Bücher veröffentlicht von Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

In examining the American Renaissance through the era's multivalent tropes of seams and seamlessness, Thomson materializes the fabric of antebellum life. In this exploration of major works and recovered texts, Thomson offers a new understanding of the sacred, the self, the city, and the nation in antebellum culture.

Mormon Women's History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture.

This book focuses on legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times and from cultures around the world. It reflects an increasingly popular leitmotif in literature and visual arts of the modern century: humanity's fear of extinction and quest for survival--in revenant, supernatural, or living human form. The collected essays examine the origins and evolution of myths and legends of the supernatural in Western and non-Western tradition and popular culture.

This book focuses on ten key figures of the so-called Johnson circle. It explores their characters, their contributions to society, their relationships with one another, and their indebtedness to Samuel Johnson.

This collection examines the multifaceted opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini through a contemporary critical lens. It offers new interpretations to some classic works such as Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom and Decameron while considering some lesser studied pieces, for example Orestiade and his Friulian verse.

This book shows the impact of the 1428 rediscovery of Plautus's plays on the theory and composition of comedy, and sets Plautus's reception apart from that of the quite different dramatist Terence. The latter half takes up the Plautine traits that appear in the practice of English comic dramatists ca. 1500-1640.

This book uses a Kafkaesque lens to study the public and legal features of the coverage of the Nisour Square shootings of 2007. It illustrates how most American communities were much more interested in regulating private security firms than they were in having legal discussions of potential war crimes.

Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe argues that the vibrant, transformative history of Shakespeare's play-within-a-play from A Midsummer Night's Dream across four centuries allows us to see the way in which Shakespeare is used to both create and critique emergent cultural trends. Because of its careful distinction between ';good' and ';bad' art, Pyramus and Thisbe's playful meditation on the foolishness of over-reaching theatrical ambition is repeatedly appropriated by artists seeking to parody contemporary aesthetics, resulting in an ongoing assessment of Shakespeare's value to the time. Beginning with the play's own creation as an appropriation of Ovid, designed to keep the rowdy clown in check, Appropriating Shakespeare is a wide-ranging study that charts Pyramus and Thisbe's own metamorphosis through opera, novel, television, and, of course, theatre. This unique history illustrates Pyramus and Thisbe's ability to attract like-minded, experimental, genre-bending artists who use the text as a means of exploring the value of their own individual craft. Ultimately, what this history reveals is that, in excerpt, Pyramus and Thisbe affirms the place of artist as both consumer and producer of Shakespeare.

This book focuses on the notion of desire in the Italian fin de siecle. It narrates how this notion informs the works of two of Italy's most prominent authors in the fin de siecle, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras: Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Mawenn is the first book to link these five filmmakers together through an analysis of the relationship between filming one's own body and the creative body. Through engaged artistic practices, these female filmmakers turn the camera to their bodies as a way to show the process of artistic creation and to produce themselves as filmmakers and artists in their work from 19872009. By making visible their bodies, they offer a wider range of representation of women in French film. Through avant-garde form, in which tangible corporeal elements are made image, they transform representational content and produce new cinematic bodies with the power to influence signifying practices in contemporary French culture. By rendering visible their artistic practice and praxis and their camera in their workreflexive practices that also unite these filmmakersthese women also visually claim the role of filmmaker and creative subject. Thus they establish their authority in a film industry in which women's participation and recognition of their achievements have historically been lower than that of their male counterparts.

Reading the twelve major novels of Lawrence Durrell, this study argues for their consideration as a single major project, an opus, marked by themes of liminality and betweenness. As major texts of mid-twentieth-century literature, repeatedly earning nominations for the Nobel Prize, Durrell's work has attracted renewed critical attention since his centenary in 2012. This study shows the thematic unity of the opus in five areas. First, by disrupting expectations of love and death and by fashioning plural narrators, works in the opus blend notions of the subject and the object. Second, in their use of metafictional elements, the texts present themselves as neither fiction nor reality. Third, their approach to place and identity offers something between the naturalistic and the human-centric. Fourth, though the texts' initial concerns are engaged with understanding the past and preparing for a future, they all resolve in something like the present. And fifth, though the novels reject many aspects of modernism, they reside nevertheless between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. Shared with other writers, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as early as the 1940s, Durrell's plans for his major works of fiction remained consistent through the publication of the last novel in 1985, and these plans show the need to consider the twelve major works as a unitary whole.

