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› Find signed collectible books: 'Age of Shakespeare'
This volume covers the period of Shakespeare's lifetime. It contains a long general survey of the English literary renaissance, and also an account of the social context of literature in the period. Then there follow a number of essays which consider in detail the work and importance of individual dramatists, poets and prose-writers, but above all the dram atists, for this was their age. Five of the essays are devoted to Shakespeare's plays alone. Finally, this volume contains an appendix giving short author-biographies and, in each case, standard editions of authors' works, critical commentaries and lists of books further study and reference. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Atlas of Literature'
"The Atlas of Literature" explores the fascinating connection between writers and place. This ambitious and exciting book focuses on writers and works that are intimately bound up with a place and a time, capturing a town, a city, a region, in its literary heyday. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Besessen'
Frankfurt 1994, ill. kartonierter Originaleinband, 631 Seiten, Kl.-8°, Schnitt leicht gebräunt, ansonsten gutes Exemplar, ungelesen, [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bloomsbury Group : A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary'
Bloomsbury, wrote E.M. Forster in 1929, 'is the only genuine movement in English civilization.' By this time the group's influence had been extended from fiction, biography, economics, and painting through literary, social, and art criticism to publishing and journalism. Partly as a result of its influence, Bloomsbury has been widely misunderstood as a cultural, social, and even sexual phenomenon by both its friends and its detractors. As S.P. Rosenbaum observes in the foreword to this revised and expanded edition, Bloomsbury cannot be reduced to a creed or argued away because of its complexity. 'What Bloomsbury stood for is what they were and what they did,' he writes, 'That is why a collection of descriptions of the Bloomsbury's lives and works may be the only wholly satisfactory way of defining the Bloomsbury Group.'
The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others.
Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties'
In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.
Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley) who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. Here are the social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and inevitably the penances each paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness.
These literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Meade recreates the excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation--the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism--and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior.
A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN is a rich evocation of a period that will forever intrigue and captivate us. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800'
Books, and the printed word more generally, are aspects of modern life that are all too often taken for granted. Yet the emergence of the book was a process of immense historical importance and heralded the dawning of the epoch of modernity. In this much praised history of that process, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, as well as the study of modes of consciousness, to root the development of the printed word in the changing social relations and ideological struggles of Western Europe. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cultures of United States Imperialism'
Contributors. Lynda Boose, Mary Yoko Brannen, Bill Brown, William Cain, Eric Cheyfitz, Vicente Diaz, Frederick Errington, Kevin Gaines, Deborah Gewertz, Donna Haraway, Susan Jeffords, Myra Jehlen, Amy Kaplan, Eric Lott, Walter Benn Michaels, Donald E. Pease, Vicente Rafael, Michael Rogin, José David Saldívar, Richard Slotkin, Doris Sommer, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Kenneth Warren, Christopher P. Wilson
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel'
Desire and Domestic Fiction argues that far from being removed from historical events, novels by writers from Richardson to Woolf were themselves agents of the rise of the middle class. Drawing on texts that range from 18th-century female conduct books and contract theory to modern psychoanalytic case histories and theories of reading, Armstrong shows that the emergence of a particular form of female subjectivity capable of reigning over the household paved the way for the establishment of institutions which today are accepted centers of political power. Neither passive subjects nor embattled rebels, the middle-class women who were authors and subjects of the major tradition of British fiction were among the forgers of a new form of power that worked in, and through, their writing to replace prevailing notions of "identity" with a gender-determined subjectivity. Examining the works of such novelists as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and the Brontës, she reveals the ways in which these authors rewrite the domestic practices and sexual relations of the past to create the historical context through which modern institutional power would seem not only natural but also humane, and therefore to be desired. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Couple'
With publishing empires swallowing smaller house for breakfast and agents swiping authors left, right, and center, the modern book industry might seem an insider's paradise, an aspiring author's nightmare, a reader's Goldberg contraption. Alas, according to Daniel Pool, 'twas ever thus. Money, advertising, publicity, blurbs, and the author's charisma were just as central to Victorian bookselling as they are now. Focusing particularly on Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thackeray, the author builds up a portrait of cutthroat times and cutthroat measures. Readers will be particularly taken with the author's account of the rise of the serial novel--and Dickens's frustration with the form. (Something Flaubert quickly copped to. After finishing The Pickwick Papers, he commented to George Sand, "Some bits are magnificent, but what a defective structure.") And the quotations Daniel Pool presents, from the epigraphs to Virginia Woolf's assessment on the final page, make Dickens' Fur Coat essential social history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'English Drama to 1710'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left'
With this book, Alan Wald launches a bold and passionate account of the U.S. Literary Left from the 1920s through the 1960s. Exiles from a Future Time, the first volume of a trilogy, focuses on the forging of a Communist-led literary tradition in the 1930s. Exploring writers' intimate lives and heartfelt political commitments, Wald draws on original research in scores of archives and personal collections of papers; correspondence and interviews with hundreds of writers and their friends and families; and a treasure trove of unpublished memoirs, fiction, and poetry.
