Edith Wharton enjoyed a complex relationship with earlymodernism. On the one hand, as a writer committed to the seriousness of novel writing as an art, her love of French literature and her close relationship with Henry James made her open to experiment. Other elements in her circumstances made her resistant to change. She enjoyed enormous success with The House of Mirth, and the public clearly demanded more from her in this style. That novel's naturalism and didactic purpose, Peel argues, conformed to her own belief in the moral purpose of literature, and ultimately Wharton's reading of politics, culture, and society led her to abandon modernistic experiment for ethical, rather than aesthetic reasons. Apart from Modernism explores the political and cultural influences that helped shape Edith Wharton. Peel examines such subjects as her politics, her relationship to bohemianism and modernist experiment, and her idea of the good society through a discussion of her fiction 1900 - 1915, starting with a survey of the early novellas and novels such as The Valley of Decision, The House of Mirth, and The Fruit of the Tree, before concentrating in detail on the years which saw the publication of The Reef, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Important issues such as Wharton's reading of gender, empire, and class form a central part of this discussion. The study emphasizes the crucial role that Wharton's contact with Europe had on her writing, and the significance intellectually and politically of her relationship with Morton Fullerton and her reading of his books on politics. It locates Wharton in her period, surrounded as she was by discourses which called for political and social change, change which an outlook that Peel calls 'American Toryism' made her reluctant to embrace. Her love of motorcars and her excitement about other technological developments such as aeroplanes was inspired by a feeling of exclusivity and not the democratization of culture, whic

This book is a detailed study of Ezra Pound 's explicit and implicit use of elements of the Neoplatonic tradition in his prose and poetry, and of the way it informed his poetics as well as his political and social-economic views.

Volume 4 is devoted to the last years (1857-64); while age and declining health saw a waning of the composer's personal optimism, this was hardly the case artistically speaking. This last volume contains a series of glossaries listing his compositions and the musical and theatrical works he attended throughout his life, as well as a bibliography of the composer, his contemporaries, and the operatic and social milieu of the times.

Bringing together over 70 influential critical articles, Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources is a collection of significant academic writing on the work of the great modernist writer, Virginia Woolf. Beginning with the academic rediscovery of Woolf in the mid-1970s, this collection charts the development of Woolf scholarship up to 2015. It comprises examinations of Woolf's fiction and non-fictional writing, important manuscript and archival discoveries and biographical analyses, as well as critical work on Woolf's feminism, aesthetics and cultural writing. Each volume includes a substantial contextualising introduction surveying Woolf studies in the decade covered. Virginia Woolf: Critical and Primary Sources is an essential academic resource for scholars and common readers alike.

Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity is a study of the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference. Focusing on Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes and using feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory, the project examines representations of looking, working, eating, conversing, and touching, to argue that encounters between selves in 'threshold space' dismantle the binary oppositions that support categorical thinking. A key term throughout the study is recognition, defined as the capacity to tolerate both sameness and difference between separate selves. Recognition of likeness-in-difference thus undermines the exclusionary logic of patriarchal and political hierarchies. Both Eve and Dalila demonstrate the ability to respect the borders of the other while seeking out similarity, but where Paradise Lost depicts the eventual achievement of intersubjective understanding between Adam and Eve after the fall, Samson Agonistes records its failure when Samson, maintaining the boundaries of difference, refuses Dalila's effort to make contact.

This is an illustrated cultural history of the emergence of modern literature in China from the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Chinese Republic, the 1930s and the war period, ending in 1949. Wu Fuhui takes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, drawing in book production, translation, popular and elite texts, international influences and political history. Presented here in English translation for the first time, Wu argues that this was a transformative period in Chinese literature informed both by developments in China's domestic history and the dynamics of global circulation and encounter.

The subject of this book-an Italian-born exiled Prince-has become an icon of misjudged romanticism and Scottish nationalism; much of this is due to the way he has been portrayed over the years. This study traces how the enduring visual image of Prince Charles Edward Stuart was created, beginning with his birth in 1720 and ending with the exhibition of John Pettie's Prince Charles Edward Stuart Entering the Ballroom at Holyrood - probably still the most enduring and popular image of the Stuart prince-at the Royal Academy in 1892. This book considers the role of portraiture in the Stuart court, both before and after exile in 1688 and how the well-established traditions of royal portraiture and image-making were used by the Stuart dynasty to promote their ambitions and stature. Charles's birth in 1720 resulted in a flurry of portrait commissions in which he was depicted as the royal heir apparent. The messianic role with which he was invested reached its apotheosis with the Jacobite uprising of 1745. He adopted the costume and manners of an idealized Highland chieftain and within the space of a few months created an abiding iconography which was to endure long after his death. The major portraits of Charles executed during his lifetime are considered, from the early court portraits of Antonio David and Domenico Dupra to the final images of a broken man by Ozias Humphrey and Hugh Douglas Hamilton. Alongside this, there is a thorough examination of a parallel phenomenon in which works of art, observing established parameters, were copied and adapted, and then re-copied, until the tartan-clad ideal of 1745 began to eclipse the real person. The revering of Charles Edward and the manufacture of items bearing his likeness are compared to other "cults" of the individual and contrasted with the "commercialization of politics" which several commentators have identified as a coherent phenomenon of late eighteenth-century British life. The extent to which the material culture that surrounded the persona of Char

