front cover of Interviews with American Composers
Interviews with American Composers
Barney Childs in Conversation
Barney Childs. Edited by Virginia Anderson
University of Illinois Press, 2022
In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others.

Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music.

Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.

[more]

front cover of Interwar Itineraries
Interwar Itineraries
Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing
Emily O. Wittman
Amherst College Press, 2022
How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and “authentic” experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter.

“This book offers a valuable account of literary activity in a genre still inadequately covered in literary-critical history. Emily Witt- man organizes her material through pairings and contextualizing that are instructive and illuminating and often exciting . . . This is comparative literature at its best.” —Vincent Sherry, Washington University
[more]

logo for University of Wisconsin Press
Intimate Communities
Representation and Social Transformation in Women's College Fiction, 1895–1910
Sherrie A. Inness
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
The many popular representations of student life at women’s colleges produced in the United States during the Progressive Era are examined. The college woman was described and defined in a period when women’s higher education was still socially suspect.
    While other scholars have argued that the Progressive Era was the “golden age” for women’s single-sex education, pointing to the many positive depictions of the women’s college student, Inness suggests that these representations actually helped to perpetuate the status quo and did little to advance women’s social rights.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Intimate Subjects
Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age
Simeon Koole
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An insightful history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain told through a single sense: touch.
 
When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present.
 
Intimate Subjects takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge.
 
With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.
 
[more]

front cover of Intimations
Intimations
The Cinema of Wojciech Has
Annette Insdorf
Northwestern University Press, 2017
In this first study in English of a master of Polish cinema, Annette Insdorf explores Has’s thirteen feature films with the same deep insight of her groundbreaking book on Krzysztof Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances (Northwestern, 2013).
 
Wojciech Has’s films are still less known outside of his native Poland than those of his countrymen Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. Yet thanks to his singular vision, many critics rank Has among the masters of world cinema. Some of his movies have developed a cult following, notably The Saragossa Manuscript, the favorite film of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, which has been praised by directors such as Luis Buñuel, Francis Ford Coppola, and Roman Polanski.
 
Has’s films reveal the inner lives of his characters, which he portrays by giving free rein to his own wildly creative imagination. In addition toThe Saragossa Manuscript, his diverse and innovative filmography includes The Hourglass Sanatorium, a vividly surreal depiction of Hassidic life in Poland between the world wars; The Noose, a stark poetic drama about a lucid alcoholic who knows he will not be able to kick the habit; and How to Be Loved, in which an actress remembers her wartime past.
 
Has made disparate but formally striking movies infused with European strains of existentialism and the avant-garde. With many of his films being restored and rereleased, new generations of film lovers are discovering his artistic genius. Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has is the definitive guide in English to his work.
 
[more]

front cover of Into Performance
Into Performance
Japanese Women Artists in New York
Yoshimoto, Midori
Rutgers University Press, 2005

The 1960s was a time of incredible freedom and exploration in the art world, particularly in New York City, which witnessed the explosion of New Music, Happenings, Fluxus, New Dance, pop art, and minimalist art. Also notable during this period, although often overlooked, is the inordinate amount of revolutionary art that was created by women.

Into Performance fills a critical gap in both American and Japanese art history as it brings to light the historical significance of five women artists-Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Shigeko Kubota. Unusually courageous and self-determined, they were among the first Japanese women to leave their country-and its male-dominated, conservative art world-to explore the artistic possibilities in New York. They not only benefited from the New York art scene, however, they played a major role in the development of international performance and intermedia art by bridging avant garde movements in Tokyo and New York.

This book traces the pioneering work of these five women artists and the socio-cultural issues that shaped their careers. Into Performance also explores the transformation of these artists' lifestyle from traditionally confined Japanese women to internationally active artists. Yoshimoto demonstrates how their work paved the way for younger Japanese women artists who continue to seek opportunities in the West today.

[more]

front cover of Into the Light of Things
Into the Light of Things
The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage
George J. Leonard
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In this sweeping revision of avant-garde history, John Cage takes his rightful place as Wordsworth's great and final heir. George Leonard traces a direct line back from Cage, Pop, and Conceptual Art through the Futurists to Whitman, Emerson, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, showing how the art of everyday objects, often thought an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, actually began as far back as 1800.

In recovering the links between such seemingly disparate figures, Leonard transforms our understanding of modern culture.

