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The Imperfect Friend
by Wendy OlmstedMany writers in early modern England drew on the rhetorical tradition to explore affective experience. In The Imperfect Friend, Wendy Olmsted examines a broad range of Renaissance and Reformation sources, all of which aim to cultivate 'emotional intelligence' through rhetorical means, with a view to understanding how emotion functions in these texts. In the works of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), John Milton (1608-1674), and many others, characters are depicted conversing with one another about their emotions. While counselors appeal to objective reasons for feeling a certain way, their efforts to shape emotion often encounter resistance.This volume demonstrates how, in Renaissance and Reformation literature, failures of persuasion arise from conflicts among competing rhetorical frameworks among characters. Multiple frameworks, Olmsted argues, produce tensions and, consequently, an interiorized conflicted self. By situating emotional discourse within distinct historical and socio-cultural perspectives, The Imperfect Friend sheds new light on how the writings of Sidney, Milton, and others grappled with problems of personal identity. From their innovations, the study concludes, friendship emerges as a favourite site of counseling the afflicted and perturbed.
The Imperfectionists: A Novel
by Tom RachmanThe charming and enthralling story of an idiosyncratic English-language newspaper in Rome and the lives of its staffers as the paper fights for survival in the internet age.'A precise, playful fiction with a deep but lightly worn intelligence' - Times Literary SupplementThe newspaper was founded in Rome in the 1950s, a product of passion and a multi-millionaire's fancy. Over fifty years, its eccentricities earned a place in readers' hearts around the globe. But now, circulation is down, the paper lacks a website, and the future looks bleak. Still, those involved in the publication seem to barely notice. The obituary writer is too busy avoiding work. The editor-in-chief is pondering sleeping with an old flame. The obsessive reader is intent on finishing every old edition, leaving her trapped in the past. And the publisher seems less interested in his struggling newspaper than in his magnificent basset hound, Schopenhauer. The Imperfectionists interweaves the stories of eleven unusual and endearing characters who depend on the paper. Funny and moving, the novel is about endings - the end of life, the end of sexual desire, the end of the era of newspapers - and about what might rise afterward.
The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory from Conrad to Greene (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
by Julia RawaFirst Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The Imperial World-System and Cultures of Dissent in Thomas Hardy's Fiction (New Comparisons in World Literature)
by Rena JacksonThis is the first book-length study of imperial crossings in Thomas Hardy’s novels and short stories. Combining the strengths of world-literary and world-systems analyses with a cultural materialist approach, the study offers unparalleled coverage of global links in Hardy’s fiction, engaging, in addition, with a range of dissenting responses – at both formal and thematic registers – to the British world-system’s exploitative structures. Hardy’s prose outputs reveal that the empire, contrary to popular critical assumptions in postcolonial studies, did not harmonise the classes, genders or regions into a shared national imperial identity, culture or destiny. A major component of the study additionally includes comparative readings of the 'modern' world-system and imperial sociality in writings by Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, David Livingstone, and in Chartist poetry. The book will be an invaluable resource to teachers, students and enthusiasts working in the field of world literature, and in Victorian, postcolonial and settler colonial studies.
The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Michael RothbergWhen it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak to this interconnection and show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity.
The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries
by Brian StockThis book explores the influence of literacy on eleventh and twelfth-century life and though on social organization, on the criticism of ritual and symbol, on the rise of empirical attitudes, on the relationship between language and reality, and on the broad interaction between ideas and society.Medieval and early modern literacy, Brian Stock argues, did not simply supersede oral discourse but created a new type of interdependence between the oral and the written. If, on the surface, medieval culture was largely oral, texts nonetheless emerged as a reference system both for everyday activities and for giving shape to larger vehicles of interpretation. Even when texts were not actually present, people often acted and behaved as if they were.The book uses methods derived from anthropology, from literary theory, and from historical research, and is divided into five chapters. The first treats the growth and shape of medieval literacy itself. Theo other four look afresh at some of the period's major issues--heresy, reform, the Eucharistic controversy, the thought of Anselm, Abelard, and St. Bernard, together with the interpretation of contemporary experience--in the light of literacy's development. The study concludes that written language was the chief integrating instrument for diverse cultural achievements.
The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales (Peculiar Bodies)
by Chris FossUnderstanding Oscar Wilde&’s characteristically unique approach to writing difference Over the course of his remarkable career, Oscar Wilde published two volumes of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. Both collections feature numerous stories with protagonists who may be said to be disability-aligned, owing to their pronounced physical differences. In The Importance of Being Different, Chris Foss explores the way that Wilde&’s stories problematically replicate many of the Victorian era&’s typical responses to disability but also the ways they diverge, offering a more progressive orientation—both through more sympathetic identifications with disability-aligned characters and through a self-conscious foregrounding of the mechanisms of pity and the consumption of pain. The first ever monograph to examine Wilde&’s work through a disability studies lens, this groundbreaking book encompasses all of his fairy tales as well as his writings during and after imprisonment. Even though Wilde unflinchingly represented the extent to which these peculiar bodies suffered rejection by society, he encouraged his readers to embrace them and to advocate for emotional responses that engage love and kindness toward both individual transformation and social change.
