Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945 PDF Author: Alba Amoia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313016488
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
The final decades of the 20th century have seen an explosion of interest in multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is more than an awareness of the different cultures comprising contemporary societies. For centuries, people from around the world have come in contact with cultures other than their own, and their exposure to multiple cultures has fostered their creativity and ability to make lasting contributions to civilization. The effects of multiculturalism are especially apparent in literature, since writers tend to be particularly aware of their environments and record their experiences. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 100 world writers from antiquity to 1945, who were significantly influenced by cultures other than their own. Included are entries for major canonical Ancient and Modern writers of the Western and Eastern worlds. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of multicultural themes and contexts, a summary of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. By illuminating the shaping influence of multiculturalism on these writers, the volume points to the lasting value of multiculturalism in the contemporary world.

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945 PDF Author: Alba Amoia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313016488
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

Get Book Here

Book Description
The final decades of the 20th century have seen an explosion of interest in multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is more than an awareness of the different cultures comprising contemporary societies. For centuries, people from around the world have come in contact with cultures other than their own, and their exposure to multiple cultures has fostered their creativity and ability to make lasting contributions to civilization. The effects of multiculturalism are especially apparent in literature, since writers tend to be particularly aware of their environments and record their experiences. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 100 world writers from antiquity to 1945, who were significantly influenced by cultures other than their own. Included are entries for major canonical Ancient and Modern writers of the Western and Eastern worlds. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of multicultural themes and contexts, a summary of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. By illuminating the shaping influence of multiculturalism on these writers, the volume points to the lasting value of multiculturalism in the contemporary world.

The Half-vanished Structure

The Half-vanished Structure PDF Author: Magnus Ullén
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039102006
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This book takes issue with the tendency in twentieth-century Hawthorne-criticism to blur the distinction between symbolism and allegory. Rejecting the long-standing notion that Hawthorne is a symbolist in allegorical disguise, Ullén argues that allegory is the key to understanding how religion, sexuality, aesthetics and politics are interwoven in Hawthorne's writings. The study presents a model for allegorical interpretation of general applicability, which is brought to bear on each of Hawthorne's mature romances, and on the oft-neglected Wonder Books written for children. An unparalleled analysis of the formal intricacies of Hawthorne's writings, this book is an eloquent plea for the necessity of grounding ideological analysis in aesthetical considerations.

A Historical Guide to Herman Melville

A Historical Guide to Herman Melville PDF Author: Giles Gunn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199729042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This collection gathers together original essays dealing with Melville's relations with his historical era, with class, with the marketplace, with ethnic otherness, and with religion. These essays are framed by a new, short biography by Robert Milder, an introduction by Giles Gunn, an illustrated chronology, and a bibliographical essay. Taken together, these pieces afford a fresh and searching set of perspectives on Melville's connections both with his own age and also with our own. This book makes the case, as does no other collection of criticism of its size, for Melville's commanding centrality to nineteenth-century American writing.

Exiled Royalties

Exiled Royalties PDF Author: Robert Milder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in 1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers, especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a "larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. The ways in which this impulse expressed itself through Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled Royalties.

Billy Budd

Billy Budd PDF Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1770485759
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
“Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever?” asked Henry David Thoreau. The question has never been academic, but in 1924, when Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor was published posthumously, we understood better than ever why. An uneasy if beautiful account of the human cost of realpolitik, Billy Budd, Sailor asks how far we should go to protect the status quo. When does the reaction to a security crisis become reactionary? In the novella John Claggart, master-at-arms of a British warship, alleges a sailor is talking mutiny. The sailor, Billy, isn’t just innocent of the charge; he’s a true innocent. Yet when confronted by his accuser, Billy reacts impulsively, striking Claggart. The resulting trial shows the horrors that can follow from a civilized society following its own laws. This Broadview Edition is based on the authoritative Hayford-Sealts copy-text of Billy Budd. The introduction distills the long and complex critical conversation about the work since its publication, and the historical appendices feature materials on mutiny, capital and corporal punishment, philosophical pessimism, sexuality, and the rule of law.

