In Their Own Words

Point of view isn't just an element of storytelling--when chosen carefully and employed consistently in a work of fiction, it is the foundation of a captivating story.

It's the character voice you can hear as clearly as your own. It's the unique worldview that intrigues readers--persuading them to empathize with your characters and invest in their tale. It's the masterful concealing and revealing of detail that keeps pages turning and plots fresh. It's the hidden agenda that makes narrators complicated and compelling.

It's also something most writers struggle to understand. In The Power of Point of View, RITA Award-winning author Alicia Rasley first teaches you the fundamentals of point of view (POV)--who is speaking, why, and what options work best within the conventions of your chosen genre. Then, she takes you deeper to explain how POV functions as a crucial piece of your story--something that ultimately shapes and drives character, plot, and every other component of your fiction.

Through comprehensive instruction and engaging exercises, you'll learn how to: choose a point of view that enhances your characters and plots and encourages reader involvement; navigate the levels of a character's point of view, from objective viewing to action to emotion; and craft unusual perspectives, including children, animal narrators, and villains.

A story changes depending on who's telling it, and The Power of Point of View will help you determine which of your characters can make your story come to life.

Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Keats, were deeply interested in how perception and sensory experience operate, and in the connections between sense-perception and aesthetic experience. Noel Jackson tracks this preoccupation through the Romantic period and beyond, both in relation to late eighteenth-century human sciences, and in the context of momentous social transformations in the period of the French Revolution. Combining close readings of the poems with interdisciplinary research into the history of the human sciences, Noel Jackson sheds new light on Romantic efforts to define how art is experienced in relation to the newly emerging sciences of the mind and shows the continued relevance of these ideas to our own habits of cultural and historical criticism today. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism, but also to those interested in the intellectual interrelations between literature and science.

This wide-ranging collection brings together leading authorities on the social history of American art music to reveal the indispensable contribution that women have made to American musical life. Some chapters discuss collective endeavors, such as music clubs, Wagnerites, supporters of "modern music" in the 1920s, and activists in African American communities, while others focus on the work of a single, strikingly individual patron such as Isabella Stewart Gardner or Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Primary sources such as private letters and autobiographies are utilized, and documentary vignettes scattered throughout the book bring to life important events and reminiscences. Among these are an interview with Betty Freeman, noted patron of avant-garde music, and advice from Mildred Bliss to Nadia Boulanger. Extensive opening and closing chapters provide conceptual and factual background on music in America and draw out the larger implications of women's patronage in the past, present, and future.

The entire text of this book is currently available electronically (chapter by chapter) at: content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft838nb58v&brand=eschol and (as a single large document) at
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft838nb58v&chunk.id=0&doc.view=print. Both versions are searchable and contain all the illustrations that are in the published book (which is officially out of print).

The Saint-Simonians, whose movement flourished in France between 1825 and 1835, are widely recognized for their contributions to history and social thought. Until now, however, no full account has been made of the central role of the arts in their program. In this skillful interdisciplinary study, Ralph P. Locke describes and documents the Saint-Simonians' view of music as an ideological tool and the influence of this view on musical figures of the day.

The disciples of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, believed that increased industrial production would play a crucial role in improving the condition of the working masses and in shifting power from the aristocratic "drones" to the enterprising men of talent then rising in the French middle class. As a powerful means of winning support for their views, music became an integral part of the Saint-Simonians' writings and ceremonial activities.

Among the musicians Locke discusses are Berlioz, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, whose tangential association with the Saint-Simonians reveals new aspects of their social and aesthetic views. Other musicians became the Saint-Simonians' faithful followers, among them Jules Vinçard, Dominique Tajan-Rogé, and particularly Félicien David, the movement's principal composer. Many of these composers' works, reconstructed by Locke from authentic sources, are printed here, including the "Premier Chant des industriels," written at Saint-Simon's request by Rouget de Lisle, composer of the "Marseillaise."

Jacques Barzun praised the book for revealing "a piece of history that also mirrors our best endeavors and worst antics: ideology, politics, genius, and the arts interact for our entertainment and instruction in this model of scholarly, judicious, and graceful writing."

Black Heart is a critique of the African American literary culture that grew up in the elite American academy during the last thirty years.

This collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England's long-distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena.

