This is the most respected and most widely-read Russian ballet manual in the world, written in 1938 by Agrippina Vaganova (Russia’s most influential ballet teacher of all time) and published in its final version (renowned as the 3rd edition) in U.S.S.R. in 1948. The book is presented – for the first time in English! – in its complete, unabridged, original form. Agrippina Vaganova played a pivotal role in the rebirth of Russian ballet, and her teaching method has gained unparalleled fame throughout the world. This Russian ballet techniques reference manual is the basis for all other classical ballet textbooks. The book contains the original text, additional documentation, contextual analysis, a biographical essay of Vaganova’s lifetime achievements, photos, specific illustrations of movements, forms and positions of her ballet method, and a fundamental new study on the influence of the Italians (led by Enrico Cecchetti) on the development of Russian ballet.

Trained as a printer when still a boy, and thrilled throughout his life by the automation of printing and the headlong expansion of American publishing, Mark Twain wrote about the consequences of this revolution for culture and for personal identity. "Printer's Devil" is the first book to explore these themes in some of Mark Twain's best-known literary works, and in his most daring speculations - on American society, the modern condition, and the nature of the self. Playfully and anxiously, Mark Twain often thought about typeset words and published images as powerful forces - for political and moral change, personal riches and ruin, and epistemological turmoil. In his later years, Mark Twain wrote about the printing press as a center of metaphysical power, a force that could alter the fabric of reality. Studying these themes in Mark Twain's writings, Bruce Michelson also provides a fascinating overview of technological changes that transformed the American printing and publishing industries during Twain's lifetime, changes that opened new possibilities for content, for speed of production, for the size and diversity of a potential audience, and for international fame. The story of Mark Twain's life and art, amid this media revolution, is a story with powerful implications for our own time, as we ride another wave of radical change: for printed texts, authors, truth, and consciousness.

Can we rediscover the wildness in Mark Twain's humor? Can we understand how that wildness helped make him a national legend and a key figure in the expression of an American self? In Mark Twain on the Loose, Bruce Michelson writes about Twain as a body of literature, as a public personality, and as a myth. Michelson shows that many of Twain's most ambitious and memorable works, from the very beginning to the end of his career, express a drive for absolute liberation from every social, psychological, and artistic limit. The outrageous and anarchic sides of Twain play a vital role in his art. But these traits are undervalued even by his admirers, who often favor clean shapes and steady affirmations in Twain's writing - not the dangerous comic outbreak, or the deep yearning to free the self from every definition and confinement. Reviewing works from a wide range of Twain's writings, Michelson brings to light those wild dimensions, their literary consequences, and their cultural importance. He reveals this great author as "the best escape artist in the American canon", a reflexive, paradoxical, rule-shattering comic genius.

This book offers a fresh examination of literary wit as a distinct variety of discourse - one that is fundamentally different from wit, humour and laughter in nonliterary contexts. Bruce Michelson moves beyond outmoded assumptions and canonical authorities to explore how wit can transform fiction, plays and poetry, providing ""a fire that keeps our imaginative literature hot"". Michelson argues that to achieve a modernized and less-reductive understanding of the comic mode, conventional ideas must be extended, refreshed, qualified and ultimately left behind. Revisiting Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin and other authorities, he develops a new description of literary wit, with an emphasis on brevity, eloquence and surprise, and gives special attention to the power and provenance of the modern epigram. To develop this new approach, Michelson explores Mark Twain's ""Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"" and Oscar Wilde's ""Preface"" to ""The Picture of Dorian Gray"". He also offers an extended discussion of two more recent celebrated dramas - Tom Stoppard's ""Arcadia"" and Margaret Edson's Pulitzer-winning ""Wit"" - as well as insightful readings of major poems by Richard Wilbur. He concludes with a suggestive look at the contemporary revolution in cognitive science and its implications for our understanding of the comic dimension in modern literature.