You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"In early modern English interior design, closets provided royalty with secluded places for reading, writing, and storing valuables, as well as for nurturing the shifting alliances on which the politics of the day depended. Admission to the closet was contingent solely on the owner's approval, and the criteria for admission were necessarily opaque. Later, in the houses of nobility and, increasingly, those of the middle class, private rooms served as prayer closets, curiosity cabinets, dressing rooms, libraries, galleries, and impromptu bedrooms. Merging with the privy and the bath, they were remade as earth closets or water closets and bathing closets. In these new iterations, closets remain...
Reciprocity, Wonder, Consequence : Object Lessons in the Land of Fire -- Of Blindness, Blood, and Second Sight : Transpersonal Journeys from Brazil to Ethiopia -- Creole Authenticity and Cultural Performance : Ethnographic Personhood in the Twentieth Century -- Performing Diaspora : The Science of Speaking for Haiti -- Conclusion : "I Danced, I Don't Know How" : Media, Race, and the Posthuman
Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. Deemed more accessible than Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and often assigned as a college text, A Sentimental Journey has received its share of critical attention, but—unlike Tristram Shandy—to date it has not been the subject of a dedicated anthology of critical essays. This volume fills that gap with fresh perspectives on Sterne’s novel that will appeal to students and critics alike. Together with an introduction that situates each essay within A Sentimental Journey’s reception history, and a tailpiece detailing the culmination of Sterne’s career and his death, this volume presents a cohesive approach to this significant text that is simultaneously grounded and revelatory.
Spoken words come alive in written verse. In Sounding Imperial, James Mulholland offers a new assessment of the origins, evolution, and importance of poetic voice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By examining a series of literary experiments in which authors imitated oral voices and impersonated foreign speakers, Mulholland uncovers an innovative global aesthetics of poetic voice that arose as authors invented new ways of crafting textual voices and appealing to readers. As poets drew on cultural forms from around Great Britain and across the globe, impersonating “primitive” speakers and reviving ancient oral performances (or fictionalizing them in verse), they invigorat...
Where were you when you first read Ariel? Who were you? What has changed in your life? In the lives of women? In My Ariel, Sina Queyras barges into one of the iconic texts of the twentieth century, with her own family baggage in tow, exploring and exploding the cultural norms, forms, and procedures that frame and contain the lives of women.
When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.
English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explores the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. Chapters in this book discuss anecdotes about actors, actresses, musicians, and other theatre people.
A pathbreaking introduction to eighteenth-century metaphors of the mind that recasts the grand narrative of the Enlightenment in terms of its tropes and figures. An encyclopedic dictionary along the lines of Voltaire’s classic Dictionnaire Philosophique, Metaphors of Mind provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Drawn from Brad Pasanek’s massive online archive, http://metaphorized.net, this volume constitutes a veritable treasury of mental metaphorics. Dividing the book into eleven broad metaphorical categories—Animals, Coinage, Court, Empire, Fetters, Impressions, Inhabitants, Metal, Mirror, Rooms, and...
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to ...
Urban Enlightenment offers the first literary history of the British periodical essay spanning the entire eighteenth century, and the first to study the genre's development and cultural impact in a transatlantic context.