Far from being a melting pot in which languages other than English vanish, the United States was in the past and is now an intensely multilingual country. Absent a unifying mother tongue, how, then, can a work be or become American? This book offers the first sustained analysis of the role that translation plays for American literature. It investigates how language affects our understanding of individuals and nations, and the role that literature plays in forming and challenging our notion of cultural identity. The writers who founded American literature (such as Phillis Wheatley, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe) embraced multilingualism. They recognized that, to become "American," a literary work had to be readily available in languages other than English. To circulate their work among the nation's linguistically different readers, these writers actively promoted literary translation. Because such translation also allowed texts to be exported to other countries, it fulfilled their desire to create a "world literature" that reached beyond state boundaries. Multilingualism is a hallmark of American literature, and we need to recognize that literature as inherently multilingual and transnational.

Employing previously unexamined archival material, Paige Reynolds reconstructs five large-scale public events in early 20th-century Irish culture: the riotous premiere of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907; the events of Dublin Suffrage Week, including the Irish premiere of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, in 1913; the funeral processions of the playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney in 1920; the sporting and arts competitions of the Tailteann Games in 1924; and the organized protests accompanying the premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926. The book provides attentive readings of the literature and theater famously produced in tandem with these events, as well as introducing surprising texts that made valuable contributions to Irish national theater. This detailed study revises pessimistic explanations of 20th-century mass politics and crowd dynamics by introducing a more sympathetic account of national communities and national sentiment.

By the early 1920s, "ladies magazines" (fujin zasshi) had become a distinct category in Japanese publishing. Women's periodicals increasingly influenced intellectual discourse, the literary establishment, and daily life. Turning Pages makes sense of this phenomenon through a detailed analysis of several interwar women's magazines, including the literary journal Ladies' Review, the popular domestic periodical Housewife's Friend, and the politically radical magazine Women's Arts. Through a close examination of their literature, articles, advertising, and art, the book explores the magazines as both windows onto and actors in this vibrant period of Japanese history.

First complete collection and analysis of some 350 alliterating word-pairs from the corpus of over 100 Early Middle High German literature (circa 1070-1170), including references to earlier occurrences in the Old High German era (circa 800-1070), and new findings adding to the earlier data. Covers religious poetry and prose, translations, historical writing, sermons, minnesang, and all other surviving German texts. Demonstrates various functions of the word-pairs, highlighting especially evocative passages, and making evident the long evolution of the still popular rhetorical device. Includes complete listing of Old High and Early Middle High German alliterating word-pairs.

Rome and the Literature of Gardens explores the garden as a powerful focus of transformation and transgression in the De Re Rustica of Columella, the Satires of Horace, the Annals of Tacitus, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. In keeping with the approach of this series, a concluding chapter examines the reincarnation of these expressions in the contemporary plays Arcadia and The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard.

Many books on gardens in ancient Rome concentrate on either technical agricultural manuals, or pastoral poetry, or the physical remains of Roman gardens. Instead, this book considers images of gardens from a kaleidoscope of genres, especially those that the Romans made their own: satire, annalistic history, and autobiography. This atypical approach makes a unique contribution to the field of Latin literature and garden history, bridging the gap between material culture and cultural history.

This 40th anniversary edition of a classic work in the field of narrative studies contains the slightly revised text of the original by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, along with a substantial new chapter by Phelan on narrative theory since 1966.

This book explores the major institutions of Elizabethan society through the lens of Spenser's poem, which gives greater voice and weight to the non-elite in Elizabethan society than previous criticism has

The shopgirl was the subject of popular novels, newspaper articles, and political treatises on women's work and leisure at the turn of the twentieth century. But who exactly was she, and why did she feature in so many narratives about women, sexuality, and urban life?

In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl--both historical figure and fictional heroine--from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. As the author reveals, the shopgirl embodied the fantasies associated with a growing consumer culture: romantic adventure, upward mobility, and the acquisition of material goods. Reading novels such as George Gissing's The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage as well as short stories, musical comedies, and films, Sanders argues that the London shopgirl appeared in the midst of controversies over sexual morality and the pleasures and dangers of London itself. Sanders explores the shopgirl's centrality to modern conceptions of fantasy, desire, and everyday life for working women and argues for her as a key figure in cultural and social histories of the period.