The poetry of Yosano Akiko covers all the many and varied aspects of the experience of love--from early romantic encounters between the lover and beloved to the intimate pleasures of mutual infatuation and then true love. The journey outlined in Akiko's verse also grapples with jealousy and unrequited passion, as Akiko's poem-narrative treats the rivalry between herself and her best friend, the poet Yamakawa Tomiko, for the affection of the dashing young literary lion, Yosano Tekkan, who later became Akiko's husband. Thus, How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love tells a number of stories: a real-life romance unfolds in the poetry of these three poets examined in the book, as well as the story of the journey from romanticism to modernism undertaken by early 20th century Japanese poetry. How Dark Is My Flower emphasizes the astonishing innovations in diction and style, not to mention content, in Akiko's work that transformed the tanka genre from a hidebound and conservative mode of verse to something much more daring and modern. This book pays particular attention to poetry, particularly the tanka genre, in the evolution of modernism in Japanese literature and breaks new ground in the study of modern Japanese literature by examining the invention and evolution of the concept of romantic love.

The Manga is one of Africa's most remote and wild regions: a hostile and unforgiving landscape inhabited by nomads like the hardy Tubu. Situated in south-eastern Niger, and in the shadow of the Old Salt Road, it has been mislaid by the modern world; no Caucasian had been seen there in living memory. The Nomad's Path is an account of a journey across this inhospitable region with former Tubu rebels at a time of Tuareg insurgency, when explosions from landmines rocked towns, mountains were overrun with militia and journalists were being thrown into desert prisons for speaking to rebel leaders. Framed against this volatile atmosphere, The Nomad's Path is the beginning of a wider enterprise: the exploration of the region's history and the ongoing consequences of the Tuaregs' 1885 disenfranchisement. It explores the centuries-old link between the Barbary Coast and the Sahel along the Old Salt Road, once trodden by corsairs and slaves, camels and the armies of empires, while conjuring to life a lost wilderness and those who survive within it. At its heart, however, is a journey across the Sahel with the Tubu nomads. It is their tale and a window into the nebulous Manga. Carr perceptively observes Tubu culture, their harmonious relationship with Islam and their interaction with the Manga's other peoples: the Fulani, Kanuri and Arabs. Woven with tales of rebellion, lost settlements and civilizations, explorers - both intrepid and mad - and an epic seventeenth century odyssey, Carr captures a sense of the intangible nature of the Sahel's Manga. It is a timely and evocative portrait of the Tubu and their world - a people living on the tide-line of the Sahara and the edge of the world.

Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centenary in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out how this polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape, encompassing the debates of the nation's founders, the traditions of Western Romanticism, and the juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book includes six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, and Joan Didion. By encouraging a reconsideration of his career from its beginnings to his final books in the early twenty-first century, Norman Mailer at 100 forges a new path toward appreciating the author's achievements that underscores the extent to which his work can help us confront the challenges of today.

Based on comparative readings of contemporary books from Latin America, Spain, and the United States, the essays of this book present a radical critique against strategies of literary appropriation that were once thought of as neutral, and even concomitant, components of the writing process. Debunking the position of the author as center of analysis, Cristina Rivera Garza argues for the communality-a term used by anthropologist Floriberto DIaz to describe modes of life of indigenous peoples of Oaxaca based on notions of collaborative labor-permeating all writing processes. Disappropriating is a political operation at the core of projects acknowledging, both at ethical and aesthetic levels, that writers always work with materials that are not their own. Writers borrow from the practitioners of a language, entering in a debt relationship that can only be covered by ushering the text back to the communities in which it grew. In an increasingly violent world, where the experiences of many are erased by pillage and extraction, writing among and for the dead is a form of necrowriting that may as well become a life-affirming act of decolonization and resistance.

This first full-length study of William Bronk, one of our most important contemporary poets and essayists, locates his work in relation to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England literary tradition, to later twentieth-century modernism, and to the subsequent Objectivist and Black Mountain schools of poetry. Through special attention to his uniquely elegant style, this study demonstrates how Bronk has brought together earlier American poetics and philosophy with modern and postmodern notions of being, emptiness, and nothingness. This book features extensive discussions of Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, as well as of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, and George Oppen. As particularly concerns these twentieth-century figures, Burt Kimmelman also sheds light on the role in their thinking and poetics played by post-positivist science especially its theories of relativity and uncertainty. Analyses of exchanges of letters, most critically between Oppen and Bronk, disclose the great influence of their writing of contemporary intellectual currents aside from poetry itself. Kimmelmans discussion of epistemology is central to understanding this subtle and at times complex poet. The book explains ultimately how, as Michael Heller observes, 'Bronk is, in some sense, a reshaper of an American transcendental tradition, a strong poet of paradoxicality and worldlessness.' Discussions of solitude and abnegation, two key ideas Bronk derives from Thoreau and Melville, reveal not only the roots of Bronks concepts of being, emptiness, and nothingness, but also essential aspects of late-twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics anticipated by Bronk, Borman, Creeley, Olson, Oppen, and others over half a century ago.