The poems in The Gentle Art, a compelling new collection from William Wenthe, move between the life of the painter James McNeill Whistler and a poetic version of the author, who is at once inspired and disturbed by Whistler. The present-day author sheds light on Whistler's artistic vocation and the beauty of his paintings, most notably the liminal London riverscapes that he named Nocturnes, yet recoils at the cost of Whistler's devotion to art: lovers abandoned, friends turned into enemies, his own children given away to adoption. Creating a kind of dual biography, Wenthe grapples with feelings of admiration and disaffection toward Whistler as he tries to perform his own roles as parent, partner, and poet. While some of the poems are narrative, their overall effect is associative--two lives superimposed in a double exposure, with attention to what the contrast of two centuries, the nineteenth and the twenty-first, reveals about the relationship of art to money, class, and politics.
A Girl's Life in New Orleans presents the diary of Ella Grunewald, an upper-middle-class teenager in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Grunewald, the daughter of one of the Crescent City's leading music dealers, used her journal to record the major events of her day-to-day life, documenting family, friendships, schooling, musical education, and social activities. Her entries frequently describe illness, death, and other tragedies. Though attentive to the city's classical music scene, Grunewald also recounts theater shows, Carnival balls and parades, Catholic religious observances, and the World's Fair that the city hosted in 1884. Expertly annotated and introduced by Hans Rasmussen, Grunewald's journal is a rare window on the life of a young woman in the South between 1884 and 1886. Adding depth to that account, Rasmussen includes a shorter journal Grunewald kept of her family's travels in Italy and Germany in the spring of 1890. In it, she describes visits to Catholic churches, museums, Roman ruins, and other tourist attractions. Tragically, Grunewald contracted malaria during the latter part of the journey and died overseas at age twenty-two.
Never in human history has travel been so accessible to so many. But--amid an escalating climate crisis that threatens the homes of vulnerable people across the world--has the human cost of trekking the globe become too high? Paul Lindholdt links firsthand narratives with research about the travel trade, telling stories of his reluctant voyages while arguing that carbon-intensive trips abroad may be offset if adventurers come to know and love the landscapes closer to home. Tourism may be the planet's largest industry, but Interrogating Travel advises readers to stay mindful of the consequences of their journeys, whether visiting local getaways or some of Earth's most remote locations.
In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the clichés of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as "the fight for freedom," "revenue enhancement," and "service the target," designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade. Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political clichés obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it. This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.
In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.
A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written is a bilingual anthology of poetry written by fifteen Venezuelan poets who are currently residing in Chile. Edited and translated by David M. Brunson, the volume encompasses the work of young poets coming from many different circumstances. Some have already published several books, while others have just begun their careers as writers. The vast majority of the original Spanish texts appeared in books, anthologies, and magazines across Chile, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the Hispanosphere. In recent years, more than six million people have fled Venezuela in one of the world's largest mass migrations, stemming in part from an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country's backsliding into authoritarianism, brutal political repression, corruption, food and medical shortages, violent crime, hyperinflation, and the mismanagement of Venezuela's natural and financial resources, first by Hugo Chávez and presently by Nicolás Maduro. Begun during Brunson's travels in Chile amid the 2019-2020 protest movement, this dual-language collection aims to elevate the individual voices of each migrant poet, to connect them with new readers, and to enrich the body of literature available in English.
A book-length sequence of poems, Matthew Thorburn's String tells the story of a teenage boy's experiences in a time of war and its aftermath. He loses his family and friends, his home and the life he knew, but survives to tell his story. Written in the boy's fractured, echoing voice--in lines that are frequently enjambed and use almost no punctuation--String embodies his trauma and confusion in a poetic sequence that is part lullaby, part nightmare, but always a music that is uniquely his.
David G. Haglund's Sister Republics tells the story of the unique relationship between the United States and its first ally, France. Historians and political scientists have characterized interactions between the two countries in the spheres of security and defense policy in radically different ways: either the two comport themselves in a highly cooperative fashion, befitting their status as old allies and steadfast friends, or they act as bitter rivals, revealing their alliance to be at best dysfunctional and at worst destructive. Haglund uses a fresh approach to reconcile these divergent positions, examining the Franco-American bond through the prism of strategic culture. In doing so, he reveals the cultural factors that have contributed to the suboptimal relationship between the two nations.
Jenny Molberg's third collection of poetry, The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Drawing inspiration from true crime investigations and artifacts, including Frances Glessner Lee's crime scene dioramas and the tragic aftermaths of two serial killers who preyed upon women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Molberg probes a cultural obsession with violence that performs active erasure of victims' lives. By engaging with historical texts through a personal lens, she sheds light on survivors who do not find justice and looks toward a future of positive systemic reformation.
Popular entertainment in antebellum Cincinnati ran the gamut from high culture to shows barely above the level of the tawdry. Among the options for those seeking entertainment in the summer of 1856 was the display of a "Wild Woman," purportedly a young woman captured while living a feral life beyond the frontier. The popular exhibit, which featured a silent, underdressed woman chained to a bed, was almost assuredly a hoax. Local activist women, however, used their influence to prompt a judge to investigate the display. The court employed eleven doctors, who forcibly subdued and examined the woman before advising that she be admitted to an insane asylum. In his riveting analysis of this remarkable episode in antebellum American history, Michael D. Pierson describes how people in different political parties and sections of the country reacted to the exhibit. Specifically, he uses the lens of the Wild Woman display to explore the growing cultural divisions between the North and the South in 1856, especially the differing gender ideologies of the northern Republican Party and the more southern focused Democrats. In addition, Pierson shows how the treatment of the Wild Woman of Cincinnati prompted an increasing demand for women's political and social empowerment at a time when the country allowed for the display of a captive female without evidence that she had granted consent.
