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Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4

Marcel Proust

William C. Carter (ed.)

Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, is notable for its ... More

Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time is considered by many to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, is notable for its pioneering discussion of homosexuality. After its publication, Colette wrote to Proust, “No one has written pages such as these on homosexuals, no one!” This edition is edited and annotated in the endeavor to bring the classic C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation closer to the spirit and style of the original.Less

Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Zander Brietzke

Magnum Opus offers an original and provocative analysis of Eugene O'Neill's unfinished cycle play project. From 1935 to 1939, Eugene O'Neill worked on a series of plays that would trace the history ... More

Magnum Opus offers an original and provocative analysis of Eugene O'Neill's unfinished cycle play project. From 1935 to 1939, Eugene O'Neill worked on a series of plays that would trace the history of an American family through several generations. He completed just two of the proposed eleven plays—A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions—before putting the project aside and taking up The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Most critics have viewed the Cycle as an extended warmup exercise, but Zander Brietzke treats the Cycle on its own terms as separate from the final plays and as O’Neill’s definitive statement on the effects of human greed and capitalism run amuck. The two plays that he did finish, numbers five and six, right in the middle, represent the core of the entire cycle and allude to the family’s past and predict its future in a critique of the American Dream. Combining archival research, literary analysis, and theatrical imagination, Magnum Opus untangles many myths about the Cycle, advances a female character as hero in a new interpretation, and proposes a new production concept as an epic event, a historical drama of our time.Less

The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian History in Literature and Culture

Sarah Bilston

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, ... More

When did the suburbs gain their reputation as places of dullness and sterility? This book traces the origins of such suburban stereotypes back to the 1820s, the earliest decade of suburban growth, and argues that those stereotypes were forged from the first to denigrate women and the new middle classes. Disdain for the suburbs blazed especially hotly at the fin de siècle. Writers like George Gissing and H. G. Wells famously presented the suburbs as dull and tedious places, inimical to creativity, and these are the images of the Victorian suburbs scholars know best to this day. This book traces a long-forgotten counter discourse back into the early decades of the century, showing that in women’s fiction especially, the suburbs functioned narratively as places of opportunity and new beginnings. The very existence of suburban problems, meanwhile, offered women a vocation, with professional work in and around the suburban home offered tentatively as the answer, the solution, the future. Drawing on a broad range of Victorian literature, from Charles Dickens and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to less well-known writers like John Claudius Loudon, Emily Eden, Bertha Buxton, Julia Frankau, and Jane Ellen Panton, this book bring forgotten voices back into the conversation about the growth of a new landscape, a new way of life.Less

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Noelle Gallagher

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often ... More

In eighteenth-century Britain, venereal disease was everywhere and nowhere: while physicians and commentators believed the condition to be widespread, it remained shrouded in secrecy, and was often represented using slang, symbolism, and wordplay. This book explores the cultural significance of the “clap” (gonorrhea), the “pox” (syphilis), and the “itch” (genital scabies) for the development of eighteenth-century British literature and art. As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. The book highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Casting light where the sun rarely shines, this study will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.Less

The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760-1830

David Francis Taylor

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense ... More

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.Less

The Elusive Brain: Literary Experiments in the Age of Neuroscience

Jason Tougaw

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple ... More

The Elusive Brain is the first comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. Jason Tougaw analyzes the works of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Maud Casey, Jonathan Lethem, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, and Siri Hustvedt, Ellen Forney, and David B.—arguing that their experiments with literary form offer a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Tougaw surveys memoirs about life with autism, epilepsy manic depression, or brain injury; revisionist mystery novels; and graphic narratives that engage neuroscience. The book argues that these works offer insight about how it feels and what it means to live with a brain whose role in the making of self or consciousness is far from fully understood. Brain memoirs and neuronovels revel in the mysteries of the explanatory gap between brain physiology and mental experience. In the process, these literary works offer an antidote to polarizing and outmoded debates about the “cerebral subject,” whether we are our brains (or not our brains). Rather than engaging in abstract philosophical debate, these literary works explore questions about neurodiversity politics and the stakes of rapidly advancing brain research for people whose experience represent what critic Ralph Savarese calls “all manner of neurologies.” Less

Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths

Emily Katz Anhalt

Millennia ago, Greek myths exposed the dangers of violent rage and the need for empathy and self-restraint. Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Hecuba, and Sophocles' Ajax show that anger and vengeance destroy ... More

Millennia ago, Greek myths exposed the dangers of violent rage and the need for empathy and self-restraint. Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Hecuba, and Sophocles' Ajax show that anger and vengeance destroy perpetrators and victims alike. Composed before and during the ancient Greeks' groundbreaking movement away from autocracy toward more inclusive political participation, these stories offer guidelines for modern efforts to create and maintain civil societies. The book reveals how these three masterworks of classical Greek literature can teach us, as they taught the ancient Greeks, to recognize violent revenge as a marker of illogical thinking and poor leadership. These time-honored texts emphasize the costs of our dangerous penchant for glorifying violent rage and those who would indulge in it. By promoting compassion, rational thought, and debate, Greek myths help to arm us against the tyrants we might serve and the tyrants we might become.Less

Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

Matthew Mutter

Restless Secularism explores the efforts of modernist writers to articulate a viable secular imagination, to trace the relation of this secular imagination to the Christian culture from which it ... More

Restless Secularism explores the efforts of modernist writers to articulate a viable secular imagination, to trace the relation of this secular imagination to the Christian culture from which it emerged, and to purify secular life of its religious residues. Yet it is also a study of the difficulty modernists have disentangling themselves from religious modes of understanding and experiencing the world, and emphasizes the persistent appeal of religious forms of imagination. The book contends that secularism has a distinct and historically contingent imaginary; it traces the modernist struggle both to articulate the contours of this imaginary and to elucidate its consequences for multiple fields of experience. Rather than focusing on private religious belief, the book shows, through a careful investigation of the work of Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden, how the shift from a religious to a secular imaginary has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of language, aesthetics, emotion, and the body and the material world. The book centers on Stevens’s attempts to pit a secular poetics of tautology against the religious promiscuity of metaphor, Woolf’s skirmishes with the eschatological significance of beauty, Yeats’s attempt to replace spiritualized emotion with the pagan “passions,” and Auden’s critique of magical thinking. Finally, it identifies a distinctly post-religious “problem of evil” that disturbs the secular imperative to affirm the immanence of life.Less

The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home

Abigail Williams

Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. This history ... More

Two centuries before the advent of radio, television, and motion pictures, books were a cherished form of popular entertainment and an integral component of domestic social life. This history explores the ways in which shared reading shaped the lives and literary culture of the time, offering new perspectives on how books have been used by their readers, and the part that they have played in middle-class homes and families. Drawing on marginalia, letters and diaries, library catalogues, elocution manuals, subscription lists, and more, the book offers fresh and fascinating insights into reading, performance, and the history of middle-class home life.Less

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque

Libby Murphy

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, ... More

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque is a new literary and cultural history of the First World War in France. It offers readers a fresh perspective on wartime popular culture, uncovering the attitudes and outlooks of the people who lived through the war one hundred years ago. The book develops a counternarrative to postwar interpretations of the infantryman as passive victim or active resister, focusing instead on the mechanisms through which soldiers and civilians resigned themselves to the war but imagined themselves as survivors. They were able to do so by reactivating a form of storytelling-the picaresque-whose central concern had always been the survival of a nonheroic protagonist in a hostile and chaotic world. During the Great War, French novelists, journalists, graphic artists, and cultural critics drew both consciously and unconsciously upon the long and rich European picaresque tradition. With its spirit of self-preservation as opposed to self-sacrifice and its affirmation of the value of life over death, the picaresque was a literary and cultural mode uniquely appropriate for expressing and attenuating the anxieties provoked by modern, industrialized warfare. The French reinvented the picaro as an apt hero for the modern age and positioned the picaresque as the dominant ethos of the modern cultural imagination.Less