You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Based on an exhibition at the Houghton Library and was originally published as a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, Volume 17, Numbers 3-4.
Napoleon today is still a figure who fascinates both his admirers and detractors because of his seminal role in European history at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, straddling the French Revolution and the enormous empire that he fashioned through military conquest. Napoleon in the Russian Imaginary focuses on the response of Russia's greatest writers—poets, novelists, critics, and historians—to the idea of "Great Man" as an agent of transformational change as it manifests itself in the person and career of Napoleon. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and his subsequent exile to St. Helena, in much of Europe a re-evaluation of Napoleon's perso...
An extraordinary prodigy of Mozartean abilities, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a distinguished composer and conductor, a legendary pianist and organist, and an accomplished painter and classicist. Lionized in his lifetime, he is best remembered today for several staples of the concert hall and for such popular music as "The Wedding March" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." Now, in the first major Mendelssohn biography to appear in decades, R. Larry Todd offers a remarkably fresh account of this musical giant, based upon painstaking research in autograph manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, and paintings. Rejecting the view of the composer as a craftsman of felicitous but sentimental, sac...
Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont is the first full-length biography of a Renaissance man, the statesman/publicist/jurist/political writer/man of letters who was hailed by Goethe, Macauley and Stendhal as one of the great intellects of his time. Among other activities he advised Mirabeau (he leader of the National Assembly) in the French Revolution, introduced Jeremy Bentham to the world by publishing ten volumes edited and rewritten from Bentham's notes, and led the political struggle that turned Geneva into a democracy. Dumont also played a direct role in such social reforms as the abolition of slavery, corresponding with and advising Samuel Romilly, William Wiberforce and others. A confirmed bachelor, he was admired and at times loved by some of the most prominent women of his time: Lady Holland, Madame de Stael and Maria Edgeworth. There has been no other full-length work, and no book at all in English, on this remarkable man.
The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it became possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe might be united in a single political community. The Pursuit of Europe tells the story of the evolution of the 'European project', from the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw the earliest creation of a 'Concert ofEurope', right through to Brexit. The question was how, after centuries of internecine conflict, to create a united Europe while still preserving the political legal and cultural integrity of each individual nation. The need tofind an answer to this question became more acute after t...
This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times. The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life. We all know the role that shipwrecks can play in this journey, and at some level we have all played witness to others' wrecks, standing in sa...
On the relationship between early cinema and 19th century theatre.
Translated by Jeremy Moyle When Hegel described the Americas as an inferior continent, he was repeating a contention that inspired one of the most passionate debates of modern times. Originally formulated by the eminent natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and expanded by the Prussian encyclopedist Cornelius de Pauw, this provocative thesis drew heated responses from politicians, philosophers, publicists, and patriots on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing polemic reached its apex in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and is far from extinct today.Translated into English in 1973, The Dispute of the New World is the definitive study of this debate. Antonello Gerbi scrutinizes each contribution to the debate, unravels the complex arguments, and reveals their inner motivations. As the story of the polemic unfolds, moving through many disciplines that include biology, economics, anthropology, theology, geophysics, and poetry, it becomes clear that the subject at issue is nothing less than the totality of the Old World versus the New, and how each viewed the other at a vital turning point in history.