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Comprehensive survey and analysis of the scholarship and criticism
on perhaps the greatest American writer. Although some of Henry
James's contemporary critics deemed him just short of a great
writer, history has elevated him to indisputable preeminence in the
American canon. Linda Simon chronicles and analyzes James criticism
beginningwith contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews and
ending with current academic criticism. The story begins in the
1870s, when critics saw James's works as mirrors of American
identity and sought to establish him in the nation's evolving
canon. James himself worked to secure that place with his prefaces
to the standard edition of his works; Simon analyzes criticism
about those prefaces. She also shows how James's reputation became
contested after his death: praised by some critics for
psychological insight and stylistic innovation, he was dismissed by
others as socially and politically irrelevant. But beginning in the
1940s, such critics as Trilling, Rahv, Leavis, and, most
influentially, Leon Edel secured James's place at the forefront of
the American canon. More recently, James scholarship has focused on
sexuality and gender, race and morality, and the nature of
consciousness; critical trends Simon also considers. This book, the
only comprehensive overview of James criticism over the past 140
years, helps readers understand the paths that that criticism has
taken and how scholars and critics have built upon past work. Linda
Simon is Professor Emerita of English at Skidmore College and
Editor-in-Chief of William James Studies. Her books include Genuine
Reality: A Life of William James, which was a New York Times
Notable Book of 1998.
Now available in paperback, The Greatest Shows on Earth takes us
from eighteenth-century hippodromes in Britain to intimate one-ring
circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and
Picasso became enchanted by aerialists and clowns. We meet P. T.
Barnum, James Bailey and the enterprising Ringling Brothers, who
created the golden age of American circuses. We explore
contemporary transformations of the circus, from the whimsical
Circus Oz in Australia to New York City's Big Apple Circus. Circus
people are central to the story: trick riders and tightrope
walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists and
clowns - these are the men and women who create the sensational,
raucous, titillating and incomparable world of the circus.
Beautifully illustrated, rich in historical detail and full of
colourful anecdotes, Linda Simon's vibrant history is as enchanting
as a night at the big-top itself.
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Miller Beach (Hardcover)
Linda Simon, Jane Ammeson
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R842
R691
Discovery Miles 6 910
Save R151 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the
ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have
undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which
have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's
tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for
lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of
American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form,
whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that
this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of
the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is
worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how
series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture
and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid
nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the
cultural work that is performed through the series genre,
contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects
including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and
friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within
such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and
feminism.
Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the
ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have
undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which
have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's
tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for
lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of
American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form,
whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that
this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of
the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is
worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how
series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture
and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid
nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the
cultural work that is performed through the series genre,
contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects
including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and
friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within
such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and
feminism.
William James claimed that his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some
Old Ways of Thinking would prove triumphant and epoch-making.
Today, after more than 100 years, how is pragmatism to be
understood? What has been its cultural and philosophical impact? Is
it a crucial resource for current problems and for life and thought
in the future? John J. Stuhr and the distinguished contributors to
this multidisciplinary volume address these questions, situating
them in personal, philosophical, political, American, and global
contexts. Engaging James in original ways, these 11 essays probe
and extend the significance of pragmatism as they focus on four
major, overlapping themes: pragmatism and American culture;
pragmatism as a method of thinking and settling disagreements;
pragmatism as theory of truth; and pragmatism as a mood, attitude,
or temperament.
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Dark Light (Paperback)
Linda Simon
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R592
R519
Discovery Miles 5 190
Save R73 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The modern world imagines that the invention of electricity was
greeted with great enthusiasm. But in 1879 Americans reacted to the
advent of electrification with suspicion and fear. Forty years
after Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, only 20 percent
of American families had wired their homes. Meanwhile,
electrotherapy emerged as a popular medical treatment for
everything from depression to digestive problems. Why did Americans
welcome electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from
their homes? And what does their reaction to technological
innovation then have to teach us about our reaction to it today?
In Dark Light, Linda Simon offers the first cultural history that
delves into those questions, using newspapers, novels, and other
primary sources. Tracing fifty years of technological
transformation, from Morse's invention of the telegraph to
Roentgen's discovery of X-rays, she has created a revealing
portrait of an anxious age.
Intellectual rebel, romantic pragmatist, aristocratic pluralist,
William James was both a towering figure of the nineteenth century
and a harbinger of the twentieth. Drawing on a wide range of
sources, including 1,500 letters between James and his wife,
acclaimed biographer Linda Simon creates an intimate portrait of
this multifaceted and contradictory man. Exploring James's
irrepressible family, his diverse friends, and the cultural and
political forces to which he so energetically responded, Simon
weaves the many threads of William James's life into a genuine, and
vibrant, reality.
"William James . . . has never seemed so vulnerably human as in
Linda Simon's biography. . . . [S]he vivifies James in such a way
that his life and thought come freshly alive for the modern
reader."--David S. Reynolds, "New York Times Book Review"
"Superb. . . . "Genuine Reality" is recommended reading for all
soul-searchers."--George Gurley, "Chicago Tribune"
"Ms. Simon . . . has provided an ideal pathway for James's
striding. . . . [Y]ou become engaged in his struggles as if they
were your own."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "New York Times"
"[A]n excellent narrative biography at once sensitively told and
lucidly written."--John Patrick Diggins, "Wall Street Journal"
"Gertrude Stein Remembered," a collection of memoirs by twenty
people who knew her well, adds invaluable details to our view of
Stein as a writer and woman. The recollections, some previously
unpublished, cover the entire span of her career: from her time as
an undergraduate at Radcliffe College to her extraordinary years as
a writer in Paris from 1903 through 1946. Among the memoirists are
novelists Sherwood Anderson and Thornton Wilder, bookseller Sylvia
Beach, Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, journalists T. S.
Matthews, Therese Bonney, and Eric Sevareid, and photographers Carl
Van Vechten and Cecil Beaton.
The composite portrait that emerges is of a complex, sometimes
contradictory, always fascinating woman. Gertrude Stein Remembered
is a kaleidoscopic view of Stein that perfectly suits this protean
champion of modern literature and the avant-garde.
William James, well known for his contributions to psychology and
philosophy, occupies a secure place in American intellectual
history.This fifth volume of a projected twelve-volume edition
chronicles James's emergence into professional and personal
maturity. During this period, James took decisive steps toward
resolving his notoriously protracted and difficult search for a
profession. he published his first substantial signed articles and
undertook some shrewd academic maneuvering that would secure him a
chair in philosophy despite his lack of formal training.
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