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London and the Making of Provincial Literature
In the early nineteenth century, London publishers dominated the transatlantic book trade. No one felt this more keenly than authors from Ireland, Scotland, and the United States who struggled to establish their own national literary traditions while publishing in the English metropolis. Authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper devised a range of strategies to transcend the national rivalries of the literary field. By writing prefaces and footnotes addressed to a foreign audience, revising texts specifically for London markets, and celebrating national particularity, provincial authors appealed to English readers with idealistic stories of cross-cultural communion. From within the messy and uneven marketplace for books, Joseph Rezek argues, provincial authors sought to exalt and purify literary exchange. In so doing, they helped shape the Romantic-era belief that literature inhabits an autonomous sphere in society.
London and the Making of Provincial Literaturetells an ambitious story about the mutual entanglement of the history of books and the history of aesthetics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Situated between local literary scenes and a distant cultural capital, enterprising provincial authors and publishers worked to maximize success in London and to burnish their reputations and build their industry at home. Examining the production of books and the circulation of material texts between London and the provincial centers of Dublin, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia, Rezek claims that the publishing vortex of London inspired a dynamic array of economic and aesthetic practices that shaped an era in literary history.
eBook
Private : do (not) enter : personal writings and textual scholarship
Until recently, writings of a private nature have been neglected in literary and textual studies. There are two main reasons for this: the scarcity of pre-modern witnesses of this type of textual production and, in contrast, the over-abundance of material in contemporary writers' archives. Although in more recent times there has been a marked shift towards the study of private and personal writings, important issues remain to be studied. In the light of genetic criticism and in the context of the broadening attention of textual scholarship to all matters relating to textual production, these texts have acquired a new status, but the legal, philological and historical questions they raise have not been systematically addressed. The new interest of textual scholarship in the processes of creation and dissemination of texts offers an opportunity to reflect more thoroughly on the nature of these documents.
Book
New World Poetics
A simultaneously ecocritical and comparative study, New World Poetics plumbs the earthly depth and social breadth of the poetry of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott, three of the Americas' most ambitious and epic-minded poets. In Whitman's call for a poetry of New World possibility, Neruda's invocation of an \"American love,\" and Walcott's investment in the poetic ironies of an American epic, the adamic imagination of their poetry does not reinvent the mythical Garden that stands before history's beginnings but instead taps the foundational powers of language before a natural world deeply imbued with the traces of human time. Theirs is a postlapsarian Adam seeking a renewed sense of place in a biocentric and cross-cultural New World through language and nature's capacity for regeneration in the wake of human violence and suffering. The book introduces the environmental history of the Americas and its relationship to the foundation of American and Latin American studies, explores its relevance to each poet's ambition to recuperate the New World's lost histories, and provides a transnational poetics of understanding literary influence and textual simultaneity in the Americas. The study provides much needed in-depth ecocritical readings of the major poems of the three poets, insisting on the need for thoughtful regard for the challenge to human imagination and culture posed by nature's regenerative powers; nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of balancing the demands of social justice within the context of deep time; and the symptomatic dangers as well as healing potential of human self-consciousness in light of global environmental degradation.
eBook
Maximum Movies—Pulp Fictions
In the words of Richard Maltby . . . \"Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked.\" One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents. The other is occupied by critics, intellectuals, cinephiles, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Manny Farber, and Lawrence Alloway, who championed the cause of these movies and incited the cultural guardians of the day by attacking a rigorously policed canon of tasteful, rarified, and ossified art objects. Against the legitimate, and in defense of the illegitimate, in an insolent and unruly manner, they agitated for the recognition of lurid sensational crime stories, war pictures, fast-paced Westerns, thrillers, and gangster melodramas were claimed as examples of the true, the real, and the authentic in contemporary culture--the foundation upon which modern film studies sits.
eBook
Multilingualism and mother tongue in medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan narratives
The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of \"canonical\" texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.
eBook
Disturbing Indians
How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and
reconstructed the Native American past in their
work.
In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have
Native Americans played an active role in the construction of
the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of
colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering
them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in
southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a
post-regional understanding of the American South. William
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon
created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the
Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the
Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the
American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful
removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently
returned to the idea of an \"Indian frontier,\" each articulating
a different vision and discourse about Native
Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some,
symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others.
Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double
discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional
identity by invoking the South’s \"native\" heritage and
pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward
expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere
of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the \"Indian\"
signifies regional and national self-definitions and
contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national
\"others.\" Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses:
quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during
the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of
material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology
as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs
into the textual strata of America’s literature and its
cultural history).
eBook