"Place and Locality in Modern France, 1750-present" is an edited collection that successfully analyses the significance and changing constructions of local place in modern France. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars from around the world, this book is a timely overview of the cross-disciplinary thinking that is currently taking place over a central issue in French history.The book investigates the politics of administrative reform, regionalism and projects of decentralization. It looks at the role of commerce in engendering narratives and experience of local place, explores the importance of ethnic, class and gender distinctions, and considers the generation and transmission of knowledge about local place and culture through academia, civic heritage and popular memory. In short, this text provides a sweeping account of the concept of the 'local' in French history in a way that will effectively bridge the divide between micro- and macro-history for those interested in ideas of locality and culture in modern French and European history.

The literary journals of a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry, and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest   Philip Whalen (1923–2002) authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy. Whalen’s literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen’s forty-plus years of journals—sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks—have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen’s journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry.

Written from 1969 to 1971, West Coast Beat poet Philip Whalen's "Scenes of Life at the Capital" is a lasting testament to the ambition, range, powers, and devotion of this crucially important American voice. Positioned among the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, Whalen looks across the ocean to address the new frontiers, political problems, and transformative hopes of the United States of the 1960s-so much of which still resonates today. In this new edition-with a deep and enlightening afterword by David Brazil-Whalen's poem is further cemented as a fundamental work in American literary history.

Place and Locality in Modern France analyses the significance and changing constructions of local place in modern France. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars from around the world, this book provides a timely overview of the cross-disciplinary thinking that is currently taking place over a central issue in French history. The contributed chapters address a range of subjects that include: the politics of administrative reform, decentralization, regionalism and local advocacy; the role of commerce in engendering narratives and experience of local place; the importance of ethnic, class, gender and race distinctions in shaping local connection and identity; the generation and transmission of knowledge about local place and culture through academia, civic heritage and popular memory. As a reconsideration of the 'local' in French history, Place and Locality in Modern France bridges the divide between micro- and macro-history for all those interested in ideas of locality and culture in modern French and European history.

Like his college roommate Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen took both poetry and Zen seriously. He became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Michael McClure, and played a key role in the explosive poetic revolution of the '50s and '60s. Celebrated for his wisdom and good humor, Whalen transformed the poem for a generation. His writing, taken as a whole, forms a monumental stream of consciousness (or, as Whalen calls it, "continuous nerve movie") of a wild, deeply read, and fiercely independent American--one who refuses to belong, who celebrates and glorifies the small beauties to be found everywhere he looks. This long-awaited Selected Poems is a welcome opportunity to hear his influential voice again.

The minds and eccentrics of Berkeley and San Francisco come to life in these two novels by poet Philip Whalen. Set in the late Fifties and early Sixties, You Didn't Even Try and Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head provide a window on the nascence of a counterculture.