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Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
by Annie Spence“A winsome volume . . . in which the librarian Annie Spence writes letters to books she has loved, or not.” —New York Times Book ReviewIf you love to read, and presumably you do since you’ve picked up this book, you know that some books affect you so profoundly they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it’s clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end.In Dear Fahrenheit 451, librarian Annie Spence has crafted love letters and breakup notes to the iconic and eclectic books she has encountered over the years. From breaking up with The Giving Tree (a dysfunctional relationship book if ever there was one), to her love letter to The Time Traveler’s Wife (a novel less about time travel and more about the life of a marriage, with all of its ups and downs), Spence will make you think of old favorites in a new way. Filled with suggested reading lists, Spence’s take on classic and contemporary books is very much like the best of literature—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes surprisingly poignant, and filled with universal truths.“Terrifically funny.” —Library Journal, starred review“A smart, funny, forthright librarian in book form.” —Kirkus Reviews“Dear Dear Fahrenheit 451, thanks for the lovely reminder of the ways we find ourselves in books.” —Booklist, starred review“[Spence] has a unique ability to capture the thoughts and feelings of book lovers.” —NPR
Dear Haiti, Love Alaine
by Maika Moulite Maritza MouliteWhen a school presentation goes very wrong, Alaine Beauparlant finds herself suspended, shipped off to Haiti and writing the report of a lifetime… <P><P>You might ask the obvious question: What do I, a seventeen-year-old Haitian American from Miami with way too little life experience, have to say about anything? <P><P>Actually, a lot. <P><P>Thanks to “the incident” (don’t ask), I’m spending the next two months doing what my school is calling a “spring volunteer immersion project.” It’s definitely no vacation. I’m toiling away under the ever-watchful eyes of Tati Estelle at her new nonprofit. And my lean-in queen of a mother is even here to make sure I do things right. <P>P>Or she might just be lying low to dodge the media sharks after a much more public incident of her own…and to hide a rather devastating secret. <P><P>All things considered, there are some pretty nice perks…like flirting with Tati’s distractingly cute intern, getting actual face time with my mom and experiencing Haiti for the first time. I’m even exploring my family’s history—which happens to be loaded with betrayals, superstitions and possibly even a family curse.You know, typical drama. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.
Dear Marian, Dear Hugh: The Maclennan-Engel Correspondence
by Hugh Maclennan Christl Verduyn Marian EngelA student at McGill in the mid-1950s, Marian Engel wrote her M. A. thesis under the direction of Hugh MacLennan. Their work together became the basis of a correspondence, the MacLennan half of which survives and is detailed here. Both personal and professional in nature, MacLennan's letters to Engel provide fascinating insights into his life's pursuit of writing and offer another glimpse of the author of Two Solitudes.
Dear Mark Twain
by R. Kent RasmussenA voracious pack-rat, Mark Twain hoarded his readers' letters as did few of his contemporaries. Dear Mark Twain collects 200 of these letters written by a diverse cross-section of correspondents from around the world--children, farmers, schoolteachers, businessmen, preachers, railroad clerks, inmates of mental institutions, con artists, and even a former president. It is a unique and groundbreaking book--the first published collection of reader letters to any writer of Mark Twain's time. Its contents afford a rare and exhilarating glimpse into the sensibilities of nineteenth-century people while revealing the impact Samuel L. Clemens had on his readers. Clemens's own and often startling comments and replies are also included. R. Kent Rasmussen's extensive research provides fascinating profiles of the correspondents, whose personal stories are often as interesting as their letters. Ranging from gushing fan appreciations and requests for help and advice to suggestions for writing projects and stinging criticisms, the letters are filled with perceptive insights, pathos, and unintentional but often riotous humor. Many are deeply moving, more than a few are hilarious, some may be shocking, few are dull.
