You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"A fascinating look inside the complexities and enjoyment of skiing. For every skier, from the beginner to the Olympic Gold Medalist, this book provides a treasure of information." -PAUL MAJOR, ATHLETIC DIRECTOR, U.S. SKI TEAM "I was delighted to learn from this interesting book more about the physics of a sport I have enjoyed for more than seventy years." -NORMAN RAMSEY, NOBEL LAUREATE IN PHYSICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
This collection of thirteen essays on American literature and culture defines and examines a gothic tradition in frontier writing. As the imaginative border between the known and the unknown, the frontier subject has provided a bridge to gothic domains and has been used by writers from every period in American history to explore social, ethnic, and gender frontiers, as well as frontiers of art and language. The frontier gothic world, for all of its ambiguity and ambivalence, is nevertheless immanent, palpable, and undeniably present, and it impinges significantly upon the conventional world, forcing that world to change, to adapt, to transform itself or be destroyed. The essays consider cano...
Taiwan’s status as an island surrounded by powerful nation states has forced upon it a history of permeable borders and an ever fluctuating cultural subjectivity. Originally inhabited by Austronesian tribal peoples, the island has over the centuries fallen under the political, economic, and cultural influences of the Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese occupiers. Globalization has further transformed and complicated Taiwan’s vistas of political reforms, cultural productions, and ethnic re-composition. Such gradual but radical transformation has, in countless ways, encouraged the nation-state identity and identification to vacillate between insularism and globalization. This collection ...
American Gothic literature inherited many time-worn tropes from its English Gothic precursor, along with a core preoccupation: anxiety about power and property. Yet the transatlantic journey left its mark on the genre--the English ghostly setting becomes the wilderness haunted by spectral Indians. The aristocratic villain is replaced by the striving, independent young man. The dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans adds urgency to traditional Gothic anxieties about possession. The unchanging role of woman in early Gothic narratives parallels the status of American women, even after the Revolution. Twentieth-century Gothic works offer inclusion to previously silent voices, including immigrant writers with their own cultural traditions. The 21st century unleashes the zombie horde--the latest incarnation of the voracious American.
The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture argues that complex and often negative initial responses of early European settlers continue to influence American horror and gothic narratives to this day. The book undertakes a detailed analysis of key literary and filmic texts situated within consideration of specific contexts.
Offering a variety of critical approaches to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, this collection provides a transnational view of the emergence and flowering of the Gothic. The essays expand on now well-known approaches to the Gothic (such as those that concentrate exclusively on race, gender, or nation) by focusing on international issues: religious traditions, social reform, economic and financial pitfalls, manifest destiny and expansion, changing concepts of nationhood, and destabilizing moments of empire-building. By examining a wide array of Gothic texts, including novels, drama, and poetry, the contributors present the Gothic not as a peripheral, marginal genre, ...
A careful and meticulous study of the Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature. I.O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature, Vol. 1
In the context of the current explosion of interest in Gothic literature and popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores for the first time the rich and long-standing relationship between war and the Gothic. Critics have described the global Seven Year’s War as the "crucible" from which the Gothic genre emerged in the eighteenth century. Since then, the Gothic has been a privileged mode for representing violence and extreme emotions and situations. Covering the period from the American Civil War to the War on Terror, this collection examines how the Gothic has provided writers an indispensable toolbox for narrating, critiquing, and representing real and fictional ...
Dirty Words in "Deadwood" showcases literary analyses of the Deadwood television series by leading western American literary critics. Whereas previous reaction to the series has largely addressed the question of historical accuracy rather than intertextuality or literary complexity, Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi's edited volume brings a much-needed perspective to Deadwood's representation of the frontier West. As Graulich observes in her introduction: "With its emotional coherence, compelling characterizations, compressed structural brilliance, moral ambiguity, language experiments, interpretation of the past, relevance to the present, and engagement with its literary forebears, Deadwood is an aesthetic triumph as historical fiction and, like much great literature, makes a case for the humanistic value of storytelling." From previously unpublished interviews with series creator David Milch to explorations of sexuality, disability, cinematic technique, and western narrative, this collection focuses on Deadwood as a series ultimately about the imagination, as a verbal and visual construct, and as a literary masterpiece that richly rewards close analysis and interpretation.
We live near the edge—whether in a settlement at the core of the Rockies, a gated community tucked into the wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, a silicon culture emerging in the suburbs, or, in the future, homesteading on a terraformed Mars. In Imagined Frontiers, urban historian and popular culture scholar Carl Abbott looks at the work of American artists who have used novels, film, television, maps, and occasionally even performance art to explore these frontiers—the metropolitan frontier of suburban development, the classic continental frontier of American settlement, and the yet unrealized frontiers beyond Earth. Focusing on writers and artists working during the past half-century, ...