In Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist light on the relation between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. She examines aesthetic sites of Victorian Modernism - including workrooms, parlours, friendships, and family relations as well as printed texts and paintings - as they develop through interminglings and continuities as well as gaps and breaks. Examining the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist) and William James (philosopher and psychologist), Feldman relates them to selected twentieth-century creations. She reveals these sentimental, domestic and sublime works to be pragmatist explorations of aesthetic realms. This study, which leads Modernism back into the Victorian age, will be of interest to scholars of literature, art history and philosophy.

Jessica Feldman sheds a pragmatist's light on the relationship between the Victorian age and Modernism by dislodging truistic notions of Modernism as an art of crisis, rupture, elitism and loss. Feldman examines the works of John Ruskin (art critic and social thinker), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (poet and painter), Augusta Evans (best-selling domestic novelist)and William James (philosopher and psychologist) and relates them to select twentieth-century creations.

" I cannot live without books."
--Thomas Jefferson

Even the most well-read among us feel gaps in our knowledge. Former English majors or art students want to understand the monetary system; mathematicians or doctors just want a great novel. Travel sections in bookstores are full of authors ready to tell you the hundred places to visit before you die, but what about the best book to read on global warming?

"What Should I Read Next?" taps seventy University of Virginia professors in an array of fields for suggestions on how to satisfy this nagging intellectual curiosity. Each contributor recommends five titles that speak to their area of inquiry, providing both a general introduction and commentary on each selection. The results read like a series of personal tutorials: Larry Sabato considers how political power is acquired, used, and held onto; climatologist Robert E. Davis provides a timely navigation of global-warming literature; and Michael Levenson offers five ways to approach James Joyce's Ulysses. Other topics include how computing changes thinking, the life and afterlife of slavery, understanding cities, and ecstatic poetry. The entries convey the contributors' expertise but also, more importantly, the enthusiasm, the original kernels of curiosity, that drew these scholars to their life's work.

Designed for the lifelong learner who wants to branch out from his or her own profession or discipline, these explorations--of art, science, history, technology, politics, and much more--offer an inspiring place to start.

Saul Steinberg's inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg's work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the specific ways in which Steinberg meant drawing not merely to resemble writing but to be itself a type of literary writing. Jessica R. Feldman's Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys, the first book-length critical study of Steinberg's art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his affinities with modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized. Feldman begins her study with a consideration of Steinberg as a reader and writer, including a survey of his personal library. She explores the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his ""teachers"" Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Studying Steinberg's art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman explores fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for parody and popular culture to their status as mythmakers, emigres, and perpetual wanderers. Further, Feldman relates Steinberg's uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe. Generously illustrated with the artist's work and drawing on invaluable archival material from the Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg's art.