Author: Helen Smith
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717419
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
One of The Sunday Times' (U.K.) Books of the Year "Garnett's life will not need to be written again." —Andrew Morton, Times Literary Supplement A penetrating biography of the most important English-language editor of the early twentieth century During the course of a career spanning half a century, Edward Garnett—editor, critic, and reader for hire—would become one of the most influential men in twentieth-century English literature. Known for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for identifying and nurturing the talents of a generation of the greatest writers in the English language, from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, Henry Green to Edward Thomas, T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence. In An Uncommon Reader, Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s intimate and at times stormy relationships with those writers. (“I have always suffered a little from a sense of injustice at your hands,” Galsworthy complained in a letter.) All turned to Garnett for advice and guidance at critical moments in their careers, and their letters and diaries—in which Garnett often features as a feared but deeply admired protagonist—tell us not only about their creative processes, but also about their hopes and fears. Beyond his connections to some of the greatest minds in literary history, we also come to know Edward as the husband of Constance Garnett—the prolific translator responsible for introducingTolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov to an English language readership—and as the father of David “Bunny” Garnett, who would make a name for himself as a writer and publisher. “Mr. Edward Garnett occupies a unique position in the literary history of our age,” E. M. Forster wrote. “He has done more than any living writer to discover and encourage the genius of other writers, and he has done it without any desire for personal prestige.” An absorbing and masterfully researched portrait of a man who was a defining influence on the modern literary landscape, An Uncommon Reader asks us to consider the multifaceted meaning of literary genius.
Author: Patricia Laurence
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030264157
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O’Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, is laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.
Author: Lara Feigel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608199851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 825
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Book Description
'The nightly routine of sirens, barrage, the probing raider, the unmistakable engine ... the bomb-bursts moving nearer and then moving away, hold one like a love-charm' --Graham Greene When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a strange kind of battlefield. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes, and bombs brought sleepless nights, fear and loss. But for a group of writers, the war became an incomparably vivid source of inspiration, the blazing streets scenes of exhilaration in which fear could transmute into love. In this powerful chronicle of literary life under the Blitz, Lara Feigel vividly conjures the lives of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and the novelist Henry Green. Starting with a sparklingly detailed recreation of a single night of September 1940, the narrative traces the tempestuous experiences of these five figures through five years in London and Ireland, followed by postwar Vienna and Berlin. Volunteering to drive ambulances, patrol the streets and fight fires, the protagonists all exhibited a unified spirit of a nation under siege, but as individuals their emotions were more volatile. As the sky whistled and the ground shook, nerves were tested, loyalties examined and torrid affairs undertaken. Literary historian and journalist Feigel brilliantly and beautifully interweaves the letters, diaries, journalism and fiction of her writers with official records to chart the history of a burning world, experienced through the eyes of extraordinary individuals.
Author: Mary S. Trouille
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322477
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Set in Paris in the 1780s, Rétif de la Bretonne's Ingénue Saxancour is a thinly veiled account of his daughter's disastrous marriage to an abusive husband. From the time of her marriage in January, 1780, until she left her husband in July, 1785, Agnès Rétif suffered continually from severe physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Published in 1789, Rétif's novel scandalized the public with its graphic descriptions of his son-in-law's sexual perversity and brutal violence. Rétif's novel remains shocking more than two centuries later and continues to raise disturbing questions about power relations within abusive relationships. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the accusations leveled against Rétif himself concerning his motives for writing and publishing this account: Was he, as some charged, a shameless exhibitionist willing to reveal his family's darkest secrets merely to attract attention and broaden his readership? Was he an unscrupulous opportunist willing to capitalize on his daughter's misfortunes and risk her reputation simply to pay his debts? Or was he, as he himself claimed, trying to warn young women about the dangers of marrying men of dubious backgrounds against their parents' wishes? Rétif was all this and more: a reform-minded pioneer far in advance of his time with his graphic portrayal of spousal abuse, his call for greater public awareness of this perennial problem, and his crusade for liberal divorce laws that would allow women to escape from abusive relationships and to remarry. This, in fact, is what Agnès Rétif was able to do after passage of the divorce law passed by France's revolutionary government in 1792.
