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The Mafia has maintained an enduring hold on the American cultural imagination--even as it continues to wrongly color our real-life perception of Italian Americans. Journalist and cultural critic De Stefano takes a look at the origins and prevalence of the Mafia mythos in America. Beginning with a consideration of Italian emigration in the early twentieth century and the fear and prejudice--among both Americans and Italians--that informed our earliest conception of what was the largest immigrant group to enter the United States, De Stefano explores how these impressions laid the groundwork for the images so familiar to us today and uses them to illuminate and explore the variety and allure of Mafia stories. At the same time, he addresses the lingering power of the goodfella cliché, which makes it all but impossible to green-light a project about the Italian American experience not set in gangland.--From publisher description.
The 1970s were the Golden Age for American film-making, with the emergence of such talents as Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, De Palma, Altman, and Malick. Ryan Gilbey looks afresh at the remarkable movies of this era, and their gifted makers.
This collection of original essays focuses on new and continuing movements in British Poetry. It offers a wide ranging look at feminist, working class, and other poets of diverse cultural backgrounds.
An up-to-date overview of Heaney's career thus far, with detailed readings of all his major publications.
What is the relationship between poetry and power? Should poetry be considered a mode of authority or an impotent medium? And why is it that the modern poets most commonly regarded as authoritative are precisely those whose works wrestle with a sense of artistic inadequacy? Such questions lie at the heart of Shades of Authority, prompting fresh insights into three of the most important poets of recent decades: Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Through attentive close readings, James shows how their responsiveness to matters of political and cultural import lends weight to the idea of poetry as authoritative utterance—but also how each is exercised by a sense of the limitations and liabilities of language itself.
This story describes the experiences of a group of people on a trip to Turkey. Aunt Dot is set on the emancipation of Turkish women through the encouragement of a wider use of the bathing hat, whilst Laurie's only object is pleasure.
The five interviews in this book were conducted by students in “The Art of Poetry,” a course that Harry Thomas taught for several years. The students’ depth of knowledge and keenness of insight into the poets’ work is an affirmation of American education. The poets respond to the students with a frankness and feeling of fraternity that mounts at times to a sort of communion. The poets take up a great range of matters in the interviews the nature of artistic creation, the varieties and difficulties of poetic translation, poetry and politics, religion, popular culture, the contemporary readership for poetry, and the experience of living as a poet in a country not your own. They speak w...
In the time of the Troubles, when there were bombs in the night and soldiers on the road, Henry Glassie journeyed to the Irish borderland to learn how country people endure. He settled into the farming community of Ballymenone, beside Lough Erne in the County Fermanagh. He asked questions, and he listened. For a decade he heard and recorded the stories and songs in which they outlined their culture, recounted their history, and pictured their world--a world which, in their view, was one of love and defeat and uncertainty, demanding faith, bravery, and wit. In his award-winning Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie set out to write a comprehensive ethnography of the community. Now, a...
"Island of Daemons interprets accounts of the Donegal pilgrimage including histories, guidebooks, devotional writing, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as three major poems by twentieth-century Irish poets." "The pilgrimage history documents religious and political themes as well as the experience of pilgrimage as arduous, enlightening, and humbling. Early writings often stressed the sensational, with miracles, devils, and hideous torture. Most Lough Derg writings have been devotional, but there is a strong tradition of satire as well. Skepticism competes with reverence. It is important to locate each modern poet within a tradition of choices made in times past. This study, attempting to register the variety of attitudes associated with Lough Derg, depends at times on hypothesis-speculative possibilities rather than definite sources or influences." "This study will be useful to Irish Studies students, teachers of Irish literature and history, as wel1 as those interested in cultural studies and religion."--BOOK JACKET.
A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature The Times and Sunday Times, Best Books of 2020 “[A] fizzing, exhilarating book.”—Sebastian Faulks, Sunday Times What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work—over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. But this Little History is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thou...