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InLiberty of the Imagination, Edward Cahill uncovers the surprisingly powerful impact of eighteenth-century theories of the imagination-philosophical ideas about aesthetic pleasure, taste, genius, the beautiful, and the sublime-on American writing from the Revolutionary era to the early nineteenth century. Far from being too busy with politics and commerce or too anxious about the morality of pleasure, American writers consistently turned to ideas of the imagination in order to comprehend natural and artistic objects, social formations, and political institutions. Cahill argues that conceptual tensions within aesthetic theory rendered it an evocative language for describing the challenges of American political liberty and confronting the many contradictions of nation formation. His analyses reveal the centrality of aesthetics to key political debates during the colonial crisis, the Revolution, Constitutional ratification, and the advent of Jeffersonian democracy. Exploring the relevance of aesthetic ideas to a range of literary genres-poetry, novels, political writing, natural history writing, and literary criticism-Cahill makes illuminating connections between intellectual and political history and the idiosyncratic formal tendencies of early national texts. In doing so,Liberty of the Imaginationmanifests the linguistic and intellectual richness of an underappreciated literary tradition and offers an original account of the continuity between Revolutionary writing and nineteenth-century literary romanticism.

In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

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.

For over 50 years, Darko Suvin has set the agenda for science fiction studies through his innovative linking of scifi to utopian studies, formalist and leftist critical theory, and his broader engagement with what he terms \"political epistemology.\" Disputing the Deluge joins a rapidly growing renewal of critical interest in Suvin’s work on scifi and utopianism by bringing together in a single volume 24 of Suvin’s most significant interventions in the field from the 21st century, with an Introduction by editor Hugh O’Connell and a new preface by the author. Beginning with writings from the early 2000s that investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here—each a brilliant example of engaged thought—highlight the value of scifi for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin’s interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008 economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis, COVID-19, and the decline of democracy. By bringing together Suvin’s essays all in one place, this collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.

InAnimals and Other People, Heather Keenleyside argues for the central role of literary modes of knowledge in apprehending animal life. Keenleyside focuses on writers who populate their poetry, novels, and children's stories with conspicuously figurative animals, experiment with conventional genres like the beast fable, and write the \"lives\" of mice as well as men. From such writers-including James Thomson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and others-she recovers a key insight about the representation of living beings: when we think and write about animals, we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Indeed, any description of animals involves personification of a sort, if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire, essential for distinguishing living beings from things. Throughout the book, animals are characterized by a distinctive mode of agency and generality; they are at once moving and being moved, at once individual beings and generic or species figures (every cat is also \"The Cat\"). Animals thus become figures with which to think about key philosophical questions about the nature of human agency and of social and political community. They also come into view as potential participants in that community, as one sort of \"people\" among others. Demonstrating the centrality of animals to an eighteenth-century literary and philosophical tradition,Animals and Other Peoplealso argues for the importance of this tradition to current discussions of what life is and how we might live together.

Leonard Bernstein is a household name. Most know him for his classic musical reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as Broadway's West Side Story. But Bernstein accomplished so much more as a composer, and his body of work is both broad and varied. He composed ballets (Fancy Free, Facsimile, Dybbuk), operas (Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, A Quiet Place), musicals (On the Town, Wonderful Town), film scores (On the Waterfront), symphonies, choral works, chamber music pieces, art songs, and piano works. In Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener's Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides readers past Bernstein's famously tortured personal problems and into the clarity and balance of his Serenade after Plato's Symposium for Violin and Orchestra, the intense drama of his music for On the Waterfront, the existential cosmography of his three symphonies, and his vibrant works for the musical stage. Perhaps the most famous American classical musician born in the twentieth century, Bernstein divided his time between composing, conducting, writing, and teaching, a busy schedule—especially his conducting of major orchestras—that set his work as composer at a disadvantage. Often generated in short spurts, his work carries an urgency—and even an element of improvisational genius—that he flavored with his eclectic embrace of jazz, folk song, Jewish cantorial music, and innovations in contemporary classical theory. The result is a body of work that is beguilingly melodic, incomparably rhythmic, and irrepressibly individual. Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener's Companion is the ideal work for any reader seeking to learn how to listen across the spectrum of Bernstein's musical output.

Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of \"great\" and \"little\" traditions spanning centuries.

Technological innovation has long threatened the printed book, but ultimately, most digital alternatives to the codex have been onscreen replications. While a range of critics have debated the benefits and dangers of this media technology, contemporary and avant-garde writers have offered more nuanced considerations. Taking up works from Andy Warhol, Kevin Young, Don DeLillo, and Hari Kunzru, Archival Fictions considers how these writers have constructed a speculative history of media technology through formal experimentation. Although media technologies have determined the extent of what can be written, recorded, and remembered in the immediate aftermath of print's hegemony, Paul Benzon argues that literary form provides a vital means for critical engagement with the larger contours of media history. Drawing on approaches from media poetics, film studies, and the digital humanities, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates how authors who engage technology through form continue to imagine new roles for print literature across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This is the first study to apply some of the results of modern cognitive science to all the major genres of the courtly love literature of medieval France (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) in Occitan, Old French, and Latin.

Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.