Böcker av Karen Chase

A collection of essays full of startling directness, fearlessness, and surprise.   Filled with profound reflections and snapshots from the past, Karen Chase's History is Embarrassing weaves together threads from one single life-a girl suffering from polio, a poet, a Jewish woman, a writer, and a painter. Like Chase, the characters who populate these essays are outsiders-undercover cops, a gay couple in 1500s India, bear poachers, psychiatric patients, and even a president-each a meaningful part of history. Divided into three parts-histories, pleasures, and horrors-History is Embarrassing is an assortment of thought-provoking essays that are sure to resonate with many readers.

A collection of power and humor in earthy eroticism, invoking both the fever and hope in wakeful dreams. A bold work of the elegiac past and the visceral present converging in provocative imagery. There is often an undercurrent of longing in Chase's poems--the longing of hunger, of sex, of unfinished business with the dead. Central to the collection is the title poem, a spiraling nightmare that explores the messy and terrifying commingling of religion, death and history's unpardonable sins.

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.