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Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell's seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he's funny as hell.”
The popular image of Scotland is dominated by widely recognized elements of Celtic culture. But a significant non-Celtic influence on Scotland's history has been largely ignored for centuries? This book argues that much of Scotland's history and culture from 1100 forward is Jewish. The authors provide evidence that many of the national heroes, villains, rulers, nobles, traders, merchants, bishops, guild members, burgesses, and ministers of Scotland were of Jewish descent, their ancestors originating in France and Spain. Much of the traditional historical account of Scotland, it is proposed, rests on fundamental interpretive errors, perpetuated in order to affirm Scotland's identity as a Celtic, Christian society. A more accurate and profound understanding of Scottish history has thus been buried. The authors' wide-ranging research includes examination of census records, archaeological artifacts, castle carvings, cemetery inscriptions, religious seals, coinage, burgess and guild member rolls, noble genealogies, family crests, portraiture, and geographic place names.
This is a description of how the Nine Years War affected the British Army, both in its actual operations in the theatre of war and in its size, operative capacity and costs. This war brought about radical changes in the sizes and the associated costs of the armies of Britain, France, Austria and the United Provinces in a relatively short period. For example, the size of field armies grew from an average of about 25,000 men during the Thirty Years' War to an average of about 100,000 men in 1695 during the Nine Years War. The costs of sustaining such huge field forces in terms of food, equipment and pay brought Britain and France, in particular, fiscal crisis and a shattered economy respectively, after the peace.
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New portrayals of the religious lives of American Jewish women from colonial times to the present.
The complete history of Thomas Jefferson's iconic American home, Monticello, and how it was not only saved after Jefferson's death, but ultimately made into a National Historic Landmark. When Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826, he was more than $100,000 in debt. Forced to sell thousands of acres of his lands and nearly all of his furniture and artwork, in 1831 his heirs bid a final goodbye to Monticello itself. The house their illustrious patriarch had lovingly designed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his beloved "essay in architecture," was sold to the highest bidder. So how did it become the national landmark it is today? Saving Monticello offers the first complete p...
Latin America and Existentialism is a preliminary intellectual history, prioritising literature and contextualising Latin American philosophical contributions from the 1860s to the late 1930s, decades that coincide with the canon’s foundational years. This study takes a Pan-American approach to move the critical focus away from the River Plate, a region that has received some critical attention. In doing so, it focuses on existentially-neglected writers such as Brazil’s Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, José Asunción Silva from Colombia, Cuba’s Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal. Underappreciated Latin American philosophical voices and existentialism’s canonical perspectives allow the author to discuss the many problems concerning the experiencing ‘I’ of these authors, and to consider such existential themes as ethical vacuity, forlornness, the crisis of insufficiency, the conundrum of choice, and the enigma of authentic being. The concentration on Latin America’s existentially-hued interest in the human condition is an invitation to the reader to reconsider the peripheral status in the existentialism canon.