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Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature

Arthur Krystal

From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. This book examines what most commentators ignore: the role of ... More

From small questions of taste to large questions concerning the nature of existence, intellectual debate takes up much of our time. This book examines what most commentators ignore: the role of temperament and taste in the forming of aesthetic and ideological opinions. In provocative chapters about reading and writing, about the relation between life and literature, about knowledge and certainty, about God and death, and about a gradual disaffection with the literary scene, the book demonstrates that opposing points of view are based more on innate predilections than on disinterested thought or analysis. Not beholden to any fashionable theory or political agenda, the book interrogates the usual suspects in the cultural wars from an independent, though not impartial, vantage point. Clearly personal and unabashedly belletrist, the chapters ask important questions. What makes culture one thing and not another? What inspires aesthetic values? What drives us to make comparisons? And how does a bias for one kind of evidence as opposed to another contribute to the form and content of intellectual argument?Less

The American Classics: A Personal Essay

Denis Donoghue

How is a classic book to be defined? How much time must elapse before a work may be judged a “classic”? And among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation? This book ... More

How is a classic book to be defined? How much time must elapse before a work may be judged a “classic”? And among all the works of American literature, which deserve the designation? This book presents a short list of “relative” classics—works whose appeal may not be universal but which nonetheless have occupied an important place in our culture for more than a century. These books have survived the abuses of time—neglect, contempt, indifference, willful readings, excesses of praise and hyperbole. The book bestows the term classic on just five American works: Melville's Moby-Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Examining each separately, each chapter discusses how the writings have been received and interpreted, and offers contemporary readings, suggesting, for example, that in the post-9/11 era, Moby-Dick may be rewardingly read as a revenge tragedy. The book extends an irresistible invitation to open the pages of these American classics again, demonstrating with wit and acuity how very much they have to say to us now.Less

American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

Caleb Crain

This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels ... More

This book weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative to describe the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing—the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. The book traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature—a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout, this book demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.Less

Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon

Nigel Smith

The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell's Protectorate, he has been variously ... More

The seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is one of the most intriguing figures in English literature. A noted civil servant under Cromwell's Protectorate, he has been variously identified as a patriot, spy, conspirator, concealed homosexual, father to the liberal tradition, and incendiary satirical pamphleteer and freethinker. But while Marvell's poetry and prose have attracted a wide modern following, his prose is known only to specialists, and much of his personal life remains shrouded in mystery. This biography provides a look into Marvell's life, from his early employment as a tutor and gentleman's companion to his suspicious death, reputedly a politically fueled poisoning. Drawing on exhaustive archival research, the voluminous corpus of Marvell's previously little-known writing, and recent scholarship across several disciplines, the author's portrait becomes the definitive account of this elusive 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

Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

Jaroslaw Anders

Twentieth-century Polish literature is often said to be a “witness to history,” a narrative of the historical and political disasters that visited the nation. This book examines Poland's modern ... More

Twentieth-century Polish literature is often said to be a “witness to history,” a narrative of the historical and political disasters that visited the nation. This book examines Poland's modern poetry and fiction and explains that the best Polish writing of the period 1918–89 was much more than testimony. Rather, it constantly transformed historical experience into metaphysical reflection, a philosophical or religious exploration of human existence. The book analyzes and contextualizes the work of nine modern Polish writers. These include the “three madmen” of the interwar period—Schulz, Gombrowicz, and Witkiewicz, whom he calls the fathers of Polish modernist prose; the great poets of the war generation—Milosz, Herbert, and Szymborska; Herling-Grudzinski and Konwicki, with their dark philosophical subtexts; and the mystical-ecstatic poet Zagajewski.Less

Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed

Joel Porte

Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also ... More

Ralp Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: America's foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protege. The truth, this book maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired. This book focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. It traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of “self-culture”, produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture.Less

The Cross and Other Jewish Stories

Lamed Shapiro

Leah Garrett (ed.)

Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossing, ... More

Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossing, alcoholism, and failed ventures, yet his writings are models of precision, psychological insight, and daring. Shapiro focuses intently on the nature of violence: the mob violence of pogroms committed against Jews; the traumatic after-effects of rape, murder, and powerlessness; and, the murderous event that transforms the innocent child into witness and the rabbi's son into agitator. Within a society on the move, Shapiro's refugees from the shtetl and the traditional way of life are in desperate search of food, shelter, love, and things of beauty. Remarkably, and against all odds, they sometimes find what they are looking for. More often than not, the climax of their lives is an experience of ineffable terror. This book also reveals Lamed Shapiro as an American master. His writings depict the Old World struggling with the New, extremes of human behaviour combined with the pursuit of normal happiness. Through the perceptions of a remarkable gallery of men, women, children—even of animals and plants—Shapiro successfully reclaimed the lost world of the shtetl as he negotiated East Broadway and the Bronx, Union Square, and vaudeville.Less

Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History

Bryan Cheyette

This book throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination ... More

This book throws new light on a wide range of modern and contemporary writers—some at the heart of the canon, others more marginal—to explore the power and limitations of the diasporic imagination after the Second World War. Moving from early responses to the death camps and decolonization, through internationally prominent literature after the Second World War, it culminates in fresh engagements with contemporary Jewish, post-ethnic, and postcolonial writers. The author regards many of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century luminaries he examines—among them Hannah Arendt, Anita Desai, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Primo Levi, Caryl Phillips, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, Zadie Smith, and Muriel Spark—as critical exemplars of the diasporic imagination. Against the discrete disciplinary thinking of the academy, he elaborates and argues for a new comparative approach across Jewish and postcolonial histories and literatures. And in so doing, the author illuminates the ways in which histories and cultures can be imagined across national and communal boundaries.Less