Selected by the American Library Association's journal, Choice, as "one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year"

"Leonard's book is a fine example of interdisciplinary studies. He shifts focus persuasively from art theory to literature to religious thought and biography, making his method seem the natural mode of inquiry into culture."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Provocative and illuminating."—Library Journal

"Highly stimulating, impassioned."—Publisher's Weekly

"A rich and rewarding study written in a clear and accessible style with excellent references and a very useful index. Highly recommended."—Choice
[more]

front cover of Intricate Thicket
Intricate Thicket
Reading Late Modernist Poetries
Mark Scroggins
University of Alabama Press, 2015
In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.
 
In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.
 
In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.
 
While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Introspection and Contemporary Poetry
Alan Williamson
Harvard University Press, 1984
In this bold defense of so-called confessional poetry, Alan Williamson shows us that much of the best writing of the past twenty-five years is about the sense of being or having a self, a knowable personal identity. The difficulties posed by this subject help explain the fertility of contemporary poetic experiment—from the jaggedness of the later work of Robert Lowell to the montage—like methods of John Ashbery, from the visual surrealism of James Wright and W. S. Merwin to the radical plainness of Frank Bidart. Williamson examines these and other poets from a psychological perspective, giving an especially striking reading of Sylvia Plath.
[more]

front cover of Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
Invasion of the Mind Snatchers
Television's Conquest of America in the Fifties
Eric Burns
Temple University Press, 2010

When the first television was demonstrated in 1927, a headline in The New York Times read, “Like a Photo Come to Life.” It was a momentous occasion. But the power of television wasn’t fully harnessed until the 1950s, when the medium was, as Eric Burns says, “At its most preoccupying, its most life-altering.” And Burns, a former NBC News correspondent who is an Emmy-winner for his broadcast writing, knows about the impact of television.

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers chronicles the influence of television that was watched daily by the baby boomer generation. As kids became spellbound by Howdy Doody and The Ed Sullivan Show, Burns reveals, they often acted out their favorite programs. Likewise, they purchased the merchandise being promoted by performers, and became fascinated by the personalities they saw on screen, often emulating their behavior. It was the first generation raised by TV and Burns looks at both the promise of broadcasting as espoused by the inventors, and how that promise was both redefined and lost by the corporations who helped to spread the technology.

Yet Burns also contextualizes the social, cultural, and political events that helped shape the Fifties—from Sputnik and the Rosenberg trial to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare.  In doing so, he charts the effect of television on politics, religion, race, and sex, and how the medium provided a persuasive message to the young, impressionable viewers.

[more]

front cover of Inventing Black Women
Inventing Black Women
African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000
Ajuan Maria Mance
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
Inventing Black Women fills important gaps in our understanding of how African American women poets have resisted those conventional notions of gender and race that limit the visibility of Black female subjects. The first historical and thematic survey of African American women's poetry, this book examines the key developments that have shaped the growing body of poems by and about Black women over the nearly 125 years since the end of slavery and Reconstruction, as it offers incisive readings of individual works by important poets such as Alice B. Neal, Maggie Pogue Johnson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and many others.

Ajuan Maria Mance establishes that the history of African American women's poetry revolves around the struggle of the Black female poet against two marginalizing forces: the widespread association of womanhood with the figure of the middle-class, white female; and the similar association of Blackness with the figure of the African American male. In so doing, she looks closely at the major trends in Black women's poetry during each of four critical moments in African American literary history: the post- Reconstruction era from 1877 to 1910; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; the Black Arts Movement from 1965 to 1975; and the late twentieth century from 1975 to 2000.

[more]

front cover of Inventing High and Low
Inventing High and Low
Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain
Stephanie Sieburth
Duke University Press, 1994
Dire word of the cultural threat of the lowbrow goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, and yet, Stephanie Sieburth suggests, no division between "high" and "low" culture will stand up to logical scrutiny. Why, then, does the opposition persist? In this book Sieburth questions the terms of this perennial debate and uncovers the deep cultural, economic, and psychological tensions that lead each generation to reinvent the distinction between high and low. She focuses on Spain, where this opposition plays a special role in notions of cultural development and where leading writers have often made the relation of literature to mass culture the theme of their novels.
Choosing two historical moments of sweeping material and cultural change in Spanish history, Sieburth reads two novels from the 1880s (by Benito Pérez Galdós) and two from the 1970s (by Juan Goytisolo and Carmen Martín Gaite) as fictional theories about the impact of modernity on culture and politics. Her analysis reveals that the high/low division in the cultural sphere reinforces other kinds of separations—between social classes or between men and women—dear to the elite but endangered by progress. This tension, she shows, is particularly evident in Spain, where modernization has been a contradictory and uneven process, rarely accompanied by political freedom, and where consumerism and mass culture coexist uneasily with older ways of life.
Weaving together a wide spectrum of diverse material, her work will be of interest to readers concerned with Spanish history and literature, literary theory, popular culture, and the relations between politics, economics, gender, and the novel.
[more]

front cover of Inventing Indigenism
Inventing Indigenism
Francisco Laso's Image of Modern Peru
Natalia Majluf
University of Texas Press, 2021

2023 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation

A fascinating account of the modern reinvention of the image of the Indian in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, seen through the work of Peruvian painter Francisco Laso.


