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The Usual Star and The Moment: Stories
by H. D.This scholarly edition makes available two little-known story collections by the modernist writer H.D., encouraging new ways of thinking about the role of the short story genre in H.D.’s life and career.
The Usufructuary Ethos: Power, Politics, and Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century
by Erin DrewAlthough a study of past ideas, The Usufructuary Ethos resonates with contemporary debates about our human responsibilities to the natural world in the face of climate change and mass extinction.
The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in 16th Century England
by Lorna HutsonIn a bold and brilliantly persuasive series of moves, Lorna Hutson draws upon new historicist and feminist theories to examine closely Renaissance literature and the cultural impact of the humanist project. The Usurer's Daughter: * provides startling new readings of Shakespeare * takes an entirely new approach to classical scholarship * focuses attention on the central importance of the history of the representation of women * illuminates how social relations between men were textualised during the early modern period.
The Utopia Reader
by Gregory Claeys Lyman Tower SargentUtopian literature has given voice to the hopes and fears of the human race from its earliest days to the present. The only single-volume anthology of its kind,The Utopia Reader encompasses the entire spectrum and history of utopian writing-from the Old Testament and Plato's Republic, to Sir Thomas More's Utopia and George Orwell's twentieth century dystopia,Nineteen Eighty-Four, through to the present day. The editors of this definitive collection demonstrate the various ways in which utopias have been used throughout history as veiled criticism of existing conditions and how peoples excluded from the dominant discourse-such as women and minorities-have used the form to imagine empowering alternatives to present circumstances. An engaging tour through the dissident, polemic, and satirical tradition of utopian writing,The Utopia Reader ultimately provides a telling portrait of civilization's persistent need to imagine and construct ideal societies.
The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination
by John FarrellIn this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the present day. While utopias aim at equality, the heroic imperative defends the need for personal and collective dignity. It asks the utopian, Do we really want to live in a world without struggle, without heroes, and without the stories they create? Because the utopian dilemma pits essential values against each other—equity versus freedom, dignity versus justice—few who confront it can simply take sides. Rather, the dilemma itself has been a generative stimulus for classic authors from Plato and Thomas More to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Farrell follows their struggles with the utopian dilemma and with each other, providing a deepened understanding of the moral and emotional dynamics of the western political imagination.
The Utopian Human Right to Science and Culture: Toward the Philosophy of Excendence in the Postmodern Society (Law, Language and Communication)
by Anna Maria NawrotThis book explores the question of whether the ideal right to science and culture exists. It proposes that the human right to science and culture is of a utopian character and argues for the necessity of the existence of such a right by developing a philosophical project situated in postmodernity, based on the assumption of ’thinking in terms of excendence’. The book brings a novel and critical approach to human rights in general and to the human right to science and culture in particular. It offers a new way of thinking about access to knowledge in the postanalogue, postmodern society. Inspired by twentieth-century critical theorists such as Levinas, Gadamer, Bauman and Habermas, the book begins by using excendence as a way of thinking about the individual, speech and text. It considers paradigms arising from postanalogue society, revealing the neglected normative content of the human right to science and culture and proposes a morality, dignity and solidarity situated in a postmodern context. Finally the book concludes by responding to questions on happiness, dignity and that which is social. Including an Annex which presents the author’s private project related to thinking in the context of the journey from ’myth to reason’, this book is of interest to researchers in the fields of philosophy and the theory of law, human rights, intellectual property and social theory.
The V-chip Debate: Content Filtering From Television To the Internet (Routledge Communication Series)
by Monroe E. PriceThe V-chip is a highly significant part of the discussion about whether television (or broadcasting in general) deserves some special attention in terms of its accessibility to children, its particular power to affect conduct, and its invasiveness. But as this notion of filtering and labeling has caught the imagination of the regulator, the legislator, and all those who wish to consider new ways to alter bargaining over imagery in society, the very idea of the V-chip or its equivalent is moving across other technologies, including the Internet. The V-chip issue has also fueled the ongoing debate about violence and sexual practices in society, and how representations on television relate to those practices. Although the initial concept of the V-chip is simple, its flow into the public realm raises so many extraordinary questions that the introduction and production of the chip virtually serves as a case study in problems of law and public policy. The very conceptualization of speech in society is being affected by this issue. Accordingly, the place of the V-chip in this debate is increasingly important; indeed, it may be argued that the V-chip's contribution to legal argumentation may be greater than its ultimate contribution to the relationship between children and imagery. Among the questions the contributors address are: *What research basis is necessary to require a framework for labeling and rating? *What relationship between government and the image-producing industries can be characterized--for constitutional and other reasons--as voluntary as opposed to coercive? *Who should evaluate these images? *To what extent should the evaluation process be centralized and/or distributed? *What assessment is appropriate to evaluate whether the experiment is "successful?" In addition to the V-chip's origin's in Canada and its further evolution in the United States, this book discusses the development of the V-chip and television rating systems in Europe, Australia, and throughout the world. It also includes essays which contrast the very different approaches in Canada and the United States in terms of the role of regulatory agency, industry, and government.