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
by Oscar WildeA selection of Oscar Wilde's best and most important plays - sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day. Who would have thought a comedy of manners written more than a hundred years ago would still be so apt and so funny? Oscar Wilde was a genius of play-writing, and his deftness, wit and sharp eye for social satire keep audiences in thrall to this day. Alongside Earnest, discover a biblical tragedy retold, Lady Windemere and her infamous fan and Wilde's take on an ideal husband, in this selection of Wilde's most important plays. ‘[The Importance of Being Earnest] has a strong claim to being the most perfect comedy in the English language’ Daily Telegraph
The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
by Oscar WildeA universal favorite, The Importance of Being Earnest displays Oscar Wilde&’s wit and theatrical genius at their brilliant best. Subtitled &“A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,&” this hilarious attack on Victorian manners and morals turns a pompous world on its head, lets duplicity lead to happiness, and makes riposte the highest form of art. Written, according to Wilde, &“by a butterfly for butterflies,&” it is a dazzling masterpiece of comic entertainment.Although it was originally written in four acts, The Importance of Being Earnest is usually performed in a three-act version. This authoritative edition features an appendix that restores valuable lines that appeared in the original.Also included in this special collection are Wilde&’s first comedy success, Lady Windermere&’s Fan, and his richly sensual melodrama, Salomé, which he called &“that terrible coloured little tragedy I once in some strange mood wrote&”—and which shocked and enraged the censors of his time.Includes an Introduction by Sylvan Barnetand an Afterword by Elise Bruhl and Michael Gamer
The Importance of Being Earnest: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions #0)
by Oscar Wilde“This revised Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest exemplifies the usefulness of the series for generations of students. Michael Patrick Gillespie’s introduction captures the sleight of hand that makes the play at once so irresistible to read and yet difficult to teach. His updated selection of background and critical materials is designed to address those difficulties and support a myriad of reader queries. This will become the gold standard for classroom use.” —Colleen Jaurretche, University of California, Los Angeles “This Second Edition retains the good material from the first edition, especially Gillespie’s preface—a great introduction to Wilde’s life and the play. The new critical essays supplementing the historical views open great approaches to the paradoxes of the play and Wilde himself. This new edition provides a great text and critical material for reading, for enhancing comprehension, and, most importantly, for enjoying The Importance of Being Earnest. It is a great text for teachers, and a perfect primer for students.” —Tim Gallagher, Messmer High School, Milwaukee, WI The text of this Norton Critical Edition of The Importance of Being Earnest is the established three-act 1895 version. The play was originally produced in four acts. Wilde shortened it to three at the urging of George Alexander, the owner of the St. James Theatre and first actor to play Jack Worthing. The play is accompanied by explanatory annotations and by an appendix of excised portions. “Backgrounds” includes essays on Wilde and the 1890s by prominent cultural critics Karl Beckson, Sharon Marcus, and Michael Patrick Gillespie. “Early Reviews and Reactions” collects contemporary responses to The Importance of Being Earnest, including George Bernard Shaw’s famous dissenting review and other commentary by H. G. Wells, Hamilton Fyfe, and William Archer. “Essays in Criticism” includes seven diverse assessments—six of them new to the Second Edition—of Wilde and the play by E. H. Mikhail, Burkhard Niederhoff, Christopher S. Nassaar, Clifton Snider, Brigitte Bastiat, Eibhear Walshe, and Maneck H. Daruwala. A chronology and selected bibliography are also included This purchase offers access to the digital ebook only.
The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850
by Leonard TennenhouseAmerican literature is typically seen as something that inspired its own conception and that sprang into being as a cultural offshoot of America's desire for national identity. But what of the vast precedent established by English literature, which was a major American import between 1750 and 1850? In The Importance of Feeling English, Leonard Tennenhouse revisits the landscape of early American literature and radically revises its features. Using the concept of transatlantic circulation, he shows how some of the first American authors--from poets such as Timothy Dwight and Philip Freneau to novelists like William Hill Brown and Charles Brockden Brown--applied their newfound perspective to pre-existing British literary models. These American "re-writings" would in turn inspire native British authors such as Jane Austen and Horace Walpole to reconsider their own ideas of subject, household, and nation. The enduring nature of these literary exchanges dramatically recasts early American literature as a literature of diaspora, Tennenhouse argues--and what made the settlers' writings distinctly and indelibly American was precisely their insistence on reproducing Englishness, on making English identity portable and adaptable. Written in an incisive and illuminating style, The Importance of Feeling English reveals the complex roots of American literature, and shows how its transatlantic movement aided and abetted the modernization of Anglophone culture at large.
