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The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Golden examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such as The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland , and Peter Rabbit , and finds new expressions of this traditional genre in present-day graphic novel adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen . She explores the various factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book--the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies--and how these ultimately created a mass market for new fiction. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the Household Edition of Dickens or the realist artists of the Sixties, notably Fred Barnard and John Tenniel, this volume examines the lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. It also discusses how a particular canon has been refashioned and repurposed for new generations of readers.

With accuracy, wit, and intelligence, this remarkable new translation ofThe Golden Assbreathes new life into Apuleius's classic work. Sarah Ruden, a lyric poet as well as a highly respected translator, skillfully duplicates the verbal high jinks of Apuleius's ever-popular novel. It tells the story of Lucius, a curious and silly young man, who is turned into a donkey when he meddles with witchcraft. Doomed to wander from region to region and mistreated by a series of deplorable owners, Lucius at last is restored to human form with the help of the goddess Isis. The Golden Ass, the first Latin novel to survive in its entirety, is related to the Second Sophistic, a movement of learned and inventive literature. In a translation that is both the most faithful and the most entertaining to date, Ruden reveals to modern readers the vivid, farcical ingenuity of Apuleius's style.

How is it that comic books-the once reviled form of lowbrow popular culture-are now the rage for Hollywood blockbusters, the basis for bestselling video games, and the inspiration for literary graphic novels? InDemanding Respect,Paul Lopes immerses himself in the discourse and practices of this art and subculture to provide a social history of the American comic book over the last 75 years. Lopes analyzes the cultural production, reception, and consumption of American comic books throughout American history. He charts the rise of superheroes, the proliferation of serials, and the emergence of graphic novels.Demanding Respectexplores how comic books born in the 1930s were perceived as a \"menace\" in the 1950s, only to later become collectors' items and eventually \"hip\" fiction in the 1980s through today. Using a theoretical framework to examine the construction of comic book culture-the artists, publishers, readers and fans-Lopes explains how and why comic books have captured the public's imagination and gained a fanatic cult following.

This book asks why so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism apparently violated their most basic principles in relying on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African American figures. As a self-described “tool of the democratic spirit”, designed to “prick the bubbles of abstract types” (William Dean Howells), literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in American magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery, and Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish “the artistic emancipation of the Negro”. Yet in practice, Howells and his fellow realists regularly employed comic typification of ethnic subjects as a feature of their representational practice. Critics have generally dismissed such lapses in realist technique as vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with the movement's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. This book argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the era's most demanding literary and graphic works.

The lasting charm of Kaufman’s stories lies in a delightful mix of personal incidents and observations set against an anchoring backdrop of cultural tradition. His new collection is filled with tales from his parents’ homeland in the Ukraine, his own childhood reminiscences, and his adult travels. We watch the young author forced alongside \"every Jewish boy on the block\" to emulate Yehudi Menuhin on a ten-dollar violin with a moldy bow until the boy is spared by an innate lack of talent and his father’s judgment of his concert: \"Enough is enough is more than enough.\" Kaufman is carefully attuned to the awkwardness of adulthood as well as to that of early adolescence. In \"Interlude in Bangkok,\" his narrator scours the city for a synagogue while pursued by a prostitute. Later he and a friend encounter Greta Garbo in a museum café and are too frightened to approach her. \"I am not she,\" intones the mysterious movie star, and in his own way, Kaufman says that of himself in these stories through an autobiograp

In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. \"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture.\"--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.

In 1835 Thomas Chandler Haliburton introduced Samuel Slick of Slicksville, Connecticut, into the pages of the Novascotian in order to awaken his fellow citizens to the economic opportunities of their province.

Dust, Spittle & Wind is a story of youth, dreams of innocence and transcendence told within a postcolonial setting. It follows Olu Ray, the main character of the novel through a bitter-sweet journey of loss and self-realisation. The novel focuses on the final moment before actual emotional maturity when dreams either become flowers of brilliance or cold ashes. The novel describes the cold hand of fate as it swings between both extremes. Olu Ray eventually survives at the price of the abrupt loss of his innocence. The book teems with colourful characters and the blistering heat of the physical terrain appears to mirrors the lush sexuality on display. It explores the nature of taboo, the frustrations caused by it and the compulsions it provokes. In Sanya Osha's telling, society seems to be on the verge of irreparable breakdown but somehow manages to pull itself back from the abyss. The tension that runs through the novel is relentless but then, there is also much tenderness and subtlety that balances everything out. This is unquestionably a feat of powerful artistry. It deservedly won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Prize for prose in 1992.

This is a small sampling of Mark Twain's life-long fulminations against the editors, printers, and proofreaders who, subtly or grossly, altered his work and shrouded his intentions as they transmitted his writing from manuscript to type. Through unauthorized changes and inadvertent errors, Mark Twain's first publishers brought out texts full of thousands of errors in form and content. Later publishers then based their reprints on these corrupt editions and added errors of their own. It is the aim of the Iowa-California edition to strip away this accretion of error and present texts faithful to the author's intention. By comparing all the life-time version of Mark Twain's works, the editors are able to isolate the author's revisions from the printers and publishers' changes. The record of this comparison supplies not only the evidence for editorial decisions, but also the history of the author's efforts to shape his work. In addition, these volumes include previously uncollected work, work that has long been out of print, and such unpublished writing as related drafts, working notes, and marginalia. The texts are established at the Center for Textual Studies at the University of Iowa or at the Mark Twain Papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The costs for editorial work have been met by generous support from the Editing Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, and other institutional and private donors. The edition is published by the University of California Press with financial assistance from the Graduate College at the University of Iowa. All volumes are submitted to the Center for Editions of american Authors, or to its successor, the Committee for Scholarly Editions, for examination and approval

The beleaguered Joad family of Steinbeck'sGrapes of Wrathstruggled 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? In this boisterously inventive book Alvin Kernan 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 in Kernan's America a world of democracy gone haywire and social institutions in perplexing disarray.In ten satiric episodes, Kernan visits 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 his barbs, he reveals both the fools and the knaves among us. Kernan'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. Echoing the voices of such other provocative wits as Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe, Kernan will make you laugh at the absurdity of American culture and-in all likelihood-at yourself.