One of the outstanding painters of the nineteenth century, Francisco Laso (1823–1869) set out to give visual form to modern Peru. His solemn and still paintings of indigenous subjects were part of a larger project, spurred by writers and intellectuals actively crafting a nation in the aftermath of independence from Spain. In this book, at once an innovative account of modern indigenism and the first major monograph on Laso, Natalia Majluf explores the rise of the image of the Indian in literature and visual culture. Reading Laso’s works through a broad range of sources, Majluf traces a decisive break in a long history of representations of indigenous peoples that began with the Spanish conquest. She ties this transformation to the modern concept of culture, which redefined both the artistic field and the notion of indigeneity. As an abstraction produced through indigenist discourse, an icon of authenticity, and a densely racialized cultural construct, the Indian would emerge as a central symbol of modern Andean nationalisms.

Inventing Indigenism brings the work and influence of this extraordinary painter to the forefront as it offers a broad perspective on the dynamics of art and visual culture in nineteenth-century Latin America.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Inventing Ireland
The Literature of the Modern Nation
Declan Kiberd
Harvard University Press, 1996

Just as Ireland has produced many brilliant writers in the past century, so these writers have produced a new Ireland. In a book unprecedented in its scope and approach, Declan Kiberd offers a vivid account of the personalities and texts, English and Irish alike, that reinvented the country after centuries of colonialism. The result is a major literary history of modern Ireland, combining detailed and daring interpretations of literary masterpieces with assessments of the wider role of language, sport, clothing, politics, and philosophy in the Irish revival.

In dazzling comparisons with the experience of other postcolonial peoples, the author makes many overdue connections. Rejecting the notion that artists such as Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett became modern to the extent that they made themselves "European," he contends that the Irish experience was a dramatic instance of experimental modernity and shows how the country's artists blazed a trail that led directly to the magic realism of a García Márquez or a Rushdie. Along the way, he reveals the vital importance of Protestant values and the immense contributions of women to the enterprise. Kiberd's analysis of the culture is interwoven with sketches of the political background, bringing the course of modern Irish literature into sharp relief against a tragic history of conflict, stagnation, and change.

Inventing Ireland restores to the Irish past a sense of openness that it once had and that has since been obscured by narrow-gauge nationalists and their polemical revisionist critics. In closing, Kiberd outlines an agenda for Irish Studies in the next century and detects the signs of a second renaissance in the work of a new generation of authors and playwrights, from Brian Friel to the younger Dublin writers.

[more]

front cover of Inventing Modern Adolescence
Inventing Modern Adolescence
The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America
Sarah E. Chinn
Rutgers University Press, 2008
The 1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a distinct "teenage culture" in America. But did this highly visible era of free love and rock 'n' roll really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing Modern Adolescence Sarah E. Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She argues that the concept of the "generation gap"—a stereotypical complaint against American teens—actually originated with the division between immigrant parents and their American-born or -raised children. Melding a uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior, these young people formed a new identity that provided the framework for today's concepts of teenage lifestyle.Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.
[more]

front cover of Inventing Paradise
Inventing Paradise
The Greek Journey, 1937-47
Edmund Keeley
Northwestern University Press, 2002
In the looming shadow of dictatorship and imminent war, George Seferis and George Katsimbalis welcomed Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell to their homeland. Together, as they spent evenings in tavernas, explored the Peloponnese, and considered the meaning of Greek life and freedom and art, they seemed to be inventing paradise. This blend of memoir, criticism, and storytelling takes readers on a journey into the poetry, friendships, and politics of an extraordinary time.
[more]

front cover of Inventing the Public Enemy
Inventing the Public Enemy
The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934
David E. Ruth
University of Chicago Press, 1996
In this richly detailed account of mass media images, David Ruth looks at Al Capone and other "invented" gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s. The subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, scores of novels, and hundreds of Hollywood movies, the gangster was a compelling figure for Americans preoccupied with crime and the social turmoil it symbolized. Ruth shows that the media gangster was less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what would sell.

