It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high-a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." In a book that has become a classic, Sebastian Junger explores the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and the candid accounts of the people whose lives the storm touched. The Perfect Storm is a real-life thriller that makes us feel like we've been caught, helpless, in the grip of a force of nature beyond our understanding or control. Winner of the American Library Association's 1998 Alex Award.

In contrast to traditional Enlightenment studies that focus solely on authors and ideas, Gary Kates' employs a literary lens to offer a wholly original history of the period in Europe from 1699 to 1780. Each chapter is a biography of a book which tells the story of the text from its inception through to the revolutionary era, with wider aspects of the Enlightenment era being revealed through the narrative of the book's publication and reception. Here, Kates joins new approaches to book history with more traditional intellectual history by treating authors, publishers, and readers in a balanced fashion throughout. Using a unique database of 18th-century editions representing 5,000 titles, the book looks at the multifaceted significance of bestsellers from the time. It analyses key works by Voltaire, Adam Smith, Madame de Graffigny, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume and champions the importance of a crucial innovation of the age: the rise of the 'erudite blockbuster', which for the first time in European history, helped to popularize political theory among a large portion of the middling classes. Kates also highlights how, when, and why some of these books were read in the European colonies, as well as incorporating the responses of both ordinary men and women as part of the reception histories that are so integral to the volume.

Collects more than sixty foundational documents from student protest from the frontlines of revolution Few people know that student protest emerged in Latin America decades before the infamous student movements of Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s. Even fewer people know that Central American university students authored colonial agendas and anti-colonial critiques. In fact, Central American students were key actors in shaping ideas of nation, empire, and global exchange. Bridging a half-century of student protest from 1929 to 1983, this source reader contains more than sixty texts from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, including editorials, speeches, manifestos, letters, and pamphlets. Available for the first time in English, these rich texts help scholars and popular audiences alike to rethink their preconceptions of student protest and revolution. The texts also illuminate key issues confronting social movements today: global capitalism, dispossession, privatization, development, and state violence. Key Features Makes available for the first time to English-language readers a diverse archive of more than sixty foundational documents and ephemera accompanied by an introduction, section introductions and further reading Expands the geographic scope of anti-colonial movement scholarship by presenting anti-colonial thought in the most contentious decades of the 20th century from a region peripheral even within anti-colonial and postcolonial studies Advances anti-colonial and postcolonial studies by taking urban students as critical actors and so recasting thematics of the peasantry, the rural/urban divide, and religion Suggests a new social movement chronology beyond the so-called "Global 1968," or the common notion that student movements peaked in May 1968 in Paris, New York City, Berkeley, and Mexico City

The American South received increased attention from national commentators during the interwar era. Beginning in the 1920s, the proliferation of daily book columns and Sunday book supplements in newspapers reflected a growing audience of educated readers and its demand for books and book reviews. This period of intensified scrutiny coincided with a boom in the publishing industry, which, in turn, encouraged newspapers to pay greater attention to the world of books. Reviewing the South shows how northern critics were as much involved in the Southern Literary Renaissance as Southern authors and critics. Southern writing, Gardner argues, served as a litmus to gauge Southern exceptionalism. For critics and their readers, nothing less than the region's ability to contribute to the vibrancy and growth of the nation was at stake.

This book offers insight into the ways students enrolled in European classrooms in higher education come to understand American experience through its literary fiction, which for decades has been a key component of English department offerings and American Studies curricula across the continent and in Great Britain and Ireland. The essays provide an understanding of how post-World War II American writers, some already elevated to 'canonical status' and some not, are represented in European university classrooms and why they have been chosen for inclusion in coursework. The book will be of interest to scholars and teachers of American literature and American studies, and to students in American literature and American studies courses.

This unique volume brings together literary critics, historians, and anthropologists from around the world to offer new understandings of gender and sexuality as they were redefined during the upheaval of 1968.

The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746) by Charles Batteux was arguably the most influential work on aesthetics published in the eighteenth century. It influenced every major aesthetician in the second half of the century: Diderot, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and others either adopted his views or reacted against them. It is the work generally credited with establishing the modern system of the arts: poetry, painting, music, sculpture and dance. Batteux's book is also an invaluable aid to the interpretation of the arts of eighteenth century. And yet there has never been a complete or reliable translation of The Fine Arts into English. Now James O. Young, a leading contemporary philosopher of art, has provided an eminently readable and accurate translation. It is fully annotated and comes with a comprehensive introduction that identifies the figures who influenced Batteux and the writers who were, in turn, influenced by him. The introduction also discusses the ways in which The Fine Arts has continuing philosophical interest. In particular, Young demonstrates that Batteux's work is an important contribution to aesthetic cognitivism (the view that works of art contribute importantly to knowledge) and that Batteux made a significant contribution to understanding the expressiveness of music. This book will be of interest to everyone interested in the arts of the eighteenth century, French studies, the history of European ideas, and philosophy of art.