Worlds of Hungarian Writing responds to the rapidly growing interest in Hungarian authors throughout the English-speaking world. Addressing an international audience, the essays in the collection highlight the intercultural contexts that have molded the conventions, genres and institutions of Hungarian writing from the nineteenth century to the present. They are mapping some of the ways in which a modern literature is produced by encounters with languages, cultures, and media external to its traditionally conceived boundaries. But rather than viewing intercultural exchange as an external force, the collection recognizes its enabling importance to the globalizing reception and circulation of Hungarian writing over the continuities and constraints implied by more traditional national narratives. Worlds of Hungarian Writing posits intercultural exchange as the very substance of a literary culture.Discussions of the politics of appropriation and translation, of the impact of émigré writers and critics, and of the use of world-literary models in genre-formation complement studies of the fate of western leftist critical theory in post-1989 Hungary, of the role of African-American models in contemporary Roma culture, and of the use of photography in late 20th-century prose. The volume spans a wide generic range, from the achievements of such canonical 19th-century critics and poets as József Bajza and János Arany, to neglected women authors-translators such as Theresa Pulszky, to modernist writers and critics like Antal Szerb and György Lukács, and to the contemporary novelists Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, and László Krasznahorkai. Each essay is an original contribution to comparative literature and to the study of this Central-European literature, but is intended to be accessible to readers unfamiliar with its traditions.

Charting the intersection of aesthetic representation and the material conditions of urban space, The City Since 9/11 posits that the contemporary metropolis provides a significant context for reassessing theoretical concerns related to narrative, identity, home, and personal precarity. In the years since the September 11 attacks, writers and filmmakers have explored urban spaces as contested sitesΓÇöshaped by the prevailing discourses of neoliberalism, homeland security, and the war on terror, but also haunted by an absence in the landscape that registers loss and prefigures future menace. In works of literature, film, and television, the city emerges as a paradoxical space of permanence and vulnerability and a convergence point for anxieties about globalization, structural inequality, and apocalyptic violence.Building on previous scholarship addressing trauma and the spectacle of terror, the contributors also draw upon works of philosophy, urban studies, and postmodern geography to theorize how literary and visual representations expose the persistent conflicts that arise as cities rebuild in the shadow of past ruins. Their essays advance new lines of argument that clarify artΓÇÖs role in contemporary debates about spatial practices, gentrification, cosmopolitanism, memory and history, nostalgia, the uncanny and the abject, postmodern virtuality, the politics of realism, and the economic and social life of cities. The book offers fresh readings of familiar post-9/11 novels, such as Jonathan Safran FoerΓÇÖs Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, but it also considers works by Teju Cole, Joseph OΓÇÖNeill, Silver Krieger, Colum McCann, Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Amitav Ghosh, and Katherine Boo. In addition, The City Since 9/11 includes essays on the films Children of Men, Hugo, and the adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, chapters on the television series The Bridge, The Killing, and The Wire, and an analysis of Michael AradΓÇÖs Reflecting Absence and the 9/11 Memorial.

This book collects essays by actors, directors, scholars, and teachers who are exploring the ways in which the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries were-and still are-performed.

America's Two Constitutions examines the history of treatment of antiwar dissenters from the American Revolution by the government and by vigilantes down to post-9/11, concluding that the United States has two constitutions, one for peacetime and another in time of war.

Ever since feminist scholarship began to reintroduce Harriet Beecher Stowe's writings to the American Literary canon in the 1970s, critical interest in her work has steadily increased. Rediscovery and ultimate canonization, however, have concentrated to a large extent on her major novelistic achievement, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Only in recent years have critics begun to focus more seriously on the wide variety of her work and started to create knowledge that broadens our understanding. Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, shows that during her long writing and publishing career, Stowe was a highly prolific writer who targeted diverse audiences, dealt with drastically changing economic, commercial, and cultural contexts, and wrote in a diversity of genres. Reflecting a recent trend to move Stowe's other texts to the fore, the essays collected in this volume thus go beyond the critical focus on Uncle Tom's Cabin. They focus on several of Stowe's other texts that have also significantly contributed to American literary and cultural history, among them her New England novels, her New York City novels, and her fictional writings on religious differences between Europe and the U.S. The essays in the first part of Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe concentrate on Stowe's language use, her rhetoric and choices of narrative technique and style, while the essays in the second part concentrate on thematic issues such as the representation of race, ethnicity, and religion, her participation in the emerging environmentalist movement, and Stowe's response to major economic shifts after the Civil War.