In fashioning a "humanscape" of the Literary Left, Wald not only reassesses acclaimed authors but also returns to memory dozens of forgotten, talented writers. The authors range from the familiar Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, and Muriel Rukeyser to William Attaway, John Malcolm Brinnin, Stanley Burnshaw, Joy Davidman, Sol Funaroff, Joseph Freeman, Alfred Hayes, Eugene Clay Holmes, V. J. Jerome, Ruth Lechlitner, and Frances Winwar.
Focusing on the formation of the tradition and the organization of the Cultural Left, Wald investigates the "elective affinity" of its avant-garde poets, the "Afro-cosmopolitanism" of its Black radical literary movement, and the uneasy negotiation between feminist concerns and class identity among its women writers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Flowering of New England'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frontier Lawmen'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History'
A manifesto for a text-free literary scholarship.
Professor Franco Moretti argues heretically that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. He insists that such a move could bring new luster to a tired field, one that in some respects is among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy." Literary study, he argues, has been random and unsystematic. For any given period scholars focus on a select group of a mere few hundred texts: the canon. As a result, they have allowed a narrow distorting slice of history to pass for the total picture.
Moretti offers bar charts, maps, and time lines instead, developing the idea of "distant reading," set forth in his path-breaking essay "Conjectures on World Literature," into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, where the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genresthe epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novelas well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851'
It seems incredible that an actual human being stands behind the works of Herman Melville, and we rightly expect a biography to show us that real, tangible man. When Melville made his debut in England, reviewers thought his books must have been the products of an esteemed English gentleman disguising himself under rough Yankee cloth. It was simply inconceivable that any American could produce such noble prose, or that any author could have lived the briny life Melville describes. Hershel Parker finds that life not unimaginable, but difficult to distill. His book is monumental in size and definitive in detail. Readers looking for a digestible portait of one of America's favorite authors may find this well researched book a bit rich (remember this is just Volume I), although it does reveal many new insights into Melville's life and family background. Regardless, Parker's book is a significant scholarly work and essential to serious students of this American master. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891'
The first volume of Hershel Parker's definitive biography of Herman Melvillea finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prizeclosed on a mid-November day in 1851. In the dining room of the Little Red Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Melville had just presented an inscribed copy of his new novel, Moby-Dick, to his intimate friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the man to whom the work was dedicated. "Take it all in all," Parker concluded, "this was the happiest day of Melville's life."
Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 2, 1851-1891 chronicles Melville's life in rich detail, from this ecstatic moment to his death, in obscurity, forty years later. Parker describes the malignity of reviewers and sheer bad luck that doomed Moby-Dick to failure (and its author to prolonged indebtedness), the savage reviews he received for his next book Pierre, and his inability to have the novel The Isle of the Crossnow lostpublished at all. Melville turned to magazine fiction, writing the now-classic "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno," and produced a final novel, The Confidence Man, a mordant satire of American optimism. Over his last three decades, while working as a customs inspector in Manhattan, Melville painstakingly remade himself as a poet, crafting the centennial epic Clarel, in which he sorted out his complex feelings for Hawthorne, and the masterful story "Billy Budd," originally written as a prose headnote to an unfinished poem.