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
by Victoria ChangAward-winning poet Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.For Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.“Chang’s work is excavation, a digging through the muck of society for an existential clarity, a cultural clarity and a general clarity of self.” —New York Times Book Review“Groundbreaking . . . Chang’s lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family’s time capsule and an artist’s timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem.” —NPR“Both a chronicling of [Chang’s] family’s history and a powerful, stirring rumination on ancestry, inherited trauma and home.” —TIME
Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
by Alice Nakhimovsky Roberta Newman&“Explore[s] the Jewish past via letters that reflect connections and collisions between old and new worlds.&” —Jewish Book Council At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture. &“Covers a neglected aspect of Jewish popular culture and deserves a wide readership. For all serious readers of Yiddish and immigrant Jewish culture and customs.&” —Library Journal &“Delivers more than one would expect because it goes beyond a linguistic study of letter-writing manuals and explicates their genre and social function.&” —Slavic Review &“Reproductions of brivnshtelers form the core of the book and comprise the majority of the text, providing a ground-level window into a largely obscured past.&” —Publishers Weekly &“The real delight of the book is in reading the letters themselves . . . Highly recommended.&” —AJL Reviews
Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy
by Dinty W. MooreThis unique writing guide pairs questions sent in by famous contemporary essayists with advice-column-style responses and hilariously witty example essays from acclaimed author and professor Dinty W. Moore. The personal essay has never been more popular, with the likes of Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling breathing new life into the genre. This innovative guide to crafting modern personal essays and creative nonfiction came about when acclaimed author and professor Dinty W. Moore solicited playful writing questions from today's top writers. He then penned witty responses in the format of a "Dear Sugar"-style advice column, illustrating each response with an original, humorous sample essay. In chapter 1, Phillip Lopate asks, "I am curious how you deal honestly with male-female relations in general and specifically your past girlfriends on the page without coming off as a male chauvinist pig," and Mister Essay Writer Guy pens a sage response and example essay dishing--respectfully--on all his exes. Cheryl Strayed asks for advice about her em-dash addiction, Julianna Baggott worries that to be a great writer you must become an alcoholic, Judith Kitchen looks for an excuse to exaggerate the truth to make it more interesting, and so on. Filled with modern examples of the creative forms nonfiction can take--including scribbled cocktail napkins, Facebook posts, and Google Map pins--this gifty little book is a hilarious relief for all essayists, memoirists, and creative nonfiction writers in distress.
Dear Reader: An Immersive Literary Journey Through Taylor Swift’s Lyrics
by Viktoria CapekFor Swifties everywhere, this guided journal with interactive prompts and questions, complete with stunning illustrations and a silky ribbon, explores all the literary easter eggs in Taylor's lyrics, revealing the best of her personal library - from The Bell Jar to The Great Gatsby.Dive into the literary world of Taylor Swift like never before. Between the pages of this interactive journal you will meet iconic characters of classic literature, soak up the magic of folklore and fairytales, delve into the imagery of tortured poets, and so much more.Welcome to Taylor's cosy library and lose yourself in the pages of ancient and modern literary classics. The journal is organised into ten themes, from the unreliable narrator of The Great Gatsby, the feminism of The Bell Jar, coming-of-age struggles of To Kill a Mockingbird or the social commentary of The Crucible. Discover the influence of Wuthering Heights running through songs like Enchanted and ivy, or the inspiration of The Picture of Dorian Gray in mirrorball and Anti-Hero.Deep dive into each topic with prompts, questions and invitations to create, doodle and dream, making this a private diary just for youDiscover visual easter eggs with the Music Video Muse, which explains the visual storytelling behind Taylor's music videosWrite your own lyrics or start a book club! With all your bookish knowledge, you too can be a songwriter or continue your literary journey.If you haven't read the books, no problem! SwiftNotes are provided for every literary work to give you a crash course. With a gorgeous ribbon and every page filled with beautiful illustrations, this will be a journal to treasure and return to time and again.
Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries)
by Katherine McKittrickIn Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets
by Hillary Rodham ClintonIn her warm and engaging text, Mrs. Clinton suggests ways parents can help their children initiate and enjoy the experience of writing and receiving letters, sharing her family's (and pets') experience, and explains how letters to Socks and Buddy are received, sorted, and answered at the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home. <P>Mrs. Clinton gives a brief "pet history" of the White House, from Dolley Madison's parrot and Teddy Roosevelt's children's menagerie to the Bushes' English springer spaniel Millie. <P>She also talks about the ways Socks and Buddy participate in White House life, such as greeting guests and visiting hospitals and nursing homes. <P>Fans of the First Pets will be delighted by a section on their vital statistics (Socks' tail length: 1 foot; Buddy's snout length: 5 inches) and answers to the questions most asked by correspondents ("Do you have room service?").