Crossing Borders engages with the emergent field of borders studies, particularly in relation to North America, South Asia, and the transnational spaces they continue to embrace. While multicultural theory tends to emphasize specific and individual cultures, border studies examines the intersection of cultures and the resulting effects.

Spenser in the Moment argues that contrary to anyone's expectation, Spenser studies may be on the brink of a revolution. Bringing together scholars from three continents, it surveys established methods, and then makes the case that there may be whole worlds of Spenser that have been nearly unsee-able or unhearable in the past forty years.

At Work in the Early Modern English Theater: Valuing Labor explores the economics of the theater by examining how drama seeks to make sense of changing conceptions of labor. With the growth of commerce and market relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England came the corresponding degradation and exploitation of workers, many of whom made their frustrations known through petitions and pamphlets. Poverty affected all sectors of society in early modern England and many laborers, even London citizens from more prosperous trades, could expect to experience periods of impoverishment. This group of precarious laborers included actors and playwrights, many of whom had direct connections to London's more established trades and occupations.Scholars have argued that dispossessed laborers turned to other forms of labor in lieu of their traditional livelihoods, including brigandage, piracy, begging, and cozening. To this list of alternative communities and applications of labor in the early modern period, Matthew Kendrick's scholarship adds the London theaters. Each chapter is guided by the central premise that anxiety over the objectification and dispossession of labor in its various forms is enacted on stage, and that drama helps to formulate, by merit of the theater's socioeconomic identity, an emerging laboring subjectivity engendered by the violent development of capitalism. As the nexus of a declining feudal social structure and an emerging capitalist regime of commodity production, a location in which dispossessed labor intersected with traditions of skilled labor and the unwieldy consumerist energies of the marketplace, the space of the theater was uniquely situated to channel and give dramatic form to the growing antagonisms and tensions that shaped labor. The stage offers a space in which to negotiate the value and meaning of labor in an increasingly exploitative society.

Reformers, almost by definition, claim the moral high ground because they see abuse and malpractice and want to abolish it. But when their perceptions become clouded, the high ground can quickly turn into quicksand. This work examines the Riggs war, a case of acute "government overreach," and the perpetrators involved.

This book traces the emergence of dedicated spaces for the administration of justice in Scotland. It examines the evolution of the architectural forms of the Scottish court, and the extent to which both changes in technology and commitment to cost reduction appear to have replaced civic pride as a driver in design.

The American Way of Life is a cultural history of the American Way of Life (or more simply the American Way). The book argues that since the term was popularized in the 1930s, the American Way has served as the primary guiding mythology or national ethos of the United States.

Judges in Street Clothes provides an historical, theoretical, and practical analysis of the ethical restrictions placed on the public lives of judges. The State's interest in maintaining an independent and impartial judiciary is considered against a judge's right to engage in educational, religious, charitable, civic, and professional activities.