Author: Library of Congress. Copyright Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Copyright
Languages : en
Pages : 1560
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Author: Varian Fry
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Varian Fry, a young editor from New York, traveled to Marseilles after Germany defeated France in the summer of 1940. As the representative of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization, he offered aid and advice to refugees who found themselves threatened with extradition to Nazi Germany under Article 19 of the Franco-German armistice — the “Surrender on Demand” clause. Fry risked his life to rescue those targeted by the Gestapo in “the most gigantic man-trap in history.” Working day and night with a few associates in opposition to France’s Vichy government and to American authorities, his elaborate rescue network managed to spirit more than 1,500 people — including prominent European politicians, artists, writers and scientists — to safety by the time Fry was expelled from France after 13 months. “Surrender on Demand is by turns wildly exciting, horrifying and exalting. Certainly, there has never been another book like it... Varian Fry is a good man. Through the people he has helped rescue — the doctors, the painters, the writers, the sculptors, the teachers — he has added to the sum total of the world’s happiness... an astonishingly good book.” — Russell Maloney, The New York Times “Surrender on Demand contains enough intrigue and conspiracy, enough narrow escapes and shady and flamboyant characters for three or four spy stories. But Mr. Fry has not written it for excitement... He has put down some plain and eloquent facts.” — Orville Prescott, The New York Times “I have read and heard many accounts of escapes from Europe... but none surpasses this restrained and factual narrative in suspense and excitement... It tells of many triumphs and some defeats: it depicts with vividness and often with humor a large number of interesting and frequently distinguished persons; it describes the endless obstacles encountered and the ingenious and constantly changing shifts and devices contrived to overcome them; and throughout it makes one feel the undercurrent of potential tragedy which too often became actual.” — New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review “A novelist would hardly dare pack a novel with so many hair-breath escapes.” — Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune “... a brilliant exposé of the work accomplished by [Fry] in Marseille during the tragic days that followed the French defeat... Surrender on Demand is a unique contribution to the underground history of the war.” — Josef Forman, Free World “There are a larger number of highly exciting and almost unbelievable stories in this deeply moving but often also highly amusing book. Friends of light adventure novels will undoubtedly like it. And friends of humanity will see much more in it than an adventure story although it deals with forging passports, with hiding and escaping from detectives, with secret messages hidden in a toothpaste tube, and with an underground railroad over a well protected border. They will see in it a memorial to the man who made what he modestly calls ‘an experiment in democratic solidarity’ and also to the women and men who sent him on his dangerous mission.” — Henry B. Kranz, Saturday Review
Author: James McDougall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317411587
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197
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Book Description
This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies and politics since the colonial period. Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers or urban real estate speculators, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.
Author: Mark Lemon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Caricatures and cartoons
Languages : en
Pages : 522
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Author: Jonathan Bolton
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 0838757731
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
"This book also looks at how authors have persistently used the bildungsroman to complicate and challenge the idealization of the family, exposing the divorce ban as symptomatic of an unrealistic notion of domestic inviolability. This study concludes with a discussion of the future of the bildungsroman in a country that has transcended many of its formative crises. This chapter considers Doyle's A Star Called Henry as a text that inaugurates a new phase in Irish coming-of-age narratives in which many of the problems of Irish life, formerly treated so earnestly and tragically, can be a source of play and humor." "By looking at a comprehensive range of novels by writers like Sean O'Faolain, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, and William Trevor, as well as lesser known figures like Eimar O'Duffy, Francis MacManus, and Mary Morrissy, Blighted Beginnings traces the evolving concerns of Irish writers as they pushed for a greater accommodation of individual freedoms and aspirations."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Peter Hart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191513385
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
What is it like to be in the I.R.A. - or at their mercy? This fascinating study explores the lives and deaths of the enemies and victims of the County Cork I.R.A. between 1916 and 1923 - the most powerful and deadly branch of the I.R.A. during one of the most turbulent periods in twentieth-century Ireland. These years saw the breakdown of the British legal system and police authority, the rise of republican violence, and the escalation of the conflict into a full-scale guerilla war, leading to a wave of riots, ambushes, lootings, and reprisal killings, with civilians forming the majority of victims in this unacknowledged civil war. Religion may have provided the starting point for the conflict, but class prejudice, patriotism, and personal grudges all fuelled the development and continuation of widespread violence. Using an unprecedented range of sources - many of them only recently made public - Peter Hart explores the motivation behind such activity. His conclusions not only reveal a hidden episode of Ireland's troubled past but provide valuable insights into the operation of similar terrorist groups today.