Dear World
by Kylie CardellWhere has the personal diary gone#151;and what forms has it taken#151;in the digital age? From the diary spaces of reality television and the how-to diary and its audience of self-helpers, in the emerging genre of the graphic diary or the online diaries of sex bloggers, in the published diaries of war correspondents or the urgent personal writing of Arab women under conflict, this book explores a new wave in diary publication and production. It also provides a fresh look at the diary as a contemporary form of autobiography. In Dear World, Kylie Cardell is sensitive to how changes to our notions of privacy and the personal#151;spurred by the central presence the Internet has come to occupy in our daily lives#151;impact how and why diaries are written, and for whom. She considers what these new uses of the diary tell us about the cultural politics of self-representation in a time of mass attention to (and anxiety about) the personal. Cardell sees the twenty-first-century diary as a vibrant and popular cultural practice as much as a literary form, one that plays a key role in mass-mediated notions of authenticity, subjectivity, and truth. Dear World provides much-needed new attention to the innovation, evolution, and persistence of a familiar yet complex autobiographical mode.
Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life
by Maggie SmithINSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith distills creativity and the craft of writing with a practical guide perfect for fans of Elizabeth Gilbert&’s Big Magic and Anne Lamott&’s Bird by Bird.Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.
Dearest Josephine
by Caroline GeorgeLove arrives at the most unexpected time . . . 1821: Elias Roch has ghastly luck with women. He met Josephine De Clare once and penned dozens of letters hoping to find her again.2021: Josie De Clare has questionable taste in boyfriends. The last one nearly ruined her friendship with her best friend.Now, in the wake of her father's death, Josie finds Elias's letters. Suddenly she's falling in love with a guy who lived two hundred years ago. And star-crossed doesn't even begin to cover it . . . &“Dearest Josephine is the type of story that becomes your own. The characters&’ heartaches worked their way into my own chest until I hurt with them, hoped with them, and dared to dream with them. This book is teeming with swoon-worthy prose, adorable humor, and an expert delivery of &‘Will they end up together?&’ I guarantee you&’ll be burning the midnight candle to a stub to get answers. Step aside Pride and Prejudice, there&’s a new romance on the English moors.&” —Nadine Brandes, author of Romanov&“Caroline George infuses an epistolary love story with a romance and charm that crosses centuries. Touching and inventive, it bursts with wit, warmth, and a blending of classic and contemporary that goes together like scones and clotted cream. Dearest Josephine is a delight.&” —Emily Bain Murphy, author of The Disappearances &“Dearest Josephine is more than an immersive read. It is a book lover&’s dream experience. Josie&’s residence in a gothic English manor and her deeply romantic connection to Elias, who lived years in the past, is as chillingly atmospheric as Rochester calling across the moors. This story is George&’s treatise on the power of books and character to creep across centuries, to pull us close and invite us to live in a fantasy where we find love—literally—in the kinship of ink and binding. But it also acknowledges the dangers of letting ourselves fall too deeply when sometimes an equally powerful connection is waiting next door. This love letter to books, and the readers who exist in and for them, is a wondrously singular escape.&” —Rachel McMillan, author of The London Restoration and The Mozart Code Romantic and evocative read in both contemporary and historical time periodsStand-alone novelBook length: 86,000 wordsIncludes discussion questions for book clubs
Death Be Not Proud (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesDeath Be Not Proud (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by John Gunther Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:chapter-by-chapter analysis explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols a review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.
Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention
by David MarnoThe seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend, wait, and be open for what might happen next. Death Be Not Proud explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what David Marno calls the “art of holy attention.” If, in Malebranche’s view, attention is a hidden bond between religion and philosophy, devotional poetry is the area where this bond becomes visible. Marno shows that in works like “Death be not proud,” Donne’s most triumphant poem about the resurrection, the goal is to allow the poem’s speaker to experience a given doctrine as his own thought, as an idea occurring to him. But while the thought must feel like an unexpected event for the speaker, the poem itself is a careful preparation for it. And the key to this preparation is attention, the only state in which the speaker can perceive the doctrine as a cognitive gift. Along the way, Marno illuminates why attention is required in Christian devotion in the first place and uncovers a tradition of battling distraction that spans from ascetic thinkers and Church Fathers to Catholic spiritual exercises and Protestant prayer manuals.
Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (SUNY Press Open Access)
by Deanna P. KoretskyDeath Rights presents an antiracist critique of British romanticism by deconstructing one of its organizing tropes—the suicidal creative "genius." Putting texts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and others into critical conversation with African American literature, black studies, and feminist theory, Deanna P. Koretsky argues that romanticism is part and parcel of the legal and philosophical discourses underwriting liberal modernity's antiblack foundations. Read in this context, the trope of romantic suicide serves a distinct political function, indexing the limits of liberal subjectivity and (re)inscribing the rights and freedoms promised by liberalism as the exclusive province of white men.The first book-length study of suicide in British romanticism, Death Rights also points to the enduring legacy of romantic ideals in the academy and contemporary culture more broadly. Koretsky challenges scholars working in historically Eurocentric fields to rethink their identification with epistemes rooted in antiblackness. And, through discussions of recent cultural touchstones such as Kurt Cobain's resurgence in hip-hop and Victor LaValle's comic book sequel to Frankenstein, Koretsky provides all readers with a trenchant analysis of how eighteenth-century ideas about suicide continue to routinize antiblackness in the modern world.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program website at: https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/1712.
Death Waits at Sundown
by L. Ron HubbardSaddle up for excitement with this riveting tale. When Lynn Taylor's kid brother, Lee, gets framed for stage robbery, cattle rustling and murder, the boy swears his innocence and instead accuses McCloud, head of the vigilante committee responsible for removing the town's former sheriff.To save Lee from hanging the following night, Lynn hatches a wild plan to rob the next stagecoach with the help of the ex-sheriff--hoping it will raise doubts about Lee's guilt if the crimes continue. But Lynn gets more than he bargained for when he's snared by McCloud's men, and the time to the hanging gallops rapidly his way. ALSO INCLUDES THE WESTERN STORIES "RIDE 'EM COWBOY" AND "THE BOSS OF THE LAZY B""Hubbard's trio has one thing in common--rough and tumble action with a twist, and all are a great read." --True West Magazine * An International Book Awards Winner
Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting (Studies in War, Society, and the Military)
by Beverly Deepe KeeverChosen for 2015 One Book One NebraskaIn 1961, equipped with a master&’s degree from famed Columbia Journalism School and letters of introduction to Associated Press bureau chiefs in Asia, twenty-six-year-old Beverly Deepe set off on a trip around the world. Allotting just two weeks to South Vietnam, she was still there seven years later, having then earned the distinction of being the longest-serving American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and garnering a Pulitzer Prize nomination.In Death Zones and Darling Spies, Beverly Deepe Keever describes what it was like for a farm girl from Nebraska to find herself halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation&’s bloodiest and bitterest wars. She arrived in Saigon as Vietnam&’s war entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon apartment to jungles where Wild West–styled forts first dotted Vietnam&’s borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from communist-led attacks. In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their valor—and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from hide-and-seek guerrillas.Keever&’s trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide the reader with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters, self-described as &“darling spies,&” helped her decode Vietnam&’s shadow world and subterranean war. These memoirs, at once personal and panoramic, chronicle the horrors of war and a rise and decline of American power and prestige.
Death and Compassion: The Elephant in Southern African Literature
by Dan WylieTraces the literary history of the elephant, and its role in South Africa's cultural imaginaryElephants are in dire straits – again. They were virtually extirpated from much of Africa by European hunters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but their numbers resurged for a while in the heyday of late-colonial conservation efforts in the twentieth. Now, according to one estimate, an elephant is being killed every 15 minutes. This is at the same time that the reasons for being especially compassionate and protective towards elephants are now so well-known that they have become almost a cliché: their high intelligence, rich emotional lives including a capacity for mourning, caring matriarchal societal structures, that strangely charismatic grace. Saving elephants is one of the iconic conservation struggles of our time.As a society we must aspire to understand how and why people develop compassion – or fail to do so – and what stories we tell ourselves about animals that reveal the relationship between ourselves and animals. This book is the first study to probe the primary features, and possible effects, of some major literary genres as they pertain to elephants south of the Zambezi over three centuries: indigenous forms, early European travelogues, hunting accounts, novels, game ranger memoirs, scientists’ accounts, and poems. It examines what these literatures imply about the various and diverse attitudes towards elephants, about who shows compassion towards them, in what ways and why. It is the story of a developing contestation between death and compassion, between those who kill and those who love and protect.