The Importance of the Dissertation in Practice (DiP): A Resource Guide for EdD Students, Their Committee Members and Advisors, and Departmental and University Leaders Involved with EdD Programs
by Kimberlee K. C. Everson Lynn Hemmer Kelly M. Torres and Suha R. TamimThe Importance of the Dissertation in Practice (DiP): A Resource Guide for EdD Students, Their Committee Members and Advisors, and Departmental and University Leaders Involved with EdD Programs is the first book-length study that looks at the elements of high-quality Dissertations in Practice (DiPs). It serves as a resource for EdD students, their committee members, their advisors, and departmental or university leaders involved with EdD programs. The book can be used to improve support from key stakeholders within EdD programs for the implementation of the DiP in the development of practitioner-scholars. <P><P> The first section of the book discusses the difference between the DiP and traditional dissertations, the history of the DiP, and how the practitioner-scholar is developed through the DiP process. Next, the book describes the elements that are reflective of a high-quality DiP. Finally, it addresses a few of the unique formats that are sometimes used with the DiP, some of the practical issues with implementing the DiP, and issues of the future including the use of artificial intelligence. <P><P> The ultimate goal of The Importance of the Dissertation in Practice is to serve as a practical guide for all those involved with the DiP, reflecting the editors’ and authors’ experiences working with students within a variety of higher education institutions.
The Important Book
by Margaret Wise BrownThe important thing about The Important Book -- is that you let your child tell you what is important about the sun and the moon and the wind and the rain and a bug and a bee and a chair and a table and a pencil and a bear and a rainbow and a cat (if he wants to). For the important thing about The Important Book is that the book goes on long after it is closed. What is most important about many familiar things -- like rain and wind, apples and daisies -- is suggested in rhythmic words and vivid pictures. 'A perfect book . . . the text establishes a word game which tiny children will accept with glee.' -- K.
The Important Book (Into Reading, Read Aloud Module 2 #1)
by Leonard Weisgard Margaret BrownNIMAC-sourced textbook <p><p> Margaret Wise Brown, the New York Times bestselling author of the perennial classics Goodnight Moon and Runaway Bunny, asks children to think deeply about the importance of everyday objects, from apples to spoons. With lyrical words and vivid illustrations by Caldecott winner Leonard Weisgard, The Important Book shows children just how important everyday objects can be. <p> What is the most important thing about a spoon? The fact that you can eat with it? What about an apple? Or a shoe? This book helps curious preschoolers notice important details about their everyday surroundings, like daisies are white, rain is wet, and a spoon is used for eating.
The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (Penn State Series in the History of the Book)
by Scott DonaldsonIn The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton. Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders’ introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes “the mythical ideal biographer,” an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.
The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (Penn State Series in the History of the Book)
by Scott DonaldsonIn The Impossible Craft, Scott Donaldson explores the rocky territory of literary biography, the most difficult that biographers try to navigate. Writers are accustomed to controlling the narrative, and notoriously opposed to allowing intruders on their turf. They make bonfires of their papers, encourage others to destroy correspondence, write their own autobiographies, and appoint family or friends to protect their reputations as official biographers. Thomas Hardy went so far as to compose his own life story to be published after his death, while falsely assigning authorship to his widow. After a brief background sketch of the history of biography from Greco-Roman times to the present, Donaldson recounts his experiences in writing biographies of a broad range of twentieth-century American writers: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Winfield Townley Scott, and Charlie Fenton. Donaldson provides readers with a highly readable insiders’ introduction to literary biography. He suggests how to conduct interviews, and what not to do during the process. He offers sound advice about how closely biographers should identify with their subjects. He examines the ethical obligations of the biographer, who must aim for the truth without unduly or unnecessarily causing discomfort or worse to survivors. He shows us why and how misinformation comes into existence and tends to persist over time. He describes “the mythical ideal biographer,” an imaginary creature of universal intelligence and myriad talents beyond the reach of any single human being. And he suggests how its very impossibility makes the goal of writing a biography that captures the personality of an author a challenge well worth pursuing.
The Impossible Exile
by George ProchnikAn original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler's rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile--from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis--where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era--the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.
The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories
by H. L. MenckenA collection of newspaper articles written by Mencken over the course of his long and distinguished career.
