Essays and Poems, with a Brief Autobiographical Memoir

Essays and Poems, with a Brief Autobiographical Memoir PDF Author: J. A. Leatherland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Essays and Poems, with a Brief Autobiographical Memoir

Essays and Poems, with a Brief Autobiographical Memoir PDF Author: J. A. Leatherland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Poets and the Fools Who Love Them

Poets and the Fools Who Love Them PDF Author: Richard Katrovas
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717744X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Poets and the Fools Who Love Them blends autobiography with cultural commentary and meditates on creative writing as a cottage industry within humanities higher education. Celebrated poet and memoirist Richard Katrovas examines his picaresque early years with a criminal father, a beleaguered mother, and four siblings as state and federal authorities pursued the family across the highways of America. His freewheeling, wide-ranging essays consider, among other social constructs, the relation of crime and art, and the relation of both to the authority of the state, particularly in terms of race and class. Katrovas speaks candidly about how white privilege facilitated his father’s criminal career, as a lifestyle of larceny and used-car scams, perpetuated state to state, would have surely had different implications for a family of color. Drawing on his adulthood in academe, Katrovas’s memoir in essays chronicles a quest to locate surrogate fathers among older poets and other creative writers, and reflects upon the ways in which that search has affected his role as the father to three Czech American daughters. The book flows from the love of a poet for other poets, for the “community of poets,” one likened to a “gang of priests” and a “herd of bears.” Katrovas maintains that most lovers of poets are themselves poets, and those lovers of poets who are not themselves poets are saints. At its heart, Poets and the Fools Who Love Them contemplates, with care and unabashed honesty, the role of art and the artist in the madcap twenty-first century.

After Confession

After Confession PDF Author: Kate Sontag
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Explores how poems have been used as autobiographies throughout time.

Strange Relation

Strange Relation PDF Author: Rachel Hadas
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589882504
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth." "If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University "Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis "Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler "A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies "Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky "Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock "Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh

Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England PDF Author: A. Miles
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230373216
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This pioneering book provides the first systematic historical analysis of occupational and social mobility in England. Using a collection of over 10,000 marriage certificates to examine inter-generational change, and almost 500 autobiographical texts and abstracts to explore the dynamics of career mobility, it shows how the development of the nineteenth-century economy was accompanied by rising rates of mobility, which made English society more 'open' while at the same encouraging a distinct process of working-class formation.

The Happiness of the British Working Class

The Happiness of the British Working Class PDF Author: Jamie L. Bronstein
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503633853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, and social and economic mobility often influenced the way they defined and experienced their emotional lives. The Happiness of the British Working Class employs and analyzes over 350 autobiographies of individuals in England, Scotland, and Ireland to explore the sources of happiness of British working people born before 1870. Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

Modern English Biography

Modern English Biography PDF Author: Frederic Boase
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 902

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Masculinity and the English Working Class

Masculinity and the English Working Class PDF Author: Ying Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135860327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book examines representations of working-class masculine subjectivity in Victorian autobiography and fiction. In it, Ying focuses on ideas of domesticity and the male body and demonstrates that working-class masculinities differ substantially from those of the widely studied upper classes. The book also maps the relationship between two trends: the early nineteenth-century efflorescence of published working-class autobiographies (in which working men construct their identities for a broad readership); and a contemporaneous surge of public interest in "the lower orders" that finds reflection in the depiction of working-class characters in popular novels by middle-class authors. The book mimics this point of convergence by pairing three working-class autobiographies with three middle-class novels. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of work: domestic service, manual (not artisanal) labour, and literary labour (and the opportunities it offers for social advancement). Ying considers the specific ways in which classed and gendered consciousness emerges autobiographically and its significance in the writing of working-class subjectivity for public consumption. Then mainstream novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley are re-read from the perspective of these autobiographical pressure points.

Why I Write

Why I Write PDF Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724263
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 15

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Book Description
George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Essays and poems

Essays and poems PDF Author: J A. Leatherland
Publisher: Gale and the British Library
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description