The Drama Is Coming Now: The Theater Criticism of Richard Gilman, 1961-1991

Richard Gilman

This book presents a collection of one of America's finest drama critics. The book chronicles a major period in American theatre history, one that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, ... More

This book presents a collection of one of America's finest drama critics. The book chronicles a major period in American theatre history, one that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, regional theatre, nonprofit companies, and avant-garde performance, as well as growing interest in plays by women and minorities and in world drama. This book is a criticism for the ages. There are essays, profiles, and book reviews dealing with such topics as the “new naturalism” in theatre, Brecht's collected plays, and the legacy of Stanislavski. There is also a generous sampling of other comments on plays by O'Neill, Miller, Chekhov, Albee, Ibsen, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Fugard, and many others.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

Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

David Dowling

In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an ... More

In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and antimaterialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes—including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. This book's history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés—a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating—is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.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

Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell

James Boswell

Paul Tankard (ed.)

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This book ... More

James Boswell (1740–1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist, and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This book presents a generous and varied selection of Boswell's journalistic writings, most of which have not been published since the eighteenth century. It offers a new angle on the history of journalism, an idiosyncratic view of literature, politics, and public life in late eighteenth-century Britain, and an original perspective on a complex and engaging literary personality.Less

Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art

Judith L. Sensibar

This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, ... More

This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkner's creative process, the text discovers that these women's relationships with Faulkner were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. The book brings to the foreground, as Faulkner did, this “female world,” an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography. Through extensive research in untapped biographical sources, including archival materials and interviews with the women's families and other members of the communities in which they lived, the book reconnects Faulkner's biography to his work. It demonstrates how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women. The book alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his brilliant fiction, but also of darknesses, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner unveiled in the American psyche.Less

Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote

Manuel Duran and Fay Rogg

Cervantes' Don Quixote is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. This book offers an excursion into Cervantes' novel and traces ... More

Cervantes' Don Quixote is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. This book offers an excursion into Cervantes' novel and traces its impact on writers and thinkers across centuries and continents. How did Cervantes write such a rich tale? The chapters explore the details of Cervantes' life, the techniques with which he constructed the novel, and the central themes of the adventures of Don Quixote and his earthy squire Sancho Panza. They then provide a panoramic view of Cervantes' powerful influence on generations of writers as diverse as Descartes, Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, and Borges.Less

The Fruited Plain: Fables for a Postmodern Democracy

Alvin Kernan

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today's ... More

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath struggled in an era of disappointed dreams and empty pockets. But how might the grandchildren of that Dust Bowl generation fare in today's more promising times? This book sends various descendants of the original Joad family on a postmodern journey out of California and into the excesses of American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The experiences of today's Joads are as hilarious as they are discomfiting: they encounter a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray. In ten satiric episodes, they visit virtually every important American institution—the family, education, religion, art, the military, law courts, sex, science and medicine, politics, and not least television and its advertisements. Unsparing with barbs, the book reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. The book's modern-day Joads find themselves in a distorted world where a surplus of democracy not only fails to free its inhabitants but also makes them vulnerable to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous exploiters.Less

George Sand

Elizabeth Harlan

George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and ... More

George Sand was the most famous, and the most scandalous, woman in nineteenth-century France. As a writer, she was enormously prolific: she wrote more than ninety novels, thirty-five plays, and thousands of pages of autobiography. She inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert and Proust but is often remembered for her love affairs with such figures as Musset and Chopin. Her affair with Chopin is the most notorious: their nine-year relationship ended in 1847 when Sand began to suspect that the composer had fallen in love with her daughter, Solange. Drawing on archival sources, much of it neglected by Sand's previous biographers, this book examines the intertwined issues of maternity and identity that haunt Sand's writing and defined her life. Why was Sand's relationship with her daughter so fraught? Why was a woman so famous for her personal and literary audacity ultimately so conflicted about women's liberation? In an effort to solve the riddle of Sand's identity, the book examines a latticework of lives that include Solange, Sand's mother and grandmother, and Sand's own protagonists, whose stories amplify her own.Less

Hamlet's Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies

Peter Lake

This incisive book reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In ... More

This incisive book reveals how in Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Shakespeare worked through a range of Tudor anxieties, including concerns about the nature of justice, resistance, and salvation. In both Hamlet and Titus, the princes are faced with successions forged under questionable circumstances and they each have a choice: whether or not to resort to political violence. The unfolding action, the book argues, is best understood in terms of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of resistance and the relation between religion and politics. Relating the plays to their broader political and polemical contexts, Lake sheds light on the nature of revenge, resistance, and religion in post-Reformation England.Less

Horace's "Carmen Saeculare": Ritual Magic and the Poet`s Art

Michael C. J. Putnam

This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 bce for choral performance at the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games. The poem is the ... More

This is the first book devoted to Horace's Carmen Saeculare, a poem commissioned by Roman emperor Augustus in 17 bce for choral performance at the Ludi Saeculares, the Secular Games. The poem is the first fully preserved Latin hymn whose circumstances of presentation are known, and it is the only lyric of Horace we can be certain was first presented orally. The book offers a close and sensitive reading of this hymn, shedding new light on the richness and virtuosity of its poetry, on the many sources Horace drew on, and on the poem's power and significance as a public ritual. A rich and compelling work, this poem is a masterpiece, and it represents a crucial link in the development of Rome's outstanding lyric poet.Less