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Although most modern scholars doubt the historicity of King Arthur, parts of the legend were accepted as fact throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval accounts of the historical Arthur, however, present a very different king from the romances that are widely studied today. Richard Moll examines a wide variety of historical texts including Thomas Gray'sScalacronicaand John Hardyng'sChronicleto explore the relationship between the Arthurian chronicles and the romances. He demonstrates how competing and conflicting traditions interacted with one another, and how writers and readers of Arthurian texts negotiated a complex textual tradition. Moll asserts that the enormous variety and number of existing chronicles demonstrates the immense popularity of the historical Arthur in medieval England. Since these chronicles were the dominant source of Arthurian information for the late medieval reader, they provide an invaluable, and neglected, interpretive context for modern readers of Malory and other later medieval romances. The first monograph to look at the impact of these historical texts on Arthurian literature,Before Maloryis also the first to show how canonical vernacular romances interacted with chronicle texts that have since dropped out of the canon.

Thomas King is the first Native writer to generate widespread interest in both Canada and the United States. He has been nominated twice for Governor General's Awards, and his first novel, Medicine River , has been transformed into a CBC movie. His books have been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times Book Review , The Globe and Mail , and People magazine. King is also the author of the serialized radio series The Dead Dog Café and is an accomplished photographer. Border Crossings is the first full-length study to explore King's art. Davidson, Walton, and Andrews employ a framework of postcolonial and border studies theory to examine the concepts of nation, race, and sexuality in King's work. They examine how King's art routinely explores cross-cultural dynamics, including Native rights and race relations, American and Canadian cultural interaction, and the artistic traditions of Europe and North America. The authors argue that, by situating these concepts within a comic framework, King avoids the polemics that often surface in cultural critiques. His writing engages, entertains, and educates. This provocative analysis of King's art reads across cultures and between borders, and makes an important contribution to the study of Native writing, Canadian and American literature, border studies, and humour studies.

Die Josephs-Tetralogie steht – gewaltiger noch als Der Zauberberg – wie ein Zentralmassiv in der literarischen Landschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts, das viele nur ehrfurchtsvoll aus der Ferne bestaunen, was angesichts des Bildungs- und Unterhaltungswertes gerades dieses Erzählwerkes höchst bedauerlich ist. Diejenigen, die sich diesem Werk nähern und den Versuch unternehmen, die Bedeutungstiefe der von Thomas Mann aufgeschichteten Stoffmassen zu durchdringen, sind gut beraten, sich an die Selbstauskünfte des Autors zu halten: Er hat in Tagebüchern, Briefen und Reden die Sedimente der Fach- und Sachbücher zur antiken Welt, zur Ägyptologie und zur Religionsgeschichte freigelegt, die von ihm im Schreibprozess konsultiert worden waren, und immer wieder auf die zeitgeschichtlichen Bezüge seines Werkes verwiesen. Der vorliegende Band folgt diesen Spuren des Dichters in Beiträgen von Alexander Honold, Iulia-Karin Patrut, Matthias Bauer, Markus Pohlmeyer, Martina Schönbächler und Vikica Matić.

Although Thomas E. Watson championed the rising Populist movement at the turn of the 19th century--an interracial alliance of agricultural interests fighting the forces of industrial capitalism--his eventual frustration with politics transformed him from liberalism to racial bigotry, from popular spokesman to mob leader. Pulitzer Prize winning scholar C. Vann Woodward clearly and objectively traces the history of this enigmatic Populist leader.

Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republicexamines a landmark decision in American jurisprudence, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the thorny legal issue of interstate commerce.Decided in 1824,Gibbons v. Ogdenarose out of litigation between owners of rival steamboat lines over passenger and freight routes between the neighboring states of New York and New Jersey. But what began as a local dispute over the right to ferry the paying public from the New Jersey shore to New York City soon found its way into John Marshall's court and constitutional history. The case is consistently ranked as one of the twenty most significant Supreme Court decisions and is still taught in constitutional law courses, cited in state and federal cases, and quoted in articles on constitutional, business, and technological history.Gibbons v. Ogdeninitially attracted enormous public attention because it involved the development of a new and sensational form of technology. To early Americans, steamboats were floating symbols of progress-cheaper and quicker transportation that could bring goods to market and refinement to the backcountry. A product of the rough-and-tumble world of nascent capitalism and legal innovation, the case became a landmark decision that established the supremacy of federal regulation of interstate trade, curtailed states' rights, and promoted a national market economy. The case has been invoked by prohibitionists, New Dealers, civil rights activists, and social conservatives alike in debates over federal regulation of issues ranging from labor standards to gun control. This lively study fills in the social and political context in which the case was decided-the colorful and fascinating personalities, the entrepreneurial spirit of the early republic, and the technological breakthroughs that brought modernity to the masses.