Author: Richard P. ROBINSON
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Patricia Cline Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679740759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett. From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness. But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators. With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Patricia Cline Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.

Author: Barbara Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is volume 52 of the Radical History Review series. It deals specifically with new directions in gender history and the history of sexuality.

Author: American Art Association, Anderson Galleries (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 1246

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: William Huffman Winters
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: George Wilkes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Acquittals
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books
Languages : en
Pages : 584

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 618

Get Book Here

Book Description

Author: Laura E. Tanner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
Framing Marilynne Robinson's fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson's novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson's novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. Stiffly perched on the edge of un-cushioned furniture or propped awkwardly in the midst of someone else's conversation, Robinson's characters hover in the margins of a lived experience they are often forced to observe self-consciously and vigilantly. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson's narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson's novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson's fiction.

Author: British Museum. Dept. of Printed Books
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English imprints
Languages : en
Pages : 1248

Get Book Here

Book Description