The Vacuum Cleaner: A Cultural Investigation (Material Modernisms)
by Maud EllmannThis book offers an entertaining study of the facts and fantasies associated with the vacuum cleaner as it evolved from a luxury gimmick to a household necessity. The iconic appliance of twentieth-century domestic revolution, the vacuum cleaner stands at the forefront of radical changes in technology, automation, finance, marketing, hygiene, infrastructure, time-management, domestic labour, and the history of dirt. This appliance also insinuates itself into the dominant phobias of the period, including totalitarianism and nuclear war. Maud Ellmann shows how modern literature, art, and other media have transformed this humble domestic mod con into a curmudgeon, windbag, cannibal, vampire, dictator, infanticidal mother, freedom fighter, mantrap, and lothario.
The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary (University of Toronto Department of English Studies and Texts #9)
by Northrop Frye Peter FisherThe author of this important contribution to the study of Blake was tragically drowned in a sailing accident when he had almost completed it in manuscript. His was a critical mind of singular erudition and power. As is abundantly evidenced in these chapters which Northrop Frye has prepared for publication. Fisher had made a careful study of Oriental philosophy and of Plato and the Neo-Platonists and this background enabled him to make an original and fruitful analysis of his central interest, Blake. The book is not a study of Blake's sources but of his context. The author is trying to answer the question: given Blake's general point of view, why does he make the specific judgments he does make, judgments which so often seem merely glib or petulant or perverse. Blake himself, in explaining a painting, remarked: "It ought to be understood that the Persons, Moses & Abraham, are not here meant, but the States Signified by those Names." Fisher explains what Blake meant by "states," and shows that such names as Plato, Bacon or Newton, or such terms as "priest" or "deist" in Blake's writings, refer not to individuals but to cultural forces in Western civilization, the influence of which accounted for the social conditions that Blake attacked. The attack itself, Fisher shows, was based on a revolutionary dialectic, a sense of the underlying opposition between reactionaries committed to obscurantism and social injustice, the "Elect" as Blake calls them, and the prophets committed to a greater vision (the "Reprobate"), with the mass of the public (the "Redeemed") in between.
The Value of Conversation: Perspectives from Antiquity to Modernity
by Christoph StrosetzkiWhat is the value of conversation measured by? Are there more valuable and inferior types of conversation? What role do the contents, the people, and the circumstances play? Do times and epochs shape their own conversations? Conversation norms from handbooks as well as conversations reproduced in texts or reconstructed from texts shed light on these questions. The contributions in this volume are grouped around conceptual questions, specific contexts such as the salon and the table conversation, bring studies on individual literary texts and cover the European cultural history from Plato to the 20th century.
The Value of Ecocriticism (The\value Of Ser.)
by Timothy ClarkThe Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues, especially at the global scale (the so-called 'Anthropocene') forms a new challenge of inventiveness for both literature and criticism. Ecocriticism has been going through a period of radical change and has become a diverse and huge field on the exciting but unstable boundary between the humanities and the sciences, with a mix of cultural, political, scientific and activist strands. Its mantra is that the environmental crisis demands a reconsideration of society's basic values, constitution and purposes, and that art and literature can be vital in that work. As a leading figure in this field, Timothy Clark surveys recent developments in ecocriticism lucidly, but also sometimes critically. This book examines ecopoetics, material ecocriticism, and the ideas of world literature as well as contentious claims that we are living in a new geological epoch.
The Value of Emily Dickinson
by Mary LoeffelholzThe Value of Emily Dickinson is the first compact introduction to Dickinson to focus primarily on her poems and why they have held and continue to hold such significance for readers. It addresses the question of literary value in light of current controversies dividing scholars, including those surrounding the critical issue of whether her writings are best appreciated as visual works of manuscript art or as rhymed and metered poems intended for the inner ear. Mary Loeffelholz deftly incorporates Dickinson's distinctive biography and her historical, religious, and cultural contexts into close readings, tracing the evolution of Dickinson's style. This volume - which considers not only the complex history of Dickinson's poems in print, but also their future in digital formats - will be an invaluable resource for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to better understand the importance of this seminal American poet.
