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Books > Language & Literature > Literary & linguistic reference works > Literary reference works
Walt Whitman's short stint in New Orleans during the spring of 1848
was a crucial moment of literary and personal development, with
many celebrated poems from Leaves of Grass showing its influence.
Walt Whitman's New Orleans is the first book dedicated to
republishing his writings about the Crescent City, including
numerous previously unknown pieces. Often spending his afternoons
strolling through the vibrant city with his brother in tow, the
young Whitman translated his impressions into short prose sketches
that cataloged curious sights, captured typical characters one
might meet on the levee, and joked about the strangeness of urban
life. Including the first complete run of a fictional, multipart
series titled "Sketches of the Sidewalks and Levee," Walt Whitman's
New Orleans pairs his glimpses of the city with historical
illustrations, supplementary texts, detailed annotations, and an
introduction by editor Stefan Schoeberlein that offers new insights
on the poet's southern sojourn. Whitmanites, history enthusiasts,
and lovers of New Orleans will find much to treasure in these
humorous, evocative scenes of antebellum city life.
The Mother of All Booklists: The 500 Most Recommended Nonfiction
Reads for Ages 3 to 103 is written for parents, grandparents, and
teachers unfamiliar with the bewildering array of award and
recommended reading lists. This book is a long overdue composite of
all the major booklists. It brings together over 100 of the most
influential book awards and reading lists from leading magazines,
newspapers, reference books, schools, libraries, parenting
organizations, and professional groups from across the country. The
Mother of All Booklists is to reading books what the website Rotten
Tomatoes is to watching movies-the ultimate, one-stop, synthesizing
resource for finding out what is best. Mother is not the opinion of
one book critic, but the aggregate opinion of an army of critics.
Organized into five age group lists each with one hundred
books-preschoolers (ages 3-5), early readers (ages 5-9), middle
readers (ages 9-13), young adults (ages 13-17), and adults (ages
18+)-The Mother of All Booklists amalgamates the knowledge of the
best English-language booklists in the United States, including a
few from Canada and Great Britain. Each of the 500 books is
annotated, describing the contents of the book and suggesting why
the book is unique and important. Each includes a picture of the
book cover.
From its ancient incarnation as a song to recent translations in
modern languages, Homeric epic remains an abiding source of
inspiration for both scholars and artists that transcends temporal
and linguistic boundaries. The Cambridge Guide to Homer examines
the influence and meaning of Homeric poetry from its earliest form
as ancient Greek song to its current status in world literature,
presenting the information in a synthetic manner that allows the
reader to gain an understanding of the different strands of Homeric
studies. The volume is structured around three main themes: Homeric
Song and Text; the Homeric World, and Homer in the World. Each
section starts with a series of 'macropedia' essays arranged
thematically that are accompanied by shorter complementary
'micropedia' articles. The Cambridge Guide to Homer thus traces the
many routes taken by Homeric epic in the ancient world and its
continuing relevance in different periods and cultures.
The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised
Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many
of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer.
Representative of Gifford's body of work, this volume is divided
into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within
these sections, Gifford's best work is showcased, including a
nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, in which
Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in
the film, producing an innovative framework for the movie. New to
the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look
at the novels of Alvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford's schooling
under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his
novel, Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and
Lula.
Provides cross-disciplinary perspectives on the study of animals in
humanities This volume critically investigates current topics and
disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the
burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies. What new questions and
modes of research need come into play if we are to seriously
acknowledge our entanglements with other animals? World-leading
scholars from a range of disciplines, including Literature,
Philosophy, Art, Biosemiotics, and Geography, set the agenda for
Animal Studies today. Rather than a narrow specialism, the 35 newly
commissioned essays in this book show how we think of other animals
to be intrinsic to fields as major as ethics, economies as
widespread as capitalism and relations as common as friendship. The
volume contains original, cutting-edge research and opens up new
methods, alignments, directions as well as challenges for the
future of Animal Studies. Uniquely, the chapters each focus on a
single topic, from 'Abjection' to 'Voice' and from 'Affection' to
'Technology', thus embedding the animal question as central to
contemporary concerns across a wide range of disciplines. Key
Features Provides in one work prominent scholars in animal studies
and their reflections on the trajectory of the field Embeds the
'animal question' as central to contemporary concerns across a wide
range of disciplines Brings discourses from the sciences into
dialogue with the arts and humanities Opens up new methods,
alignments, directions and challenges for the future of animal
studies Afterword from Cary Wolfe (Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie
Professor of English, Rice University)
When Romantic Religion was first published thirty-five years ago,
no one dreamed that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia
would one day be boxoffice hits and that their authors, J.R.R.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, would be household names. R.J. Reilly's
remarkably readable and perceptive book about the two writers and
their two brilliant friends, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams,
was soon treasured by fans as the best book on their circle of
writer-philosophers, the Inklings. Romantic Religion went out of
print and commanded high prices on the rare-book market. Now it has
finally been republished so that a new generation of readers can
delve into this book, whose relevance has kept pace with the
growing reputations of its subjects. The title Romantic Religion
reflects Reilly's premise that these four thinkers share a "matured
romanticism." For them, creative imagination is central, with
literary and religious views intimately related. Reilly devotes an
insightful chapter to each of the writers and, in his conclusion,
discusses their differences and similarities. Barfield fans will be
especially impressed by the author's ability to clarify Barfield's
famously condensed prose. In a compelling new preface, Reilly
considers the changing reputations of the four writers and their
relevance for today's readers. The book was first published, he
tells us, during a war and horrendous societal dilemmas, not very
different from those that plague the world today. Now, as then,
says Reilly, the four writers remind us of "the possibility of a
higher and saner life." They remind us that "if we belong to the
party not of memory but of hope, it is because we are imaginative
beings and can imagine better beings and better worlds." This is
the first study to examine in depth the theological and philosophic
implications of the work of that remarkable group of writers now
called the Oxford Christians. In focusing on the central religious
concern of the group, R.J.Reilly provides and approach that is
destined to become normative. This is not a work of convention
literary biography (even less hagiography) or conventional literary
history. Rather, it is intellectually informed criticism that makes
possible a deep understanding of the enduring dimensions of the
work of four of the most attractive and challenging writers of our
time. With the republication of Romantic Religion, this wise,
penetrating picture of our own possibilities is put before us once
more.
While humans have used their hands to engage in combat since the
dawn of man, boxing originated in Ancient Greece as an Olympic
event. It is one of the most popular, controversial and
misunderstood sports in the world. For its advocates, it is a
heroic expression of unfettered individualism. For its critics, it
is a depraved and ruthless physical and commercial exploitation of
mostly poor young men. This Companion offers engaging and
informative essays about the social impact and historical
importance of the sport of boxing. It includes a comprehensive
chronology of the sport, listing all the important events and
personalities. Essays examine topics such as women in boxing,
boxing and the rise of television, boxing in Africa, boxing and
literature, and boxing and Hollywood films. A unique book for
scholars and fans alike, this Companion explores the sport from its
inception in Ancient Greece to the death of its most celebrated
figure, Muhammad Ali.
"Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing." "The fool
wonders, the wise man asks." "Comedy is tragedy plus time."
"Friends are the sunshine of life." It is hard to imagine a more
convenient reference--and a more engaging book to browse in--than
The Little Oxford Dictionary ofQuotations. Here at your fingertips
are over 4,000 of the best things ever said on more than 300
topics. From Actors to Writing by way of America, Children, Cinema,
Last Words, Marriage, Politicians, Sex, and Taxes, it only takes a
moment to find the perfect witticism, bon mot, or sage adage to
suit any occasion.
Full of snappy one-liners and the world's greatest ideas, this
stimulating volume ranges from the wisdom of the Bible,
Shakespeare, and the great philosophers to the more modern
meditations of Bona, J. K. Rowling, and George W. Bush. There is
Yogi Berra's immortal "The future ain't what it used to be," Robert
Louis Stevenson's "Wine is bottled poetry," and Lao Tzu's "A good
traveler has no fixed plans." From literature to the law, music to
the movies, readers will find an abundance of classic quotes and
little known gems to enliven their speeches, conversation, reports
and correspondence. And to make this volume even easier to use, a
full index allows readers to search the text by author as well as
theme.
The fifth edition has many new themes--including Africa, Facts,
Honesty, India, Insight, Kissing, Persistence, Wisdom, Wit--and
over 400 new quotations. Concise, convenient, authoritative, and
affordable, The Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations allows
readers to keep a traveling data base of entertainment and
information right in their pocket. It's as handy as it is
indispensable--the perfect reference for home, school, and office.
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.
Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman
(1893-1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New
Yorker as a time defined by ""feverish contact with great theatre
stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at parties, in
mansions and great estates."" While he hobnobbed with the likes of
Mary McCarthy, Elia Kazan, and Greta Garbo and was one of
Broadway's leading luminaries, Behrman would later admit that the
friendships he built with the magazine's legendary editors Harold
Ross, William Shawn, and Katharine S. White were the ""one
unalloyed felicity"" of his life. People in a Magazine collects
Behrman's correspondence with his editors along with telegrams,
interoffice memos, and editorial notes drawn from the magazine's
archives - offering an unparalleled view of mid-twentieth-century
literary life and the formative years of The New Yorker, from the
time of Behrman's first contributions to the magazine in 1929 until
his death.