The Value of Herman Melville

The Value of Herman Melville PDF Author: Geoffrey Sanborn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108644228
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
In The Value of Herman Melville, Geoffrey Sanborn presents Melville to us neither as a somber purveyor of dark truths nor as an ironist who has outthought us in advance but as a quasi-maternal provider, a writer who wants more than anything else to supply us with the means of enriching our experiences. In twelve brief chapters, Sanborn examines the distinctive qualities of Melville's style - its dynamism, its improvisatoriness, its intimacy with remembered or imagined events - and shows how those qualities, once they have become a part of our equipment for living, enable us to sink deeper roots into the world. Ranging across his career, but focusing in particular on Moby-Dick, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', 'Benito Cereno', and Billy Budd, Sanborn shows us a Melville who is animating rather than overawing, who encourages us to bring more of ourselves to the present and to care more about the life that we share with others.

London Fog

London Fog PDF Author: Christine L. Corton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674495713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Telegraph Editor’s Choice An Evening Standard “Best Books about London” Selection In popular imagination, London is a city of fog. The classic London fogs, the thick yellow “pea-soupers,” were born in the industrial age of the early nineteenth century. Christine L. Corton tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and their lasting effects on our culture and imagination. “Engrossing and magnificently researched...Corton’s book combines meticulous social history with a wealth of eccentric detail. Thus we learn that London’s ubiquitous plane trees were chosen for their shiny, fog-resistant foliage. And since Jack the Ripper actually went out to stalk his victims on fog-free nights, filmmakers had to fake the sort of dank, smoke-wreathed London scenes audiences craved. It’s discoveries like these that make reading London Fog such an unusual, enthralling and enlightening experience.” —Miranda Seymour, New York Times Book Review “Corton, clad in an overcoat, with a linklighter before her, takes us into the gloomier, long 19th century, where she revels in its Gothic grasp. Beautifully illustrated, London Fog delves fascinatingly into that swirling miasma.” —Philip Hoare, New Statesman

Macaulay

Macaulay PDF Author: Robert E. Sullivan
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
On the 150th anniversary of the death of the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, Robert Sullivan offers a portrait of a Victorian life that probes the cost of power, the practice of empire, and the impact of ideas. His Macaulay is a Janus-faced master of the universe: a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who cared little for the cause, a forceful advocate for reforming Whig politics but a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian, yet a skeptic and a secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist who was in love with his two youngest sisters. Perhaps best known in the West for his classic History of England, Macaulay left his most permanent mark on South Asia, where his penal code remains the law. His father ensured that ancient Greek and Latin literature shaped Macaulay’s mind, but he crippled his heir emotionally. Self-defense taught Macaulay that power, calculation, and duplicity rule politics and human relations. In Macaulay’s writings, Sullivan unearths a sinister vision of progress that prophesied twentieth-century genocide. That the reverent portrait fashioned by Macaulay’s distinguished extended family eclipsed his insistent rhetoric about race, subjugation, and civilizing slaughter testifies to the grip of moral obliviousness. Devoting his huge talents to gaining power—above all for England and its empire—made Macaulay’s life a tragedy. Sullivan offers an unsurpassed study of an afflicted genius and a thoughtful meditation on the modern ethics of power.

The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art

The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art PDF Author: Dehn Gilmore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107661609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary study argues for the vital importance of visual culture as a force shaping the Victorian novel's formal development and reading history. It shows how authors like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy borrowed language and conceptual formations from art world spaces - the art market, the museum, the large-scale exhibition, and art critical discourse - not only when they chose certain subjects or refined certain aspects of realism, but also when they tried to adapt various genres of the novel for a new and newly vociferous mass audience. Quandaries specific to new forms of public display affected authors' sense of their relationship with their own public. Debates about how best to appreciate a new mass of visual information impacted authors' sense of how people read, and consequently the development of particular novel forms like the multi-plot novel, the historical novel, the sensation novel, and fin-de-siècle fiction.

Chasing the White Whale

Chasing the White Whale PDF Author: David Dowling
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299062
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
"There have been a lot of crazy books about Melville and Moby-Dickiut this isn't one of them. Dowling's overarching analogy, between Ishmael's and Melville's obsessions and the annual marathon group-reading of Moby-Dick in New Bedford, makes perfect sense and generates illuminating analyses of the novel and its cultural contexts. It also lets him open his book up into a passionate exploration of how great literature can still play a vital role in people's lives today"-Damion Searls, editor, Thoreau's The Journal: 1837-1861 and Melville's; or The Whale --Book Jacket.