The Impotency Poem from Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature
by Hannah LaveryThe first book length study of the motif of impotency in poetry from early antiquity through to the late Restoration, this book explores the impotency poem as a recognisable form of poetry in the longer tradition of erotic elegy. Hannah Lavery’s central claim is that the impotency motif is adopted by poets in recognition of its potential to signify satirically through its use as symbol and allegory. By drawing together analysis of works in the tradition, Lavery shows how the impotency motif is used to engage with anxieties as to what it means to enact ’service’ within political and social contexts. She demonstrates that impotency poems can be seen on one level to represent bawdy escapism, but on the other to offer positions of resistance and opposition to social and political concerns contemporary to a particular time. Whilst the link between the 'Imperfect Enjoyment' poems by Ovid and Rochester is well known, Lavery here looks further back to the origins of the concept of male impotency as degradation in the works of earlier Roman poets. This is an important context for considering how the impotency poem then first appears in the French and English vernaculars during the sixteenth century, leading to translations and adaptations throughout the seventeenth century. Lavery's close readings of the poems consider both the nature of the literary form, and the political and social contexts within which the works appear, in order to chart the intertextual development of the impotency poem as a distinct form of writing in the early modern period.
The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility
by Margaret HomansThe Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility addresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption—transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption—that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives. Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making’s special relationship to themes of adoption, an “as if” form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or “real. ” Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be. ” In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension. The texts examined include fiction (e. g. , classic novels such as Silas Marner, What Maisie Knew, and Beloved); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney’s iconic Mulan, with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades. This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women’s and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.
The Imprisoned Traveler: Joseph Forsyth and Napoleon's Italy (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850)
by Keith CrookThe Imprisoned Traveler is a fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its elusive author. Joseph Forsyth, traveling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year “detention” came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy (1813). Written as an (unsuccessful) appeal for release, praised by Forsyth’s contemporaries for its originality and fine taste, it is now recognized as a classic of Romantic period travel writing. Keith Crook, in this authoritative study, evokes the peculiar miseries that Forsyth endured in French prisons, reveals the significance of Forsyth’s encounters with scientists, poets, scholars, and ordinary Italians, and analyzes his judgments on Italian artworks. He uncovers how Forsyth’s allusiveness functions as a method of covert protest against Napoleon and reproduces the hitherto unpublished correspondence between the imprisoned Forsyth and his brother. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood
by Joel B. AltmanShakespeare’s dramatis personae exist in a world of supposition, struggling to connect knowledge that cannot be had, judgments that must be made, and actions that need to be taken. For them, probability—what they and others might be persuaded to believe—governs human affairs, not certainty. Yet negotiating the space of probability is fraught with difficulty. Here, Joel B. Altman explores the problematics of probability and the psychology of persuasion in Renaissance rhetoric and Shakespeare’s theater.Focusing on the Tragedy of Othello, Altman investigates Shakespeare’s representation of the self as a specific realization of tensions pervading the rhetorical culture in which he was educated and practiced his craft. In Altman’s account, Shakespeare also restrains and energizes his audiences’ probabilizing capacities, alternately playing the skeptical critic and dramaturgic trickster. A monumental work of scholarship by one of America’s most respected scholars of Renaissance literature, The Improbability of Othello contributes fresh ideas to our understanding of Shakespeare’s conception of the self, his shaping of audience response, and the relationship of actors to his texts.
The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels
by Alistair M. DuckworthOriginally published in 1994. In The Improvement of the Estate, Alistair Duckworth contends that understanding Mansfield Park is fundamental to appreciating Jane Austen's body of work. Professor Duckworth understands Mansfield Park as underscoring the central uniting theme in Austen's work—her concept of the "estate" and its "improvement." The author illustrates Austen's connection to the values of Christian humanism, which she conveys through the uniting theme of estate improvement. According to Duckworth, the estate represents moral and social heritage, so the manner in which individuals seek to improve their estates in Jane Austen's novels represents the direction in which she saw the state and society moving. Finally, Duckworth underscores Austen's awareness of the importance of a society of individuals whose behavior is socially informed.
The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect
by Simon HarrisonGestures are central to the way people use language when they interact. This book places our impulse to gesture at the very heart of linguistic structure: grammar. Based on the phenomenon of negation - a linguistic universal with clear grammatical and gestural manifestations - Simon Harrison argues that linguistic concepts are fundamentally multi modal and shows how they lead to recurrent bindings between grammar and gesture when people speak. Studying how speakers express negation multi modally in a range of social and professional contexts, Harrison explores how and when people gesture, what people achieve linguistically and discursively with their gestures, and why we find similar uses of gesture in different languages (including spoken and signed language). Establishing the inseparability of grammar and gesture, this book is an important reference for any researcher interested in the relation between language, gesture, and cognition.
The Inaugural Address 2009
by Barack ObamaCelebrate the inauguration of America's 44th president with this New York Times bestseller Tying into the official theme for the 2009 inaugural ceremony, "A New Birth of Freedom" from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Penguin presents a keepsake edition commemorating the inauguration of President Barack Obama with words of the two great thinkers and writers who have helped shape him politically, philosophically, and personally: Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Having Lincoln and Emerson's most influential, memorable, and eloquent words along with Obama's historic inaugural address will be a gift of inspiration for every American for generations to come. .