Adventure is just a book away as best-selling author Nancy Pearl
returns with recommended reading for more than 120 destinations
around the globe. "Book Lust To Go" connects the best fiction and
nonfiction to particular destinations, whether your bags are packed
or your armchair is calling. With stops from Texas to Timbuktu,
Nancy Pearl's reading recommendations will send you on your way.
As a result of fabricated accounts endlessly repeated since his
death, the early nineteenth-century French satirist, J.
J.Grandville (180347), is often perceived as being as bizarre as
his inventive protosurrealist imagery. With the recent bicentennial
of his birth, it is time for a reassessment of this seminal artist
based on primary sources. The Diary of J. J. Grandville and the
Missouri Album: The Life of an Opposition Caricaturist and Romantic
Book Illustrator in Paris under the July Monarchy by Clive F. Getty
does just that. This first major study in English of Grandville
allows him to speak for himself through a careful examination of
his diary, fragments of which are to be found in a previously
unexamined album of drawings in the Special Collections of the
University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries.An introductory biography
situates the artist within the political, social,and cultural
climate of France during the Romantic era and the July Monarchy of
Louis-Philippe. The main body of the book consists of an annotated
catalog of the albums drawings. Since the majority originate from
his diaries, they provide valuable new insights into Grandville's
life and work, particularly during those years most extensively
represented: 1830, 1833, and 1846. An epilogue explores the genesis
of the Missouri Album. The biography follows Grandville from his
native Nancy to Paris where he first gained fame as a satirist with
the human/ animal hybrids of Les Mtamorphoses du jour (182829).
After the Revolution of 1830, he produced opposition caricatures
for Philipons La Caricature, Le Charivari, and the Association
mensuelle. With the establishment of press censorship in 1835,
Grandville turned to book illustration, producing such innovative
masterpiecesas Scnes de la vie prive et pub-liquedes animaux (1842)
and Un autre monde (1844). The biography ends with the unusual
circumstances of Grandville's death in 1847 and an analysis of the
distorted accounts about the deceased artist and
This book treats the literary work of Julia Augusta Webster within
the context of Websters participation in nineteenth century British
aestheticism. Websters personal life, her experience as a member of
the Suffrage Society and her tenure on the London School Board, as
well as her position as poetry reviewer for the Athenaeum and
participation in the salon society of the 1880s, inform her later
work, but her earliest poetry and fiction also reflect the
beginnings of the aestheticist perspective on the transience and
impermanence of life. This book makes use of extensive archival
materials to provide context for a study of Websters literary work,
beginning with her first volume of poetry Blanche Lisle and
concluding with her posthumously published Mother and Daughter
sonnets. In tracing the trajectory of Websters development as an
aestheticist poet, Patricia Rigg extends Webster scholarship into
areas of the writers work not previously explored.
This book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with
respect to three broad issues-authorship, the posthumous, and
cultural revisionism-that arise in reading such works from a
contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction
'postmodernizes' romantic and modern authors not only to understand
them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past
(literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations,
etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Blue
Flower', Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and
Chatterton', Peter Carey's 'Jack Maggs', Michael Cunningham's 'The
Hours', Colm Toibin's 'The Master', and Geoff Dyer's 'Out of Sheer
Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence - 'the mighty dead' (Harold
Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new
textual bodies that project a postmodern understanding of the
author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity
constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class,
and nationality.
For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century,
Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for
the Americas and the most important Spanish-Language print center
in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo
Lazo opens a window into Spanish-Language writing produced by
Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who Settled and
passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the
city's printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating
independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.The first
book-length study of Philadelphia publications by intellectuals
such as Vicente Rocafuerte, Jose Maria Heredia, Manuel Torres, Juan
German Roscio, and Servando Teresa de Mier, Letters from Filadelfia
offers an approach to discussing their work as part of early Latino
literature and the way in which it connects to the United States
and other parts of the Americas. Lazo's book is an important
contribution to the complex history of the United States' first
capital. More than the foundation for the U.S. nation-state,
Philadelphia reached far beyond its city limits and, as considered
here, suggests new ways to conceptualize what it means to be
American.
This book builds upon critical reevaluations of modernism and
British literature of the 1930s with a simultaneous focus on
discourses of race, gender, and empire. The essays direct attention
to the complications and ambivalence accumulating around the
meanings of Englishness. They reject analyses of texts as
chronicles of personal psychological development in favor of
analyses that assume texts are shaped by their authors' public
intellectual involvement. In addition, they offer detailed,
specific explorations of ways in which British women in the 1930s
narrativize empire and war. Thus they will resonate with
significance for readers in the early twenty-first century for
women empire and war, as well as terror and security, are part of
the discourse of everyday life.
