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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
Black Print Unbound explores the development of the Christian
Recorder during and just after the American Civil War. As a study
of the official African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper (a
periodical of national reach and scope among free African
Americans), Black Print Unbound is thus at once a massive recovery
effort of a publication by African Americans for African Americans,
a consideration of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and
print culture studies, and an intervention in the study of
literatures of the Civil War, faith communities, and periodicals.
The book pairs a longitudinal sense of the Recorder's ideological,
political, and aesthetic development with the fullest account
available of how the physical paper moved from composition to real,
traceable subscribers. It builds from this cultural and material
history to recover and analyze diverse and often unknown texts
published in the Recorder including letters, poems, and a
serialized novel-texts that were crucial to the development of
African American literature and culture and that challenge our
senses of genre, authorship, and community. In this, Black Print
Unbound offers a case study for understanding how African Americans
inserted themselves in an often-hostile American print culture in
the midst of the most complex conflict the young nation had yet
seen, and it thus calls for a significant rewriting of our senses
of African American-and so American-literary history.
In this volume, Kieran McGroarty provides a philosophical
commentary on a section of the Enneads written by the last great
Neoplatonist thinker, Plotinus. The treatise is entitled
"Concerning Well-Being" and was written at a late stage in
Plotinus' life when he was suffering from an illness that was
shortly to kill him. Its main concern is with the good man and how
he should pursue the good life. The treatise is therefore central
to our understanding of Plotinus' ethical theory, and the
commentary seeks to explicate and elucidate that theory. Plotinus'
views on how one should live in order to fulfill oneself as a human
being are as relevant now as they were in the third century AD. All
Greek and Latin is translated, while short summaries introducing
the content of each chapter help to make Plotinus' argument clear
even to the non-specialist.
The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France
between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of
intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's
relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly
tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that
rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was
a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of
possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or
fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even
friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might
turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be
... continually giving & receiving, and shedding &
renewing, & examining & trying to place'. For all the
grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still
offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively
frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an
invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.
Digital Modernism examines how and why some of the most innovative
works of online electronic literature adapt and allude to literary
modernism. Digital literature has been celebrated as a postmodern
form that grows out of contemporary technologies, subjectivities,
and aesthetics, but this book provides an alternative genealogy.
Exemplary cases show electronic literature looking back to
modernism for inspiration and source material (in content, form,
and ideology) through which to critique contemporary culture. In so
doing, this literature renews and reframes, rather than rejects, a
literary tradition that it also reconfigures to center around
media. To support her argument, Pressman pairs modernist works by
Pound, Joyce, and Bob Brown, with major digital works like William
Poundstone's "Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit]"
(2005), Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd
Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter. With each pairing, she demonstrates
how the modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s laid the
groundwork for the innovations of electronic literature. In sum,
the study situates contemporary digital literature in a literary
genealogy in ways that rewrite literary history and reflect back on
literature's past, modernism in particular, to illuminate the
crucial role that media played in shaping the ambitions and
practices of that period.
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