This innovative interdisciplinary study makes an important contribution to research on women, class, and consumer culture and will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature.

A study of Sergio Leone's revisionist Western, Once Upon a Time in The West, and a defense of Leone as a film director worthy of the same veneration as his often more esteemed art-film peers of the sixties and seventies.

This book takes a fresh look at John Milton's major poems--Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained--and a few of the minor ones in light of a new analysis of Milton's famous tracts on divorce. Luxon contends that Milton's work is best understood as part of a major cultural project in which Milton assumed a leading role--the redefinition of Protestant marriage as a heteroerotic version of classical friendship, originally a homoerotic cultural practice.

Schooled in the humanist notion that man was created as a godlike being, Milton also believed that what marked man as different from God is loneliness. Milton's reading of Genesis--"it is not good for man to be alone"--prescribes a wife as the remedy for this "single imperfection," but Milton thought marriage had fallen to such a degraded state that it required a reformation.

As a humanist, Milton looked to classical culture, especially to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, for a more dignified model of human relations--friendship. Milton reimagined marriage as a classical friendship, without explicitly conceptualizing the issues of gender construction. Nor did he allow the chief tenet of classical friendship, equality, to claim a place in reformed marriage. Single Imperfection traces the path of friendship theory through Milton's epistolary friendship with Charles Diodati, his elegies, divorce pamphlets, and major poems. The book will prompt even more reinterpretations of Milton's poetry in an age that is anxiously redefining marriage once again.

Thomas H. Luxon is Cheheyl Professor and director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning and professor of English at Dartmouth College.

When Paul Celan was charged with plagiarism in 1960, the ensuing public debate in West Germany threw the poet into a major personal crisis even though most German critics immediately came to his defense. This crisis coincided with a transformative moment in the history of Holocaust remembrance--its first generational reimagining in the wake of a number of highly publicized criminal trials. Words from Abroad takes its lead from this disjunction between public ritual and private crisis to chart the emergence of a new literary diaspora, examining German Jewish writers who were dislocated in the course of World War II and began rewriting their own displacement more than a decade after the war. The idea of diaspora had ceased to be a constructive element of Jewish culture in Germany during the nineteenth-century process of emancipation and assimilation, though this book argues that it becomes crucial in articulating the possibility of German Jewish identity after the Holocaust.

Along with the works of Paul Celan, Words from Abroad examines selected German Jewish writers such as Peter Weiss and Nelly Sachs. The study of these authors is framed by theoretical reflections on the play of distance and proximity in German Jewish intellectuals after the Holocaust, including Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Amery, and Gunther Anders. Drawing on postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, trauma theory, and psychoanalytical theory, author Katja Garloff offers an original and nuanced reading of the way in which these writers, in the wake of the Holocaust, experienced and variously created a vision of dispersion as both traumatic and productive. Words from Abroad is an important tool in investigating the works of these German Jewish writers and thinkers, but it is also a contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship on trauma and displacement itself.

Even the casual reader will notice a strong preoccupation with religion in the work of Northrop Frye. In his latest book, however, Frye scholar Robert Denham shows that it played a far greater role than has been assumed--religion was in fact central to practically everything Frye wrote. Denham's focus shifts the emphasis from Anatomy of Criticism, Frye's most famous work, and places it on those works with which Frye began and ended his career--the early Fearful Symmetry and, fifty years later, his two studies of the Bible and The Double Vision. This reevaluation is based on a close examination of Frye's religiously charged language and aided by Denham's remarkable and unique access to Frye's notebooks. The notebooks' contents not only expand on ideas laid out in Frye's published works but also touch on subjects most readers would not associate with Frye, such as his wide reading in both Eastern religious texts and in esoteric traditions ranging from astrology to the Cabala.

Denham does not attempt to distill a theology from Frye's work; rather, he seeks to trace the movement of Frye's thought, demonstrating the imaginative use to which he put his wide-ranging reading. The result is a pivotal work, redefining our understanding of one of the most important humanists of the twentieth century.

This book, with contributions from some 30 scholars, attempts to provide a cartography of the contemporary global framework of knowledge and culture that can tell us where we have arrived in the new millennium, and where we are headed. It is organized around dome of the ideas, products, and practices that constitute everyday life.

