Book Description
Visions and Visionaries is an apt title for this volume of essays on contemporary Austrian literature and film, because this collection offers insightful discussions of a gal-lery of significant authors and cultural figures. It also investigates important issues of style and genre, and portrays questions of Austrian identity and culture in rich contexts of recent literary and multi-media developments, cross-cultural interactions, and historical forces. This book encompasses relevant trends and notions from the past—especially the com-plexities of lingering effects of the Nazi era—along with issues of the future—in particular the present and anticipated interactions of culture and cyberspace. The essays are en-hanced by poems by Evelyn Schlag and Gerhard Kofler. ... Read more

Book Description
The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the `modern' is implicated and debated, and which inform its representational modes.

Modernism: A Cultural History explores modernism's struggle with a split temporality in which the old and the emerging new struggle, and in which, with the horror of the Great War, notions of a traumatic or `frozen' time emerge. It considers such topics as modernism, market culture and obscurity; the culture of science and technology; politics, economics, eugenics, and sexology; primitivism and race; cinema and sound recording; gender and modernism; and the study of consciousness and the senses. It portrays modernism less as a movement in revolt from the modern world than as attempting to engage with that world: the cry of `reform!' which characterizes much of post-enlightenment thought is used to describe modernist writers' engagement with politics or bodies as well as with inherited style. In this wide-ranging study, a parade of writers - from the canonical like Pound, Eliot and Woolf to less well-known figures like Mary Butts, Muriel Rukeyser and Sterling Brown - are considered, and literary movements like Imagism, Surrealism and the Harlem Renaissance are drawn into the debate.

Students and scholars alike, of Modernism and Twentieth Century Literature, will find the breadth, clarity and fresh approach of this text invaluable. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

not useful
ordered due to syllabus, discursive texts are long and dense, prof didn't discuss them in class. so, I'm stuck. ... Read more

Book Description
Distinctly interdisciplinary, Kingship, Conquest, and Patria brings together French and Welsh studies with literary and historical analysis, genre study with questions of medieval colonialisms and national writing. It treats eight centuries' worth of insular and continental literature, placing the 12th- and 13th-century development of Arthurian romance in a history of fraught, ambiguous relations between Capetian France, Angevin England, and native Wales. Overall, the book aims to contextualize how French Arthurian romance and Welsh rhamant, despite being products of opposing cultures in an age of conquest, collectively revise the figure of King Arthur created by earlier insular tradition. At a time when contemporary monarchies sought to curtail the autonomy of both northern French and Welsh principalities, the literary image of kingship pointedly declines in romance and rhamant, replaced by an ideal of knightly independence. A focus on the romance portrait of King Arthur is the culmination of this study: Part I provides a survey of early British Arthurian material written in Latin and Welsh; Part II presents the historical contexts in northern France and Wales out of which the genre of Arthurian romance emerged; Part III turns to literary and sociopolitical analyses of Chrétien's five romances and the three Welsh rhamantau. ... Read more

Book Description
Ronald Schleifer offers a powerful reassessment of the politics and culture of modernism. His study analyzes the transition from the Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment ways of understanding in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He argues that this transition expresses itself centrally in an altered conception of temporality. Addressing a variety of disciplines, this study examines the period's remarkable breaks with the past in literature, music, and the arts more generally, and engages with the work of writers and thinkers as varied as George Eliot, Walter Benjamin, Einstein and Russell. ... Read more

Book Description
Africa, according to the contributors to this anthology, is "one cultural river with numerous tributaries articulated by their specific responses to history and the environment." They concentrate on the similarities in behavior, perceptions, and technologies of African culture that tie those tributaries together. The fourteen original essays by leading scholars of African studies are organized in four general divisions which consider the ethno-cultural motif, the artistic tradition, concepts of cultural value, and cultural continua. ... Read more

Book Description
In this original and illuminating study, Mark Knights reveals how the political culture of the eighteenth century grew out of earlier trends and innovations. Arguing that the period 1675-1720 needs to be seen as the second stage of a seventeenth-century revolution that ran on until c.1720, the book traces the development of the public as an arbiter of politics, the growth of a national political culture, the shift towards a representative society, a crisis of public discourse and credibility, and a political enlightenment rooted in local and national partisan conflict. The 'public' acquired a new status in the later Stuart period as a result of frequent elections, the lapse of pre-publication licensing, the emergence of party politics, the creation of a public debt and ideological conflict over popular sovereignty. These factors enlarged the role of the public and required it to make frequent acts of judgement. Yet contemporaries from across the political spectrum feared that the public might be misled by the misrepresentations peddled by their rivals. Each side, and those ostensibly of no side, discerned a culture of passion, slander, libel, lies, hypocrisy, dissimulation, conspiracy, private languages and fictions. 'Truth' appeared an ambiguous, political matter. But the reaction to partisanship was also creative, for it helped to construct an ideal form of political discourse. This was one based on reason rather than passion, on politeness rather than incivility, on moderation rather than partisan zeal, on critical reading rather than credulity; and the realisation of those ideals rested on infrequent rather than frequent elections. Finding synergies between social, political, religious, scientific, literary, cultural and intellectual history, 'Representation and Misrepresentation' reinvigorates the debate about the emergence of 'the public sphere' in the later Stuart period. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Rise of public opinion and electioneering
Mark Knights' book tells how political writing began, and the birth of influencing the voters through print. Knights book exposes the beginings of this most common feature of modern politics-campaign literature and writings.
From the Exclusion Crisis in 1679 to the South Sea Bubble in 1720, Whigs and Tories sought to influence voters by trumpeting the virtues of their side, condemning the vices of the other, and either praising the innate common sense, or lamenting the gullibility of the voters, as more frequent elections gave the public more opportunity to vote. Knights does an excellent job of explaining how the process of electioneering began, and how "public opinion" and "the People" entered into politics for the first time in English history.
This is a great book thats easy to follow and understand. The author assumes knowledge of the late Stuart, early Georgian time period, and also about British elections system, but it was still a very good book, which I highlt recommend. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
'The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.'Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that are as relevant now as they have ever been. Arnold seeks to find out 'what culture really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it' in an age of rapid social change and increasing mechanization.He contrasts culture, 'the study of perfection', with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England.How can individuals be educated, not indoctrinated, and what is the role of the state in disseminating 'sweetness and light'? This edition reproduces the original book version and enables readers to appreciate its immediate historical context as well as the reasons for its continued importance today, in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Witty, ironic, and irrepressible classic
This was probably Arnold's greatest work, and it can still be read with profit today. Mainly a reaction to the social and cultural uncertainties of mid-Victorian England, Arnold attempted to analyze and solve the problem of anarchy and cultural uncertainty as he saw it in this witty and articulate collection of essays. The U.S. is in a similar uncertain state today, but unfortunately we're more likely to see more false pundits pandering nonsense rather than another Matthew Arnold, whose intelligence, wit, and uncommon sense seem to be all too rare today in this country. As the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it, "Arnold saw in the idea of "the State," and not in any one class of society, the true organ and repository of the nation's collective "best self." No summary can do justice to this extraordinary book; it can still be read with pure enjoyment, for it is written with an inward poise, a serene detachment, and an infusion of mental laughter, which make it a masterpiece of ridicule as well as a searching analysis of Victorian society. The same is true of its unduly neglected sequel, Friendship's Garland (1871)." ... Read more