Moving effortlessly from Virginia to Italy and beyond, Ron Smith's new volume responds with a range of emotions from humor to horror and with a variety of forms from the sonnet to visually expressive organic shapes. The book's forty-three pieces gather themselves into three flights that hover above and touch down among the politics of memory and the psychology of beauty. With inspiration drawn from memoir, myth, history, fiction, and the visual arts, That Beauty in the Trees presents, ponders, and sometimes judges the actions, fates, and aesthetics of not only the author's friends and family but also legendary and historical figures, including Achilles, Catullus, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, H.D., Ezra Pound, and many more.
Titled after one of the side effects of antidepressants, Unusually Grand Ideas is a poignant account of clinical depression and the complications it introduces to marriage and fatherhood. James Davis May's poems describe mental illness with nuance, giving a full account of the darkness but also the flashes of hope, love, and even humor that lead toward healing. In pieces ranging from spare lyrical depictions of pain to discursive meditations that argue for hope, May searches for meaning by asking the difficult but important questions that both trouble and sustain us.
The reach of Divine Ratios is global, ranging from Tang Dynasty China and the Florentine Renaissance to contemporary Baltimore, post-World War II Berlin, and the landscapes of the Mountain West. The speed and mobility evoked in this new collection by Jacqueline Osherow are not only physical--a traveler's movement in a crowded, thrilling world--but imaginative, and its poetic idiom is no less varied, as a breezy conversational tone serves as a counterpoint to traditional form. With striking juxtapositions of natural and cultural wonders, this enrapturing volume asks, what is the right proportion--or "ratio"--for living in a world of such splendors, horrors, and possibilities?
"Carl V. Harris's Segregation in the New South explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama, a critical southern industrial city. In the 1870s, African Americans in Birmingham were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery's old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites-elite and non-elite alike-worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the slave South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham's founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris's history. From the beginning of Reconstruction, southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans-the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. Harris's interpretation emphasizes the importance, even in early Reconstruction, of the white doctrine that Black freedpeople were inherently inferior, had inherited the abysmally low social status of slaves, and had to be rigorously excluded from social fellowship and social institutions. In the process, he reveals, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the post-Civil War South. Harris's study draws on an extensive body of research in social psychology rarely utilized by historians, including the creation of group boundaries that illuminate the social construction of races. This model is dynamic, revealing how groups develop and evolve through encounters with other groups. Using this methodology, Harris explores segregation within the social core of southern society, probing the motivations of whites who devised Jim Crow, identifying and assessing the relative importance of transactional versus socio-emotional factors in the origins of discrimination, and discussing the reasons for the prolonged survival of Jim Crow"--
"Norman Mailer at 100 celebrates the author's centennial in 2023 and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of his bestselling debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, by illustrating how Mailer remains a still provocative presence in American letters. Novelist and Mailer scholar Robert J. Begiebing lays out the extent to which the polymath author's work makes vital contributions to the larger American literary landscape from the debates of the nation's founders, to the traditions of western romanticism, and to the whole juggernaut of twentieth-century modernism. The book presents six critical essays, two creative dialogues featuring Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway, and Begiebing's own interview with Mailer from 1983 on his Brooklyn boyhood, his Harvard years, and the composition of his novel Ancient Evenings. Each piece pairs Mailer with a critical interlocutor whose work offers telling revelations about his ideas and art, among them Hemingway, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Jung, Kate Millett, Joan Didion, and the historian Joseph Ellis. These pairings open up discussions of literature and politics encompassing war novels, Jungian self-analysis, second wave feminism and the women's liberation movement, the fragmentation and roiling revolt of the mid-1960s, the search for self-knowledge and inner truth, and how economic inequity and foreign policy can challenge the fundamentals of American democracy. Norman Mailer at 100 presents a new path into the author's life and work by encouraging a reconsideration of his career from his debut novel to his final books in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, underscoring the potential for finding in his work a new pertinence for the challenges of today"--
Collects and annotates a unique and little-known body of Civil War literature: narrative sketches, accounts, and poetry by veterans who lost the use of their right arms due to wounds sustained during the conflict and who later competed in left-handed penmanship contests in 1865 and 1866.
Features ten in-depth essays that provide fresh, diverse perspectives on Kate Chopin's first novel, At Fault. The essays in this volume provide multiple approaches for understanding this complex work, with particular attention to the dynamics of the post-Reconstruction era.
Explores the epistemological possibilities of the 'Black world' paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations.
The final year of the Civil War witnessed a profound transformation in the practice of modern warfare, a shift that produced unprecedented consequences. Steven Sodergren examines the transition to trench warfare, the lengthy campaigns of attrition that resulted, and how these new realities affected the mindset and morale of Union soldiers.
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