The Value of Herman Melville (The Value of)
by Geoffrey SanbornIn The Value of Herman Melville, Geoffrey Sanborn presents Melville to us neither as a somber purveyor of dark truths nor as an ironist who has outthought us in advance but as a quasi-maternal provider, a writer who wants more than anything else to supply us with the means of enriching our experiences. In twelve brief chapters, Sanborn examines the distinctive qualities of Melville's style - its dynamism, its improvisatoriness, its intimacy with remembered or imagined events - and shows how those qualities, once they have become a part of our equipment for living, enable us to sink deeper roots into the world. Ranging across his career, but focusing in particular on Moby-Dick, 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', 'Benito Cereno', and Billy Budd, Sanborn shows us a Melville who is animating rather than overawing, who encourages us to bring more of ourselves to the present and to care more about the life that we share with others.
The Value of James Joyce
by Margot NorrisMargot Norris' The Value of James Joyce explores the writings of James Joyce from his early poetry and short stories to his final avant-garde work, Finnegans Wake. His works include some of the most difficult and challenging texts in the English literary canon without diminishing his impressive popularity beyond the scope of academia. A democratic impulse may be counted as an important feature of this paradox: that Joyce's stylistic and linguistic experiments never lose their focus on a world of characters whose everyday activities comprise the stories of life in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, even as some of the most famous texts are given structures derived from Ancient Greek literature. The Value of James Joyce examines not only the significance of the ostensibly ordinary but the function of natural and urban spaces, classical and popular culture, and the moods, voice, and language that give Joyce's works their widespread appeal.
The Value of Milton
by John LeonardIn The Value of Milton, leading critic John Leonard explores the writings of John Milton from his early poetry to his major prose. Milton's work includes one of the most difficult and challenging texts in the English literary canon, yet he remains impressively popular with general readers. Leonard demonstrates why Milton has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of political liberty and as a poet of sublimity and terror who also exhibits moments of genuine humanity and compassion. A poet divided against himself, Milton offers different rewards to different readers. The Value of Milton examines not only the significance of his most celebrated verse but also the function of biblical allegory, classical culture, and the moods, voice and language that give Milton's writings their perennial appeal.
The Value of Poetry (The Value of)
by Eric FalciEric Falci's The Value of Poetry offers an evaluation and critique of the literary, cultural, and political value of poetry in the twenty-first century. Falci claims that some of the most vital, significant, and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems. Poems marble civilizations: they catch courses of thought, tracks of feeling, and acts of speech and embed these shapes in language that is, in some fashion, poised toward the future. Falci argues that poetry is a vital medium in addressing and understanding some of the most pressing issues of our time. Ranging widely across canonical and contemporary poetry, The Value of Poetry shows how poems matter, and what poetry offers to readers in the contemporary world.
The Value of Style in Fiction (The Value of)
by Garrett StewartThis is the first book to demonstrate the value of prose analysis - both appreciative and interpretive in its 'evaluations' - across dozens of authors, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. The Value of Style in Fiction is designed not just for students and scholars of the English novel - and its verbal 'microplots' - but also for anyone interested in mastering the art of the sentence by 'writing along with' its finest examplars in a fully descriptive account: a stylistic challenge in its own right exemplified by Stewart's multifaceted critical modelling. Beginning with a state-of-the-field survey of prose poetics, this manual of invested reading concludes with an 'Inventory' of terms (bolded throughout) drawn primarily from grammar, rhetoric, etymology, and phonetics, but also narratology and poetic theory: a glossary whose consultation can help cross-map certain verbal tendencies in literary-historical evolution and its separate landmark writers.
The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature
by Tina SkouenThe stigma of haste pervaded early modern English culture, more so than the so-called stigma of print. The period’s writers were perpetually short on time, but what does it mean for authors to present themselves as hasty or slow, or to characterize others similarly? This book argues that such classifications were a way to define literary value. To be hasty was, in a sense, to be irresponsible, but, in another sense, it signaled a necessary practicality. Expressions of haste revealed a deep conflict between the ideal of slow writing in classical and humanist rhetoric and the sometimes grim reality of fast printing. Indeed, the history of print is a history of haste, which carries with it a particular set of modern anxieties that are difficult to understand in the absence of an interdisciplinary approach. Many previous studies have concentrated on the period’s competing definitions of time and on the obsession with how to use time well. Other studies have considered time as a notable literary theme. This book is the first to connect ideas of time to writerly haste in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing upon rhetorical theory, book history, poetics, religious studies and early modern moral philosophy, which, only when taken together, provide a genuinely deep understanding of why the stigma of haste so preoccupied the early modern mind. The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature surveys the period from ca 1580 to ca 1730, with special emphasis on the seventeenth century. The material discussed is found in emblem books, devotional literature, philosophical works, and collections of poetry, drama and romance. Among classical sources, Horace and Quintilian are especially important. The main authors considered are: Robert Parsons; Edmund Bunny; King James 1; Henry Peacham; Thomas Nash; Robert Greene; Ben Jonson; Margaret Cavendish; John Dryden; Richard Baxter; Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope. By studying these writers’ expressions of time and haste, we may gain a better understanding of how authorship was defined at a time when the book industry was gradually taking the place of classical rhetoric in regulating writers’ activities.