As the subtitle indicates, this book has three majors concerns. The first and most important concern is an examination of the film adaptations of Woolf's novelsTo the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dallowayin the order the films were released. This is the heart of the matter, a fairly conventional effort to acknowledge film reviews as well as the criticism of academicians in film or literature as a starting point for a fresh view of these three film adaptations. Since many film specialists prefer that no film ever be adapted from literary fiction and many literature specialists have similarly wished that their favorite novels had never been filmed, the effort to mediate the two sides can be challenging. Of the three films, To the Lighthouse is the least successful, tending toward the old Masterpiece Theater mode of attempting to be faithful to the ';source text,' to use the term of the film theorist Robert Stam, but missing the essence of the novel. Director Sally Potter's Orlando is cinematically the most venturesome and attractive, although some Woolf readers condemn Potter's erasure of Woolf's intent to celebrate her affair with Vita Sackville-West (whose son Nigel Nicolson called Woolfs Orlando ';the longest and most charming love-letter in literature'). Mrs. Dalloway tends toward the Merchant/Ivory style of treating literary masterworksindeed, the film credits include a debt of gratitude to the producer/director partnershipand is generally carried by the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, although it is difficult to imagine her having a crush on another young woman, even at eighteen.The book's second concern is Woolf's interest in what she would call ';the cinema.' As a member of Bloomsbury, she saw and participated in the discussion of the cinema, especially avant-garde films, which she considered to be more the future of cinema than film adaptations, upon which she heaped great scorn for their ravenous, if not rapacious, consumption of vulnerable literary fiction such as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Woolf specialists such as Leslie Hankins proclaim her one of the earliest and most significant British film theorists for the brilliant essay ';The Cinema' (1925), as film was just beginning to establish itself as art and not merely popular entertainment.The third concern is a complex effort to explore the David Hare/Stephen Daldry film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel The Hours, an homage to Mrs. Dalloway in which Virginia Woolf has a starring role, as portrayed by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. The film and Kidman's prosthetic nose produced a violent division among the Woolfians who either commended its bringing legions of new readers to Mrs. Dalloway and potentially to ';Woolf'Mrs. Dalloway becoming the best-seller it could not have been in her lifetimeor were outraged by the film's diminishment of probably the most important female British novelist of the 20th century. Even Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing spoke out against the travesty of a novelist she considered a foremother of later 20th-century writers.

In Shakespeare's Dramatic Persons, Travis Curtright examines the influence of the classical rhetorical tradition on early modern theories of acting in a careful study of and selection from Shakespeare's most famous characters and successful plays. Curtright demonstrates that ';personation'the early modern term for playing a roleis a rhetorical acting style that could provide audiences with lifelike characters and action, including the theatrical illusion that dramatic persons possess interiority or inwardness.Shakespeare's Dramatic Persons focuses on major characters such as Richard III, Katherina, Benedick, and Iago and ranges from Shakespeare's early to late work, exploring particular rhetorical forms and how they function in five different plays. At the end of this study, Curtright envisions how Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's best actor, might have employed the theatrical convention of directly addressing audience members.Though personation clearly differs from the realism aspired to in modern approaches to the stage, Curtright reveals how Shakespeare's sophisticated use and development of persuasion's arts would have provided early modern actors with their own means and sense of performing lifelike dramatic persons.

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion is an anthology featuring leading critical voices, including such figures as Nancy Henry, Julian Wolfreys, Ira Nadel, Joseph Wiesenfarth, and William Baker, among others, as they address ideas of subversion in nineteenth-century literature.

This book tells the story of how and why millions of Chinese works of art got exported to collectors and institutions in the West, in particular to the United States. As China's last dynasty was weakening and collapsing from 1860 into the early years of the twentieth century, China's internal chaos allowed imperial and private Chinese collections to be scattered, looted and sold. A remarkable and varied group of Westerners entered the country, had their eyes opened to centuries of Chinese creativity and gathered up paintings, bronzes and ceramics, as well as sculptures, jades and bronzes. The migration to America and Europe of China's art is one of the greatest outflows of a culture's artistic heritage in human history. A good deal of the art procured by collectors and dealers, some famous and others little known but all remarkable in individual ways, eventually wound up in American and European museums. Today some of the art still in private hands is returning to China via international auctions and aggressive purchases by Chinese millionaires.

This study examines the third generation ethnic return to the homeland and its identity quest through myth, history, and storytelling as seen in late-twentieth-century novels. Through a comparison between Italian American and Greek American works, the book discusses contemporary ethnic cultures, histories, and the common painful identity issues.

This international collection of essays gives fresh insight into the lives and perspectives of the modernist authors who lived and wrote in the shadow of war. These essays offer a link through wartime experience, as the fragmented, violent, and traumatic period demanded unique forms of expression.

Volume II of this series presents the unabridged text of Progress and Poverty, arguably the most influential work of Henry George. The original text is supplemented by notes that explain the changes George made during his lifetime and the many references he made to history, literature, economics, and public policy.