The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature rethinks a key chapter in American literary history. Stacey Margolis challenges the idea that 19th-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne through Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood and, more importantly, could only understand themselves thorugh their public actions. She argues that the social issues that 19th-century novelists analyzed--including race, sexuality, the market, and the law--formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires or intentions, but rather in light of the various and inevitable traces they left on the world.

Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthornes and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers' works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments--including changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law--as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes and unintended consequences--one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.

The Song of Hiawatha, Snow-Bound, "Barefoot Boy," "Rock Me to Sleep," "It Snows," and others were part of the schoolroom canon, poems learned by rote, a tradition that went beyond the classroom that brought poetry to the mass culture's everyday. Angela Sorby's Schoolroom Poets traces how popular poems accrued cultural power through repetition; as they circulated and established bonds between individuals, institutions, and the nation.

The schoolroom canon presents work that most Americans educated in the United States between 1865 and 1917 (and well into the twentieth century) would recognize. From a cultural studies perspective, these poems are key because they circulated so widely: never before or since have so many ordinary Americans known so much poetry and much of it by heart. Sorby approaches the schoolroom canon through its readers, discovering how people encountered schoolroom poetry and how the terms of its social transmission affected its meaning.

Dramatic changes in the reading public and literary market in early nineteenth-century England not only altered the relationship between poet and reader but prompted new conceptions of the poetic text, literary reception, and authorship. With the decline of patronage, the rise of the novel and the periodical press, and the emergence of the mass reading public, poets could no longer assume the existence of an audience for poetry. Andrew Franta examines how the reconfigurations of the literary market and the publishing context transformed the ways poets conceived of their audience and the forms of poetry itself. Through readings of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hemans, and Tennyson, and with close attention to key literary, political, and legal debates, Franta proposes a new reading of Romanticism and its contribution to modern conceptions of politics and publicity.

An analysis of the literary essays of Francisco Ayala, one of Spain's foremost contemporary intellectual figures and a U of C professor from 1967 to 1971. The study examines his techniques in literary portraiture, as well as the autobiographical elements incorporated in his literary essays.

A comprehensive historical survey of literary theory and criticism, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to 20th-century scholars. It includes more than 240 alphabetically arranged entries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods. It also examines developments in other disciplines which have shaped literary theory and criticism. An international, encyclopedic guide to the field's most important figures, schools, and movements, the new edition reflects the state of literary theory and criticism.

This collection of essays provides an international perspective on ways to incorporate black British writing and culture in the study of English literature.

An exploration of changing conceptions of space and world in the sixteenth century, as manifested in Spanish maps and literature regarding its New World Empire. Against prevailing historiographical models, The Spacious Word argues that Spain tended to figure the New World with habits of mind inherited from the European Renaissance. Its analysis covers maps, geography texts, travel narrative, historiography, and epic poetry.

Larry Kart's collected writings about jazz, Jazz In Search of Itself (Yale University Press) was published November 16. Discussing nearly seventy major jazz figures and many of the music's key stylistic developments, Kart sees jazz as a unique perpetual narrative--one in which musicians, their audiences, and the evolving music itself are intimately intertwined. The book discusses the supposed return to tradition that the music of Wynton Marsalis has come to exemplify, and includes detailed accounts of the careers of Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Bill Evans, and Lennie Tristano, and essays that explores jazz's relationship to American popular song and the jazz musician's role as actual and would-be social rebel.

Bringing to light information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and from other sources such as the Royal Geographical Society, Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life (1888-94), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in Somoa.

For more than fifty years, High Noon has been a touchstone in the popular imagination and a source of endless controversy about film art. On its release it was hailed as a masterpiece. But film historians and theorists have also reviled it almost from the beginning as pretentious "social realism" inspired by its screenwriter's victimization by the red-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Showdown at High Noon is the study of a film caught between popular admiration and critical disdain. In order to understand how and why High Noon has elicited such disparate reactions, author Jeremy Byman explores all of its elements, from its origins in the mind of blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman to its long-lasting impact on culture, American and otherwise. High Noon not only affected the westerns that followed it, but also changed filmmaking in fundamental ways. By analyzing its political, cultural, and thematic implications, Byman reveals how this one film has had such a profound and enduring influence, a long lasting impact that cannot be so easily dismissed.