The Value of Virginia Woolf
by Madelyn DetloffIn The Value of Virginia Woolf, Madelyn Detloff explores the writings of Virginia Woolf from her early texts to her challenging and inventive novels. Detloff demonstrates why Woolf has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of modernist experimentation and as a novelist of innovation and poetic vision who also exhibits moments of intense insight and philosophical depth. A famously enigmatic figure, Woolf's literary works offer different rewards to different readers. The Value of Virginia Woolf examines not only the significance of her most celebrated fiction but the function of time and allegory, natural and urban spaces, voice and language that give Woolf's writings their perennial appeal.
The Value of the Novel
by Peter BoxallPeter Boxall's The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the ethical, political and literary value of the novel as a genre at turning point in the history both of literature and of criticism. As the dominant critical concerns of the twentieth century faded, and new cultural and technological environments emerged, Boxall argues that we lost our collective sense of the purpose of the novel. This book responds to this predicament by demonstrating why and how the novel matters to us today. Ranging from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith, Boxall shows how the formal properties of the novel allow us to imagine the worlds in which we live. This is a vibrant, compelling and richly informed critical perspective that asks us to see anew how central fiction is to our idea of the world, and how richly the novel informs our attempts to understand our present and our future.
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age
by Hoyt LongIdeas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.
The Values of Literary Studies
by Rónán McdonaldWhat is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.
The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature)
by Lorna Piatti-FarnellProminent examples from contemporary vampire literature expose a desire to re-evaluate and re-work the long-standing, folkloristic interpretation of the vampire as the immortal undead. This book explores the "new vampire" as a literary trope, offering a comprehensive critical analysis of vampires in contemporary popular literature and demonstrating how they engage with essential cultural preoccupations, anxieties, and desires. Drawing from cultural materialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and postmodern thought, Piatti-Farnell re-frames the concept of the vampire in relation to a distinctly twenty-first century brand of Gothic imagination, highlighting important aesthetic, conceptual, and cultural changes that have affected the literary genre in the post-2000 era. She places the contemporary literary vampire within the wider popular culture scope, also building critical connections with issues of fandom and readership. In reworking the formulaic elements of the vampiric tradition — and experimenting with genre-bending techniques — this book shows how authors such as J.R. Ward, Stephanie Meyers, Charlaine Harris, and Anne Rice have allowed vampires to be moulded into enigmatic figures who sustain a vivid conceptual debt to contemporary consumer and popular culture. This book highlights the changes — conceptual, political and aesthetic — that vampires have undergone in the past decade, simultaneously addressing how these changes in "vampire identity" impact on the definition of the Gothic as a whole.
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature
by Carol A. SenfCarol A. Senf traces the vampire’s evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.
The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: A Feast of Blood (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Brooke CameronAgainst the social and economic upheavals that characterized the nineteenth century, the border-bending nosferatu embodied the period’s fears as well as its forbidden desires. This volume looks at both the range among and legacy of vampires in the nineteenth century, including race, culture, social upheaval, gender and sexuality, new knowledge and technology. The figure increased in popularity throughout the century and reached its climax in Dracula (1897), the most famous story of bloodsuckers. This book includes chapters on Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, as well as touchstone texts like John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but it also focuses on the many “Other” vampire stories of the period. Topics discussed include: the long-war veteran and aristocratic vampire in Varney; the vampire as addict in fiction by George MacDonald; time discipline in Eric Stenbock’s Studies of Death; fragile female vampires in works by Eliza Lynn Linton; the gender and sexual contract in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne;” cultural appropriation in Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire; as well as Caribbean vampires and the racialized Other in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire. While drawing attention to oft-overlooked stories, this study ultimately highlights the vampire as a cultural shape-shifter whose role as “Other” tells us much about Victorian culture and readers’ fears or desires.