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias. Especially in Eurasia and North America, especially among the middle and upper classes, people had the space, time, and energy for very long books. More than other multi-volume nineteenth-century collections, the dictionaries, or their descendants of the same name, remain with us in the twenty-first century. Online or on paper, people still consult Oxford for British English, Webster for American, Grimm for German, Littre for French, Dahl for Russian. Even in spaces whose literary languages already had long philological and lexicographic traditions-Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin-the burgeoning imperialisms and nationalisms of the nineteenth century generated new dictionaries. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Newly automated technologies and systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, and advertising led to their unprecedented popularization. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. In this volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars investigate these lexicographers asking how the world within which they lived supported their projects? What did language itself mean for them? What goals did they try to accomplish in their dictionaries?

Hazlitt the Dissenter is unique in providing the first book-length account of Hazlitt's early life as a dissenter. As the first multi-disciplinary account of Hazlitt's early literary career, it provides a new insight into the literary, intellectual, political and religious culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.

When Ovid, already renowned for his love poetry, the Metamorphoses and other works, was exiled by Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8, he continued to write. After five books of Tristia, he composed a collection of verse letters, the Epistulae ex Ponto, in which he appeals to his friends and supporters in Rome, lamenting his lot and begging for their help in mitigating it. In these epistolary elegies his inventiveness flourishes no less than before and his imaginative self-fashioning is as ingenious and engaging as ever, although in a minor key. This commentary on Book I assists intermediate and advanced students in understanding Ovid's language and style, while guiding them in the appreciation of his poetic art. The introduction examines the literary background of the Epistulae ex Ponto, their relation to Ovid's earlier works, and their special interest and appeal to readers of Augustan poetry.

This new study of one of Britain's greatest modern playwrights represents the first major, extended discussion of Edward Bond's work in over twenty years. The book combines rigorous and stimulating analysis and discussion of Bond's plays and ideas about drama and society. For the first time, there is also discussion of selected plays from his later, post-2000 period, including Innocence and Have I None, alongside explorations of widely studied plays such as Saved.

This book brings a variety of voices into conversation about the issues of identity, community, tension and violence, and peace in the West: from Sophocles to Alice Walker, from Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. and from Euripides to Edward Said.

War and Peace and Anna Karenina are widely recognised as two of the greatest novels ever written. Their author, Leo Tolstoy, has been honoured as the father of the modern war story; as an innovator in psychological prose and forerunner of stream of consciousness; and as a genius at using fiction to reveal the mysteries of love and death. At the time of his death in 1910, Tolstoy was known the world over as both a great writer and as a merciless critic of institutions that perpetrated, bred, or tolerated injustice and violence in any form. Yet among literary critics and rival writers, it has become a commonplace to disparage Tolstoy's "thought" while praising his "art." In this Very Short Intorduction Liza Knapp explores the heart of Tolstoy's work. Focussing on his masterpieces of fiction which have stood the test of time, she analyses his works of non-fiction alongside them, and sketches out the core themes in Tolstoy's art and thought, and the interplay between them. Tracing the continuing influence of Tolstoy's work on modern literature, Knapp highlights those aspects of his writings that remain relevant today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this unique study, Michael Y. Bennett re-reads four influential modern plays alongside their contemporary debates between rationalism and empiricism to show how these monumental achievements were thoroughly a product of their time, but also universal in their epistemological quest to understand the world through a rational and/or empirical model. Bennett contends that these plays directly engage in their contemporary epistemological debates rather than through the lens of a specific philosophy. Besides producing new, insightful readings of heavily-studied plays, the interdisciplinary (historical, philosophical, dramatic, theatrical, and literary) frame Bennett constructs allows him to investigate one of the most fundamental questions of the theatre - how does meaning get made? Bennett suggests that the key to unlocking theatrical meaning is exploring the tension between empirical and rational modes of understanding. The book concludes with an interview with performance artist Coco Fusco.

Becoming the Gentleman explains why British citizens in the long eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. Supplementing recent work on femininity, Solinger identifies a corpus of texts that address masculinity and challenges the notion of a masculine figure that has been regarded as unchanging.

This book offers a comprehensive political biography of Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe, (1915-1990), a central figure in Nigerian political history for more than forty years. Starting in 1936 as a protege of Nnamdi Azikiwe, then Nigeria's most renowned nationalist, Mbadiwe himself by the 1950s became a frontline nationalist. And next to Tafawa Balewa from the North who became Prime Minster in 1957, he was the most important figure in the Nigerian Federal Government between 1952 and Nigeria's first military coup in 1966. During this time he held a succession of important Cabinet positions and was Parliamentary Leader of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which was in a ruling alliance with the Northern People's Congress (NPC). In contrast, his older prominent political contemporaries, Azikiwe of the Eastern Region, Igbo Leader of the NCNC; Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region, Yoruba Leader of the Action Group (AG); and Ahmadu Bello of the Northern Region, Fulani Leader of the NPC, all carved out their political careers totally or largely at the regional level. Throughout his political career Mbadiwe's focus was always at the national level. Truly, it has been stated that Mbadiwe was one of the founding fathers of the Nigerian State. Nonetheless, Mbadiwe's ambition for himself to lead Nigeria and for his nation to set it on the path to greatness faced insuperable difficulties. In a country of widespread poverty, high illiteracy, and a grossly underdeveloped private sector, there were fierce ethnic and regional conflicts for the control of governments and resources, leading to massive corruption and serious instability. This in turn led to prolonged military rule twenty years in Mbadiwe's lifetime which was often more corrupt and repressive than civilian rule, and was bitterly deprecated by Mbadiwe.