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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
In this comprehensive study, Kenneth Morgan provides an
authoritative account of European exploration and discovery in
Australia. The book presents a detailed chronological overview of
European interests in the Australian continent, from initial
speculations about the 'Great Southern Land' to the major
hydrographic expeditions of the 19th century. In particular, he
analyses the early crossings of the Dutch in the 17th century, the
exploits of English 'buccaneer adventurer' William Dampier, the
famous voyages of James Cook and Matthew Flinders, and the
little-known French annexation of Australia in 1772. Introducing
new findings and drawing on the latest in historiographical
research, this book situates developments in navigation, nautical
astronomy and cartography within the broader contexts of imperial,
colonial, and maritime history.
In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways
that poets have responded to the cliches of public speech from the
start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around
1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic
lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with
bureaucratic stock phrases such as "the fight for freedom,"
"revenue enhancement," and "service the target," designed for the
mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of
ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these
tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such
expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities
they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic
particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this
innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At
the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to
dead language, so that co-opting political cliches obliged them to
scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while
simultaneously pushing against it. This innovative study blends
close readings with historical context as it traces the development
of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly
deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall
Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine
Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry
can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the
insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.
For more than 25 years, York Notes have been helping students
throughout the UK to get the inside track on the written word.
Firmly established as the nation's favourite and most comprehensive
range of literature study guides, each and every York Note has been
carefully researched and written by experts to make sure that you
get the most wide-ranging critical analysis, the most detailed
commentary and the most helpful key points and checklists. York
Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English
Literature. Written by established literature experts, they
introduce students to a more sophisticated analysis, a range of
critical perspectives and wider contexts.
Part literary history, part personal memoir, Alice Brittan's
beautifully written The Art of Astonishment explores the rich
intellectual, religious, and philosophical history of the gift and
tells the interconnected story of grace: where it comes from and
what it is believed to accomplish. Covering a remarkable range of
materials-from The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the tragedies
of Classical Greece, through the brothers Grimm and Montaigne, to
C. S. Lewis, Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove
Knausgaard, and Jhumpa Lahiri-Brittan moves with ease from personal
story to myth, to theology, to literature and analysis, examining
the nature of social and communal obligation, the role of the
intellectual in times of crisis, and the pleasures of reading. In
the 21st century, we might imagine grace as a striking and refined
quality that is pleasurable to encounter but certainly not
fundamental to anyone's existence or to the beliefs and practices
that hold us together or drive us apart. For millennia, though, it
has been recognized as essential to the vitality of inner life, as
well as to the large-scale shifts in perspective and legislation
that improve the way we live as a society. Grace is also
astonishing-always-as the enormously insightful readings in The Art
of Astonishment show. Brittan reveals the concept's breadth as
sacred and secular, ancient and recent, lived and literary. And in
so doing, she shows us how the act of reading is like grace-social
but personal, pleasurable and essential.
This book explores how women's relationship with food has been
represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and
other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the
present. Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and
serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of
the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of
the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these
intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the
feminist movement. From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena
Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter
examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to
perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food,
addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.
This is the first book-length study of Plautus' shortest surviving
comedy, Curculio, a play in which the tricksy brown-nosed title
character ("The Weevil") bamboozles a shady banker and a pious pimp
to secure the freedom of the enslaved girl his patron has fallen
for while keeping her out of the clutches of a megalomaniacal
soldier. It all takes place in the Greek city Epidaurus, the most
important site for the worship of the healing god Aesculapius, an
unusual setting for an ancient comedy. But a mid-play monologue by
the stage manager shows us where the action really is: in the
real-life Roman Forum, in the lives and low-lifes of the audience.
This study explores the world of Curculio and the world of Plautus,
with special attention to how the play was originally performed
(including the first-ever comprehensive musical analysis of the
play), the play's plots and themes, and its connections to ancient
Roman cultural practices of love, sex, religion, food, and class.
Plautus: Curculio also offers the first performance and reception
history of the play: how it has survived through more than two
millennia and its appearances in the modern world.
In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the
environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably
toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of
postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John
Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the
troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and
Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and
O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic
econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate
fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region. Phrased as a
reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the
South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental,
ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account
of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space
between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.
This book is one English professor's assessment of university life
in the early 21st century. From rising mental health concerns and
trigger warnings to learning management systems and the COVID
pandemic, Christopher Schaberg reflects on the rapidly evolving
landscape of higher education. Adopting an interdisciplinary public
humanities approach, Schaberg considers the frequently exhausting
and depressing realities of college today. Yet in these meditations
he also finds hope: collaboration, mentoring, less grading, surface
reading, and other pedagogical strategies open up opportunities to
reinvigorate teaching and learning in the current turbulent decade.
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