Death and Disorder: A History of Early Modern England, 1485–1690
by Ken MacMillanIn Death and Disorder, award-winning teacher Ken MacMillan introduces readers to the tumultuous world of Tudor and Stuart England. During this period, numerous kings and queens were killed, their advisors assassinated, treasonous nobles beheaded, religious heretics burned at the stake, and common criminals executed by hanging. Combined with devastating plagues, a high rate of infant mortality, and violence on the battlefield, these events created an environment of disorder. MacMillan argues that both despite and because of the prevalence of death and disorder in early modern England, these two centuries saw critical historical developments. Each chapter opens with a thematic vignette, closes with an excerpt from a primary source, and includes images and engaging discussion questions. The book also provides a timeline of key events, genealogical charts, and a list of further resources.
Death and Rebirth in a Southern City: Richmond's Historic Cemeteries
by Ryan K. SmithThis exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital.Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities. In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South.The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.
Death and The King's Horseman
by Wole Soyinka Simon Gikandi"Backgrounds and Sources" helps readers understand Death and the King's Horseman's traditional African contexts and the role of theater in African culture. Included are a map of Yoruba-land, discussions of Yoruban religious beliefs and cultural traditions, Soyinka on the various forms that theater has taken in African culture in order to survive, and Anthony Appiah on Soyinka's struggle with the problem of African identity in the creation of Death and the King's Horseman. Commentary on the play as both a theatrical production and a classroom text is provided by Gerald Moore, Tanure Ojaide, and Martin Rohmer. "Criticism" collects nine major essays on the play and the difficulties it presents to readers. Contributors include D. S. Izevbaye, Eldred Durosimi Jones, Henry Louis Gates Jr. , Biodun Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka, Joan Hepburn, Adebayo Williams, David Richards, and Olakunle George. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
by Jolene ZigarovichDeath and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel demonstrates that archives continually speak to the period’s rising funeral and mourning culture, as well as the increasing commodification of death and mourning typically associated with nineteenth-century practices. Drawing on a variety of historical discourses—such as wills, undertaking histories, medical treatises and textbooks, anatomical studies, philosophical treatises, and religious tracts and sermons—the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the history of death in the Enlightenment and its narrative transformation.Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel not only offers new insights about the effect of a growing secularization and commodification of death on the culture and its productions, but also fills critical gaps in the history of death, using narrative as a distinct literary marker. As anatomists dissected, undertakers preserved, jewelers encased, and artists figured the corpse, so too the novelist portrayed bodily artifacts. Why are these morbid forms of materiality entombed in the novel? Jolene Zigarovich addresses this complex question by claiming that the body itself—its parts, or its preserved representation—functioned as secular memento, suggesting that preserved remains became symbols of individuality and subjectivity. To support the conception that in this period notions of self and knowing center upon theories of the tactile and material, the chapters are organized around sensory conceptions and bodily materials such as touch, preserved flesh, bowel, heart, wax, hair, and bone. Including numerous visual examples, the book also argues that the relic represents the slippage between corpse and treasure, sentimentality and materialism, and corporeal fetish and aesthetic accessory.Zigarovich’s analysis compels us to reassess the eighteenth-century response to and representation of the dead and dead-like body, and its material purpose and use in fiction. In a broader framework, Death and the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel also narrates a history of the novel that speaks to the cultural formation of modern individualism.
Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman
by Lucinda M. BeckerThis study explores the female experience of death in early modern England. By tracing attitudes towards gender through the occasion of death, it advances our understanding of the construction of femininity in the period. Becker illustrates how dying could be a positive event for a woman, and for her mourners, in terms of how it allowed her to be defined, enabled and elevated. The first part of the book gives a cultural and historical overview of death in early modern England, examining the means by which human mortality was confronted, and how the fear of death and dying could be used to uphold the mores of society. Becker explores particularly the female experience of death, and how women used the deathbed as a place of power from which to bestow dying maternal blessings, or leave instructions and advice for their survivors. The second part of the study looks at 'good' and 'bad' female deaths. The author discusses the motivation behind the reporting of the deaths and the veracity of such accounts, and highlights the ways in which they could be used for religious, political and patriarchal purposes. The third section of the book considers how death could, paradoxically, liberate a woman. In this section Becker evaluates the opportunity for female involvement in dying and posthumous rituals, including funeral rites and sermons, commemorative and autobiographical writing and literary legacies. While accounts of dying women largely underpinned the existing patriarchy, the experience of dying allowed some women to express themselves by allowing them to utilise an established male discourse. This opportunity for expression, along with the power of the deathbed, are the focus for this study.
Death by Landscape
by Elvia WilkFrom the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of &“fan nonfiction&” about living and writing in the age of extinction In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self. Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen. What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.