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Translation was central to Old English literature as we know it. Most Old English literature, in fact, was either translated or adapted from Latin sources, and this is the first full-length study of Anglo-Saxon translation as a cultural practice. This 'culture of translation' was characterised by changing attitudes towards English: at first a necessary evil, it can be seen developing increasing authority and sophistication. Translation's pedagogical function (already visible in Latin and Old English glosses) flourished in the centralizing translation programme of the ninth-century translator-king Alfred, and English translations of the Bible further confirmed the respectability of English, while lfric's late tenth-century translation theory transformed principles of Latin composition into a new and vigorous language for English preaching and teaching texts. The book will integrate the Anglo-Saxon period more fully into the longer history of English translation.ROBERT STANTON is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College, Massachusetts.
A cultural history of utopian writing in early modern England, Founding Fictions traces the development of the genre from the publication of Thomas More's Utopia (1516) through Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). Amy Boesky sees utopian literature rising alongside new social institutions that helped shape the modern English nation. While utopian fiction explicitly advocates a reorganization of human activity, which appears liberal or progressive, utopias represent reform in self-critical or qualitative ways. Early modern utopias, Boesky demonstrates, are less blueprints for reform than they are challenges to the very possibility of improvement. After an initial discussion of More's Utopia, Boesky ...
Susan Clair Imbarrato, Carol Berkin, Brett Barney, Lisa Paddock, Matthew J. Bruccoli, George Parker Anderson, Judith S.
This book examines writings by people living with Alzheimer's Disease and their caregivers. Its focus areas include the construction of the self in the face of diminishing linguistic and cognitive abilities, the stigmatization of ageing, the various narrative strategies that these texts (often collaborative) employ, the health activism and advocacy generated via a 'biosociality,' and the ethics of care. It examines the 'disease writing' genre about a condition that ravages the ability to use language. It serves as a "literary" examination of the work done in this area through a critical reading of the memoirs of those with AD and caregivers and a healthy dose of literary theory. The book is a valuable resource for those interested in literary and critical theory and researchers in the field of ageing/dementia studies.
"Lynn Davidman has written a courageous and important book about the impact of losing one's mother at an early age. Courageous because this is painful material--no one who reads it can help but recall their own mother's passing, even if not at an early age--and important because it seems there are few, if any, other books like it."—Virginia Olesen, University of California, San Francisco "This is an interesting, important, well-written book on a profoundly moving subject."—Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations "This is an important contribution to our understanding of the social construction of personal loss. It's an absorbing read and a vivid, often poignan...
This volume initiates a long-overdue reassessment of mid-twentieth-century British theatre cultures.
This stimulating collection of essays, the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson, deals individually with his five major plays and also addresses issues crucial to Wilson's canon: the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama. The collection includes essays by virtually all the scholars who have currently published on Wilson along with many established and newer scholars of drama and/or African American literature.
"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."—from the Introduction American popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book—illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images—finds a place for the dying and lost body in t...