Gleaning Modernity shows how earlier eighteenth-century literary
texts might have eased the way for Britain's increasing modernity.
They allowed Modern scenarios to be played out imaginatively, as
simulations for experimental, predictive ends. The process spoke to
the needs and desires of readers in a world of rapid, managed
change. It worked unobtrusively first because of the practice of
recycling old forms, as Pope and Richardson did, for example, with
Horatian and tragic models, respectively; and second because given
texts offered different readers a range of interpretative options.
Along with providing original readings of such major texts as
Gulliver's Travels and Clarissa, this study enlarges our sense of
the Modernizing process. It also shows how a consumer-driven
Darwinian model of adaptive change, affecting literature and its
readership, can help us understand the ways in which literature can
have social efficacy.
This comprehensive study of the literary output of Sir John
Suckling reconstructs the various contexts in which the poems,
plays, letters, and prose tracts were produced and, by means of
close textual analysis, reveals the nature of one writer's
engagement_both creative and subversive_with the social, religious,
political, and cultural dimensions of Caroline England. It
challenges the common view of Suckling as primarily a court wit and
courtier playwright and makes a case for reading much of his poetry
and drama as a critique of the social values and aesthetic fashions
associated with the patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria. In other
words, this so-called 'Cavalier' is revealed as an astute and
skeptical commentator on national and international affairs, whose
discontent with the religious and political consequences of King
Charles I's government during the 1630s was often at odds with his
unshakable loyalty to the crown.
Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), winner of the Premio Casa de las Americas
(Poesia de paso, 1966), was one of Chile's most significant
creative minds of the twentieth century. Surprising his
predecessors, inspiring his contemporaries, and always venerated by
younger inheritors of his legacy, he is as important to the Latin
American literary community as Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, or
Nicanor Parra. This book provides a detailed study of all major
stages of his literary production, from his third book, La pieza
oscura [The Dark Room] (1963) to his posthumous Diario de Muerte
[Diary of Dying] (1989). A critical introduction provides an
orientation to Lihn's work as related to the critical apparatus of
Western Marxism and postmodern theory. An additional auxiliary
section comes between chapters two and three, accommodating the
vary significant change in historical period from the pre- to
post-Pinochet eras, and further investigating Theodor Adorno's
provocative questioning of whether "art after Auschwitz" can truly
exist.
Tragedy in the eighteenth century is often said to have expired or
been deflected into nondramatic forms like history and satire, and
to have survived mainly as a "tragic sense" in writers like Samuel
Johnson. Leopold Damrosch shows that many readers were still
capable of an imaginative response to tragedy. In Johnson, however,
moral and aesthetic assumptions limited his ability to appreciate
or create tragedy, despite a deep understanding of human suffering.
This limitation, Mr. Damrosch argues, derived partly from his
Christian belief, and more largely from a view of reality that did
not allow exclusive focus on its tragic aspects. The author
discusses Irene, The vanity of Human Wishes, and Johnson's
criticism of tragedy, particularly that of Shakespeare. A Final
chapter places Johnson's view in the context of modern theories.
Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the
latest print-on-demand technology to again make available
previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of
Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original
texts of these important books while presenting them in durable
paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy
Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage
found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University
Press since its founding in 1905.
This book is the first work in the English language to discuss the
participation of women writers in the narrative construction of
Mozambican nationhood over the past half-century. Covering the rise
of anti-colonial nationalism in the 1950s, the advent of the
Marxist-Leninist Republic in the 1970s, the war that followed
independence in the 1980s, and the transition to democracy and the
neo-liberal economy in the 1990s, the volume focuses on four
representative women writers who belong to distinct but overlapping
periods and work in different genres. Dealing with Noemia de
Sousa's poetry, Lina Magaia's testimonial writings, Lilia Momple's
short fiction, and Paulina Chiziane's novels, the result is a close
reading of the ways in which women have narrated and
counter-narrated Mozambican nationhood to take account of the
gendered power relations that traditionally underpin national
community as imagined by men.
This volume explores a wide range of Victorian texts, including
novels, poems, sermons, and some less easily categorized writings,
in terms of their use of language and imagery suggestive of the
Apocalypse. The focus is less upon the conscious or deliberate use
of the Apocalypse as a source of sublime metaphors or as a guide to
cultural decline than on the ways in which certain tropes recur in
the writings of the period. These can be characterized in terms of
oppositions that both structure apocalyptic literature and
characterize much Victorian writing: human/inhuman, desert/city,
veiled/revealed, time/the eternal, this world/other world. The book
sets out to show that what might be called a cultural affinity
exists between the writing of the Victorian era and apocalyptic
literature, and to argue that such a relationship was unavoidable
for a society steeped in the bible as it confronted dramatic
changes in its relationships with nature, God, and time.
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