American writers in the 1830's and 1840's felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the unconscious constitutes to the theme of this study, which was first published in 1987. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.

American writers in the 1830's and 1840's felt the need for a new terminology to express their awakening perception of "new" aspects of the mind. Without words like the "unconscious" vast areas of the psyche would have remained unexpressed and thus unapproachable. This "discovery" of the unconscious constitutes to the theme of this study, which was first published in 1987. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory.

"Transfiguring America" is the product of more than ten years of research and numerous published articles on Margaret Fuller, arguably America's first feminist theorist and one of the most important woman writers in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Fuller's development of a powerful language that paired cultural critique with mythmaking, Steele shows why her writing had such a vital impact on the woman's rights movement and modern conceptions of gender.

This groundbreaking study pays special attention to the ways in which Fuller's feminist consciousness and social theory emerged out of her mourning for herself and others, her dialogue with Emersonian Transcendentalism, and her eclectic reading in occult and mythical sources. "Transfiguring America" is the first book to provide detailed analyses of all of Fuller's major texts, including her mystical "Dial" essays, correspondence with Emerson, "Summer on the Lakes, " 1844 poetry, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century, " and "New York Tribune" essays written both in New York and Europe.

Starting from her own profound sense of loss as a marginalized woman, Fuller eventually recognized the ways in which the foundational myths of American society, buttressed by conservative religious ideologies, replicated dysfunctional images of manhood and womanhood. With "Woman in the Nineteenth Century, " after exploring the roots of oppression in her essays and poetry, Fuller advanced the cause of woman's rights by conceptualizing a more fluid and equitable model of gender founded upon the mythical reconfiguration of human potential. But as her horizons expanded, Fuller demanded not only political equality for women, but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual freedom for all victims of social oppression.

By the end of her career, Steele shows, Fuller had blended personal experience and cultural critique into the imaginative reconstruction of American society. Beginning with a fervent belief in personal reform, she ended her career with the apocalyptic conviction that the dominant myths both of selfhood and national identity must be transfigured. Out of the ashes of personal turmoil and political revolution, she looked for the phoenix of a revitalized society founded upon the ideal of political justice.

Using the theories of Nietzche, Freud, Jung, and Lacan--as well as the critical insights of Derrida, Iser, Ricoeur, and others--Steele explains how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller attempted to influence readers by promoting psychological myths that functioned as ontological paradigms. She also shows that the Transcendentalist myths of the psyche are most fully revealed in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.
Originally published in 1987.
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The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller has been remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of nineteenth-century men and women. In this new collection, the full range of her literary career is represented from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy. For the first time, the complete texts of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes are printed together, along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous ""Autobiographical Romance"" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian culture, mythology, and the BibleJeffrey Steele's introduction provides an important revision of Fuller's biography and literary career, tracing the growth of her feminism and her development into one of America's preeminent social critics. No other writer of Fuller's day could match the range of her experience. Growing up in the world of Boston intellectuals, she was the close friend of the Alcotts, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. But she also traveled adventurously to the western frontier, canoed down rapids with Chippewa Indians, visited the outcast and the poor in New York's institutions and prisons, and experienced the rigors of war during the bombardment of Rome. As a whole, this anthology provides the material to understand one of the most fascinating nineteenth-century American women writers.

Second language acquisition has rapidly grown as a field over the past decade, as our knowledge of the ways in which children and adults learn and use a second language has become crucial for effective language teaching. In addition to this important 'applied' function, research into second language acquisition has also informed the fields of linguistics and psychology in general, as it has shed light on the differences between native and non-native models of human language and cognition. The focus of this accessible new book is second language speech - that is, how speakers perceive, process, understand and pronounce the sounds of a second language. Each chapter includes review questions, and most chapters include 'tutorial' and 'lab' sections with practical exercises based on the University of Toronto Romance Phonetics Database (available online for free). The book also has a companion website, containing illustrated answers to the exercises, scripts for running acoustic analyses and useful weblinks.

In this stimulating collection of essays, John Roberts draws together a wide range of work on some of the most important artists of the post-war period. Written by leading art historians and artist-writers, the essays take a sharply critical look at the construction of modern art history. The artists discussed include Francis Picabia, Robert Smithson, Ad Reinhardt, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Victor Burgin and Laurie Anderson. The extensive influence of post-structuralism on all schools of art history has brought about a widespread derogation of questions around intentionality and social agency. Free-ranging textual interpretation has come to outweigh causal analysis. Art Has No History! reverses this bias. Putting the artist back into art history, the essays reinstate the claims for historical materialism as a theory of the conflictual socialization of individuals. Acknowledging the dissemblances involved in the representations of artistic invention, the book challenges the self-image of traditional art history and the radical New Art History alike. In his introduction, John Roberts gives a fascinating account of the vicissitudes of Marxist writing on art, from Max Raphael and Arnold Hauser to T.J. Clark and Griselda Pollock. Placing the debates on intention and agency in their wider political context, he refers to what he calls "the continuing influence of historical materialism on the best Anglophone art writing today." Art Has No History! is a lively and iconoclastic contribution to that tradition.

Second language acquisition has rapidly grown as a field over the past decade, as our knowledge of the ways in which children and adults learn and use a second language has become crucial for effective language teaching. In addition to this important 'applied' function, research into second language acquisition has also informed the fields of linguistics and psychology in general, as it has shed light on the differences between native and non-native models of human language and cognition. The focus of this accessible new book is second language speech - that is, how speakers perceive, process, understand and pronounce the sounds of a second language. Each chapter includes review questions, and most chapters include 'tutorial' and 'lab' sections with practical exercises based on the University of Toronto Romance Phonetics Database (available online for free). The book also has a companion website, containing illustrated answers to the exercises, scripts for running acoustic analyses and useful weblinks.