Through prodigious archival research into hundreds of family letters and diary entries, newly discovered newspaper articles, and marginalia from books that Melville owned, Parker vividly recreates the last four decades of Melville's life, episode after episode unknown to previous biographers. The concluding volume of Herman Melville: A Biography confirms Hershel Parker's position as the world's leading Melville scholar, demonstrating his unrivaled biographical, literary, and historical imagination and providing a rich new portrait of a greatand profoundly Americanartist.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Reading'
A history of reading presents tales of book thieves, book burners, censors, anarchists, women of eleventh century Japan who had to invent their own reading material, and African-American slaves who were forbidden to read under penalty of death. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Russian Literature'
This magisterial work, written by one of the world's foremost Slavic scholars, presents a survey of Russian literature from its beginning in the eleventh century to modern times. Victor Terras argues eloquently that Russian literature has reflected, defined, and shaped the nation's beliefs and goals, and he sets his survey against a background of social and political developments and religious and philosophic thought. Terras traces a rich literary heritage that encompasses Russian folklore of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, medieval literature that in style and substance drew on the Byzantine tradition, and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Russia passed through a succession of literary schools-neoclassicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, and realism-imported from the West. Terras then moves on to the masterful realist fiction of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoi during the second half of the nineteenth century, showing how it was a catalyst for the social and cultural advances following the reforms of Alexander II. In discussing the period preceding the revolution of 1917, Terras links the literary movements with parallel developments in the theater, music, and the visual arts, explaining that these all placed Russia in the forefront of European modernism. Terras divides Russian literature after the revolution into émigré and Soviet writing, and he demonstrates how the latter acted as a propaganda tool of the Communist party. He concludes his survey with the dissident movement that followed Stalin's death, arguing that the movement again made literature a leader in the struggle for freedom of thought, genuine relevance, and communion with Western culture. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'History of Russian Literature : From Its Beginnings to 1900'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Immortal Dinner'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Key Concepts in Victorian Literature'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Latin Literature: A History'
This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Latin Literature: A History'
This authoritative history of Latin literature offers a comprehensive survey of the thousand-year period from the origins of Latin as a written language to the early Middle Ages. At once a reference work, a bibliographic guide, a literary study, and a reader's handbook, Latin Literature: A History is the first work of its kind to appear in English in nearly four decades. From the first examples of written Latin through Gregory of Tours in the sixth century and the Venerable Bede in the seventh, Latin Literature offers a wide-ranging panorama of all major Latin authors. Including names, dates, edition citations, and detailed summaries, the work combines the virtues of an encyclopedia with the critical intelligence readers have come to expect from Italy's leading Latinist, Gian Biagio Conte.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages'
In this, his final book, Erich Auerbach writes, "My purpose is always to write history." Tracing the transformations of classical Latin rhetoric from late antiquity to the modern era, he explores major concerns raised in his Mimesis: the historical and social contexts in which writings were received, and issues of aesthetics, semantics, stylistics, and sociology that anticipate the concerns of the new historicism.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lucy Maud Montgomery'
Lucy Maud Montgomery is known to millions of readers the world over as the creator of Canada_s most famous redhead, Anne of Green Gables.
Born in the tiny Prince Edward Island village of Clifton in 1874, Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in the seaside community of Cavendish on the north shore of the island.
Opportunities for women were limited in the rural Victorian society of the time, but Lucy Maud showed an unusually independent turn of character by trying her hand first as a teacher and then as a journalist in Halifax before returning to the isolation of Cavendish to care for her widowed grandmother. It was during these thirteen long years that she wrote Anne of Green Gables and established herself as Canada_s most popular and widely-read author.
In 1911 she married Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald and moved to Ontario. Her spiritual home remained Prince Edward Island, however, and she continued to write of it with nostalgic fondness until her death in 1942.
[via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature'
A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Modern Age'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Modern Epic : The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Modernism: 1890-1930'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Modernism: 1890-1930/A Guide to European Literature'
The Modern movement in the arts transformed consciousness and artistic form just as the energies of modernity--scientific, technological, philosophical, political--transformed for ever the nature, the speed, the sensation of human life, ' write the editors in their new Preface. This now classic survey explores the ideas, the groupings and the social tensions that shaped this transformation.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mothers of the Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New Pelican Guide to English Literature'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740'
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of gender.
Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of "realism" and the "middle class," McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories. Between 1600 and 1740, momentous changes took place in European attitudes toward truth in narrative and toward virtue in the individual and the social order. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn, 1640-1689'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Possession'
Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, this novel describes the romance between two 19th-century poets and the parallel relationship of their two biographers and includes passages of "Victorian verse". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor and the Madman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor and the Madman: A Tale Of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary'
The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, 70 years in the making, was an intellectually heroic feat with a twist worthy of the greatest mystery fiction: one of its most valuable contributors was a criminally insane American physician, locked up in an English asylum for murder. British stage actor Simon Jones leads us through this uncommon meeting of minds (the other belonging to self-educated dictionary editor James Murray) at full gallop. Ultimately, it's hard to say which is more remarkable: the facts of this amazingly well-researched story, or the sound of author Simon Winchester's erudite prose. Jones's reading smoothly transports listeners to the 19th century, reminding us why so many brilliant people obsessively set out to catalogue the English language. This unabridged version contains an interview between Winchester and John Simpson, editor of the Oxford dictionary. (Running time: 6.5 hours, 6 cassettes) --Lou Schuler [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800'
In this new edition of his landmark book, John Gross traces the shifting fortunes of the men who shaped literary opinion in England during the Victorian, Edwardian, and contemporary eras. He brings together famous or forgotten critics and editorsprophets, aesthetes, statesmen, dons, radicals, social climbers, idealists, gossipmongers, and literary lionsand explores not only their critical ideas but also their personalities, careers, social backgrounds, and politics. He looks at "the higher journalism;" the expansion of the reading public, the byways of British liberalism, and the rise of literature as an academic subject, and the impact of modernism. In all a remarkable survey, to which Mr. Gross has now added updates on several literary careers, the new style of critics who have evolved from the universities, and the dominant role of the media. "A brilliant account of English literary culture which is as engaging as it is illuminating"Lionel Trilling. "Extremely readable.... The book is strewn with marvelous bits: deft aperçus, biographical portraits of great subtlety and force, wit, commonsensical intelligence everywhere. It is a book that no one who cares about the state of literature can afford to neglect."Joseph Epstein. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rise of the Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shakespeare: Invention'
"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness." So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. This is a titanic claim. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus--and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility.
It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: "The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways." On The Merchant of Venice: "To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate." On As You Like It: "Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share." Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. Chips: "Falstaff is more than skeptical, but he is too much of a teacher (his true vocation, more than highwayman) to follow skepticism out to its nihilistic borders, as Hamlet does."
In the end, it doesn't matter very much whether we agree with all or any of these ideas. What does matter is that Bloom's capacious book sends us hurrying back to some of the central texts of our civilization. "The ultimate use of Shakespeare," the author asserts, "is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." Bloom himself has made excellent use of his hero's instruction, and now he teaches us all to do the same. --Daniel Hintzsche [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human'
"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare's greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness." So Harold Bloom opines in his outrageously ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. This is a titanic claim. But then this is a titanic book, wrought by a latter-day critical colossus--and before Bloom is done with us, he has made us wonder whether his vision of Shakespeare's influence on the whole of our lives might not be simply the sober truth. Shakespeare is a feast of arguments and insights, written with engaging frankness and affecting immediacy. Bloom ranges through the Bard's plays in the probable order of their composition, relating play to play and character to character, maintaining all the while a shrewd grasp of Shakespeare's own burgeoning sensibility.
It is a long and fascinating itinerary, and one littered with thousands of sharp insights. Listen to Bloom on Romeo and Juliet: "The Nurse and Mercutio, both of them audience favorites, are nevertheless bad news, in different but complementary ways." On The Merchant of Venice: "To reduce him to contemporary theatrical terms, Shylock would be an Arthur Miller protagonist displaced into a Cole Porter musical, Willy Loman wandering about in Kiss Me Kate." On As You Like It: "Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share." Bloom even offers some belated vocational counseling to Falstaff, identifying him as an Elizabethan Mr. Chips: "Falstaff is more than skeptical, but he is too much of a teacher (his true vocation, more than highwayman) to follow skepticism out to its nihilistic borders, as Hamlet does."
In the end, it doesn't matter very much whether we agree with all or any of these ideas. What does matter is that Bloom's capacious book sends us hurrying back to some of the central texts of our civilization. "The ultimate use of Shakespeare," the author asserts, "is to let him teach you to think too well, to whatever truth you can sustain without perishing." Bloom himself has made excellent use of his hero's instruction, and now he teaches us all to do the same. --Daniel Hintzsche [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary'
The making of the "Oxford English Dictionary" was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the "OED's" editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The True Story of the Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Way of the World : The Bildungsroman in European Culture'
Willhelm Meister, Elizabeth Bennet, Julian Sorel, Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Bazaroz, Dorothea Brooke...the Golden Age of the European novel discovers a new collective protagonist: youth. It is problematic and restless youth - 'strange' characters, as their own creators often say - arising from the downfall of traditional societies. But even more than that, youth is the symbolic figure for European modernity: that sudden mix of great expectations and lost illusions that the bourgeois world learns to 'read', and to accept, as if it were a novel. The Way of the World, with its unique combination of narrative theory and social history, interprets the Bildungsroman as the great cultural mediator of nineteenth-century Europe: a form which explores the many strange compromises between revolution and restoration, economic take-off and aesthetic pleasure, individual autonomy and social normality. This new edition includes an additional final chapter on the collapse of the Bildungsroman in the years around the First World War (a crisis which opened the way for Modernist experimentation), and a rew preface in which the Moretti looks back at The Way of the World in light of his more recent work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages'
Discussed and debated, revered and reviled, Bloom's tome reinvigorates and re-examines Western Literature, arguing against the politicization of reading. His erudite passion will encourage you to hurry and finish his book so you can pick up Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens once again to rediscover their original magic. In addition, his appendix listing of the "future" canon - the books today that will be timeless tomorrow - is sure to be the template for future debate. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables'
Lucy Maud Montgomery is Canada's best-known writer of children's fiction. Anne of Green Gables-- in print, film, television, on stage--captures people's imaginations as easily now as it did when it burst upon the world in 1908.
Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island and she set her best-loved stories there. She worked briefly as a journalist, but family responsiblities shaped her life as a young single woman. At 36 she married a dour, often depressive Presbyterian minister and moved to Ontario. There she lived a life of contradictions--in private, the romantic, successful imaginative writer; in public the strict, dutiful minister's wife.
Using diaries and letters Lucy Maud never intended to be made public, The Wheel of Things is a pioneering biography of one of Canada's most successful and important writers. Since its publication, the release of Montgomery's diaries and other work by scholarly writers have confirmed the life story that Mollie Gillen tells so well in this important and path-breaking biography. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wheel of Things: Lucy Maud Montgomery'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare'
There's no shortage of good Shakespearean biographies. But Stephen Greenblatt, brilliant scholar and author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, reminds us that the "surviving traces" are "abundant but thin" as to known facts. He acknowledges the paradox of the many biographies spun out of conjecture but then produces a book so persuasive and breathtakingly enjoyable that one wonders what he could have done if the usual stuff of biographical inquiry--memoirs, interviews, manuscripts, and drafts--had been at his disposal. Greenblatt uses the "verbal traces" in Shakespeare's work to take us "back into the life he lived and into the world to which he was so open." Whenever possible, he also ushers us from the extraordinary life into the luminous work. The result is a marvelous blend of scholarship, insight, observation, and, yes, conjecture--but conjecture always based on the most convincing and inspired reasoning and evidence. Particularly compelling are Greenblatt's discussions of the playwright's relationship with the university wit Robert Greene (discussed as a chief source for the character of Falstaff) and of Hamlet in relation to the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet, his aging father, and the "world of damaged rituals" that England's Catholics were forced to endure.
Will in the World is not just the life story of the world's most revered writer. It is the story, too, of 16th- and 17th-century England writ large, the story of religious upheaval and political intrigue, of country festivals and brutal public executions, of the court and the theater, of Stratford and London, of martyrdom and recusancy, of witchcraft and magic, of love and death: in short, of the private but engaged William Shakespeare in his remarkable world. Throughout the book, Greenblatt's style is breezy and familiar. He often refers to the poet simply as Will. Yet for all his alacrity of style and the book's accessibility, Will in the World is profoundly erudite, an enormous contribution to the world of Shakespearean letters. --Silvana Tropea
Interview with Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt shares his thoughts about what make Shakespeare Shakespeare and why the Bard continues to fascinate us endlessly.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'World of Science Fiction, 1926-1976: The History of a Subculture'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599'
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England
Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.
James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeares staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Canon Occidental'
El autor retoma la antigua idea del canon o catalogo de libros perceptivos, y propone un recorrido por la historia de la literatura occidental mediante 26 autores que el considera capitales, y que van desde Shakespeare hasta Dante, Cervantes, Joyce o Borges. Asi mismo reivindica la autonomia de la estetica y el placer de la lectura sin intenciones de redencion social, y basada en el puro goce intelectual. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Posesion/ Possession'
Esta extraordinaria novela, cuenta su autora, tiene su remoto origen en las reflexiones que le inspiro una biografa americana de Coleridge que habia dedicado toda su vida al estudio del poeta. Todo empieza con unas cartas robadas. Roland Mitchell, un oscuro graduado en literatura inglesa, descubre entre unos libros, dos cartas inconclusas y nunca enviadas a una desconocida mujer. Roland investiga la identidad de la misteriosa corresponsal y descubre que esta es Christabel LaMotte, oscura, ambigua poetisa de la epoca, reivindicada en la actualidad por feministas y lesbianas. Roland ha hecho un descubrimiento que puede lanzarle a una brillante carrera academica y constituir un hito en el estudio de la poesia victoriana. Y acompanado por una mas que atractiva especialista en la obra de Christabel, seguiran un rastro de poemas, diarios y cartas, y gradualmente poseidos por aquellos que buscaban poseer, reconstruiran una historia de pasiones alli donde nunca se supo que las hubiera. [via]
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