies seeking hospitality - daunting, mostly evil challenges that travelers must obey or even defend. This seemingly fantastic motif, first conceived by Chrètien de Troyes in the twelfth century and widely imitated in medieval French romance, flowered again when Italian and English authors adopted it during the century before Shakespeare's plays and the rise of the novel. Unlike other scholars who have dismissed it as pure literary convention, Charles Ross finds serious social purpose behind the custom of the castle.Ross explores the changing legal and cultural conceptions of custom in France, Italy, and England to uncover a broad array of moral issues in the many castle stories. He concentrates on single scenes that are common to a series of epics, showing how their nuanced narratives reflect real social limits of order, violence, justice, civility, and political conformity. His investigation of masterpieces from the thirteenth-century Lancelot to The Faerie Queene - by way of Malory, Boiardo, and Ariosto - demonstrates for the first time the impact on Shakespeare's plays, particularly Macbeth , of an earlier way of thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of social customs.   [brief]
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Title: Faultlines: cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading 
Author: Sinfield, Alan
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: If we come to consciousness within a language that is complicit with the social order, how can we conceive, let alone organize, resistance to that social order? This key question in the politics of reading and subcultural practice informs Alan Sinfield's book on writing in early-modern England.New historicism has often shown people trapped in a web of language and culture. In lively discussions of writings by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sidney, and Donne, Sinfield reassesses the scope of dissidence and control. The early-modern state, Christianity, and the cultural apparatus, despite an ideology of unity and explicit violence, could not but allow space to challenging voices. Sinfield shows that disruptions in concepts of hierarchy, nationality, gender, and sexuality force their way into literary texts.Sinfield is often provocative. He "rewrites" Julius Caesar to produce a different politics, compares Sidney's idea of poetry to Leonid Brezhnev's, and reinstates the concept of character in the face of post-structuralist theory. He keeps the current politics of literary study in view, especially in a substantial chapter on Shakespeare in the U.S. Sinfield subjects interactions between class, ethnicity, sexuality, and the professional structures of the humanities to a detailed and hard-hitting critique, and argues for new commitments to collectivities and subcultures.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England 
Author: Mallin, Eric Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.   [brief]
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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: 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: 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: 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 tireless traveler: twenty letters to the Liverpool Mercury 
Author: Trollope, Anthony 1815-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1978
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Letters
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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: Memory and re-creation in troubadour lyric 
Author: Van Vleck, Amelia Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | European Literature | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: In spite of the fame of individual singers, many of whose names are legendary, the songs of the troubadours often come to us in multiple versions, each with a different sequence of stanzas. What accounts for this variability? Authorial self-effacement might explain why much anonymous medieval poetry was "reworked," but Amelia Van Vleck argues that this answer will not suffice when the author of the song is well known and admired.Van Vleck outlines a new way of reading troubadour lyric by questioning the belief that chansonniers were compiled from song-sheets tracing back to written "authorized" copies. She challenges the very appropriateness of a concept of "text" as applied to troubadour lyric. Instead of superimposing a nineteenth-century notion of "lyric poetry" on these songs, reading them as "perfect" texts and attempting to re-establish an "authentic" version through textual criticism, we must, she claims, become aware of these songs as potential performances with moveable parts, each version a realization of the whole song. Van Vleck concludes that it was primarily the voice, not the pen, that created (and re-created) this innovative body of poetry that forms the very foundation of the Western European lyric.   [brief]
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Title: Collected prose
Author: Olson, Charles 1910-1970
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | Poetry | Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | Poetry
Publisher's Description: The prose writings of Charles Olson (1910-1970) have had a far-reaching and continuing impact on post-World War II American poetics. Olson's theories, which made explicit the principles of his own poetics and those of the Black Mountain poets, were instrumental in defining the sense of the postmodern in poetry and form the basis of most postwar free verse.The Collected Prose brings together in one volume the works published for the most part between 1946 and 1969, many of which are now out of print. A valuable companion to editions of Olson's poetry, the book backgrounds the poetics, preoccupations, and fascinations that underpin his great poems. Included are Call Me Ishmael , a classic of American literary criticism; the influential essays "Projective Verse" and "Human Universe"; and essays, book reviews, and Olson's notes on his studies. In these pieces one can trace the development of his new science of man, called "muthologos," a radical mix of myth and phenomenology that Olson offered in opposition to the mechanistic discourse and rationalizing policy he associated with America's recent wars in Europe and Asia. Editors Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander offer helpful annotations throughout, and poet Robert Creeley, who enjoyed a long and mutually influential relationship with Olson, provides the book's introduction.   [brief]
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Title: Darkness moves: an Henri Michaux anthology, 1927-1984
Author: Michaux, Henri 1899-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "genius," and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "is without equal in the literature of our time." This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux's major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.   [brief]
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Title: Dryden in revolutionary England 
Author: Bywaters, David A
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | European History
Publisher's Description: In 1681, when he wrote Absalom and Achitophel , John Dryden was poet laureate and historiographer royal at the court of his patron Charles II, and the acknowledged champion of a successful political cause. Only a few years later, Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism, followed by James II's deposition for favoring Catholics, had cost the poet both his honors and his public. In no way, however, did Dryden accept the status of a political has-been. David Bywaters argues convincingly that this post-revolutionary phase of Dryden's career reveals a polemic as consistent as that of earlier periods.Dryden not only lived on in the country that had metaphorically cast him out but also remained a public literary figure, responding in his work to contemporary political changes. Between 1687 and 1700 he developed a subtle and powerful rhetoric in order to reconstruct his political and literary authority. Discussing both major and less-studied works, Dryden in Revolutionary England tells us much about the relation between politics and literature during a crucial, formative moment.   [brief]
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Title: "Mademoiselle Irnois" and other stories 
Author: Gobineau, Arthur, comte de 1816-1882
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Literature
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Title: Green thoughts, green shades: essays by contemporary poets on the early modern lyric 
Author: Post, Jonathan F. S 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.   [brief]
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