You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
While critical studies of the American political novel date from the 1920s, such considerations of the genre have failed, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to recognize works by women. The exclusion is usually based on a distinction between "social" novels and "political" novels, and the result is an understanding of the "political" as a largely male province. In this thought-provoking collection of essays, the contributors seek not simply to add works by women to the canon of political novels but, rather, to demand a conceptual revolution - one that questions the very precepts on which the canon is based. This redefinition of the political novel takes many factors into account, including gender, race, and class and their relation to our most basic conceptions of literary and aesthetic value.
This adventure novel tells the tale of the Millenium Hall, the female Utopia. The people in the Hall live in a model of mid-century reform ideas. All the women have crafts with which to better themselves. Property is held in common, and education is the primary pastime. The narrator's long-lost cousin relates the series of adventures and how each of the residents arrived at this female Utopia. The adventures are remarkable for their reliance on a nearly superstitious form of divine grace, where God's will manifests itself with the direct punishment of the wicked and the miraculous protection of the innocent. In one tale, a woman about to be ravished by a man is saved, literally by the hand of God, as her attacker dies of a stroke. Millenium Hall was Sarah Scott's most significant novel. Interest in it has revived in the 21st century among feminist literary scholars.
Mulford Sibley, for many years a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, used to frequently quote Plato's complaint in the Laws "that man never legislates but accidents of all sorts . . . legislate for us in all sorts of ways. The violence of war and the hard necessity of poverty are constantly overturning governments and changing laws." But even if most legislation is a result of accident, Mulford Sibley holds out to us the idea that politics is a sphere of human freedom, in which men and women can collectively determine the conditions of their common life.
Bitter Healing is the first anthology of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German women's writing in English translation. It goes far toward filling a major gap in literary history by recovering for a wide audience the works of women whoøwere as famous during their lifetime as Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. Like those men, they wrote in the early modern period spanning the transition from early Enlightenment to Romanticism. Edited by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, this collection assembles little-known writings by fifteen authors from various social classes, religious backgrounds, and political persuasions. They include the forgotten pietist theologian Johanna Eleonore Peters...
None
Dystopia: A Natural History is the first monograph devoted to the concept of dystopia. Taking the term to encompass both a literary tradition of satirical works, mostly on totalitarianism, as well as real despotisms and societies in a state of disastrous collapse, this volume redefines thecentral concepts and the chronology of the genre and offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the subject.Part One assesses the theory and prehistory of "dystopia". By contrast to utopia, conceived as promoting an ideal of friendship defined as "enhanced sociability", dystopia is defined by estrangement, fear, and the proliferation of "enemy" categories. A "natural history" of dystopia thus concentratesu...
Cultural revolution: the making of a plebeian intelligentsia -- Knowledges of self -- The proletarian "I" -- The moral landscape of the modern city -- Revolutionary modernity and its discontents -- Feelings of the sacred -- Sacred vision in the revolution.
James Gunn--one of the founding figures of science fiction scholarship and teaching--wrote in 1951 what is likely the first master's thesis on modern science fiction. Portions were in the short-lived pulp magazine Dynamic but it has otherwise remained unavailable. Here in its first full publication, the thesis explores many of the classic Golden Age stories of the 1940s and the critical perspective that informed Gunn's essential genre history Alternate Worlds and his anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. The editor's introduction and commentary show the historical significance of Gunn's work and its relevance to today's science fiction studies.
Technology, which has significantly changed Western man's way of life over the past century, exerted a powerful influence on American society during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In this study Raymond H. Merritt focuses on the engineering profession, in order to describe not only the vital role that engineers played in producing a technological society but also to note the changes they helped to bring about in American education, industry, professional status, world perspectives, urban existence, and cultural values. During the development period of 1850-1875, engineers erected bridges, blasted tunnels, designed machines, improved rivers and harbors, developed utilities necess...