We see efficient criminal executives demonstrating the multifarious uses of organization; dapper, big-spending gangsters highlighting the promises and perils of the emerging consumer society; and gunmen and molls guiding an uncertain public through the shifting terrain of modern gender roles. In this fascinating study, Ruth reveals how the public enemy provides a far-ranging critique of modern culture.

[more]

front cover of The Invention of Madness
The Invention of Madness
State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China
Emily Baum
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Throughout most of history, in China the insane were kept within the home and treated by healers who claimed no specialized knowledge of their condition. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, psychiatric ideas and institutions began to influence longstanding beliefs about the proper treatment for the mentally ill. In The Invention of Madness, Emily Baum traces a genealogy of insanity from the turn of the century to the onset of war with Japan in 1937, revealing the complex and convoluted ways in which “madness” was transformed in the Chinese imagination into “mental illness.”

Focusing on typically marginalized historical actors, including municipal functionaries and the urban poor, The Invention of Madness shifts our attention from the elite desire for modern medical care to the ways in which psychiatric discourses were implemented and redeployed in the midst of everyday life. New meanings and practices of madness, Baum argues, were not just imposed on the Beijing public but continuously invented by a range of people in ways that reflected their own needs and interests. Exhaustively researched and theoretically informed, The Invention of Madness is an innovative contribution to medical history, urban studies, and the social history of twentieth-century China.
[more]

logo for The Ohio State University Press
INVISIBLE AUTHOR
LAST ESSAYS
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE
The Ohio State University Press, 2002

logo for Intellect Books
Invisible Country
Four Polish Plays
Edited and Translated by Teresa Murjas
Intellect Books, 2012

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century marked a tumultuous period in Poland’s history, with artists and writers working under difficult sociopolitical conditions. This book contains the first English- language translations of four plays by Polish writers in the modernist tradition: Snow by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, In a Small House by Tadeusz Rittner, Ashanti by Wlodzimierz Perzynski, and All the Same by Leopold Staff. Well-chosen and carefully annotated, these translations provide important insight into this underexplored area of Polish dramatic history and practice and facilitate greater understanding of its role in the development of European theater. Also included is a broad discussion of the characteristics of translation for the theater.

[more]

front cover of Invisible Darkness
Invisible Darkness
Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen
Charles R. Larson
University of Iowa Press, 1993

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers "disappeared" after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer's troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen's life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer's connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major i mpact on African American literary studies.

[more]

front cover of Invisible Hawkeyes
Invisible Hawkeyes
African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era
Lena M. Hill and Michael D. Hill
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Between the 1930s and 1960s, the University of Iowa sought to assert its modernity, cosmopolitanism, and progressivism through an increased emphasis on the fine and performing arts and athletics. This enhancement coincided with a period when an increasing number of African American students arrived at the university, from both within and outside of the state, seeking to take advantage of its relatively liberal racial relations and rising artistic prestige. The presence of accomplished African American students performing in musical concerts, participating in visual art exhibitions, acting on stage, publishing literature, and competing on sports fields forced white students, instructors, and administrators to confront their undeniable intellect and talent. Unlike the work completed in traditional academic units, these students’ contributions to the university community were highly visible and burst beyond the walls of their individual units and primary spheres of experience to reach a much larger audience on campus and in the city and nation beyond the university’s boundaries.

By examining the quieter collisions between Iowa’s polite midwestern progressivism and African American students’ determined ambition, Invisible Hawkeyes focuses attention on both local stories and their national implications. By looking at the University of Iowa and a smaller midwestern college town like Iowa City, this collection reveals how fraught moments of interracial collaboration, meritocratic advancement, and institutional insensitivity deepen our understanding of America’s painful conversion into a diverse republic committed to racial equality.

SUBJECTS COVERED
Edison Holmes Anderson, George Overall Caldwell, Elizabeth Catlett, Fanny Ellison, Oscar Anderson Fuller, Michael Harper, James Alan McPherson, Herbert Franklin Mells, Herbert Nipson, Thomas Pawley, William Oscar Smith, Mitchell Southall, Margaret Walker
 
CONTRIBUTORS
Dora Martin Berry, Richard M. Breaux, Kathleen A. Edwards, Lois Eichaker, Brian Hallstoos, Lena M. Hill, Michael D. Hill, Dianna Penny, Donald W. Tucker, Ted Wheeler 
[more]

front cover of Invisible Immigrants
Invisible Immigrants
The English in Canada since 1945
Marilyn Barber
University of Manitoba Press, 2015

front cover of The Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop
origins, emergence & growth
Stephen Wilbers
University of Iowa Press, 1980

front cover of Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
By Ali Gheissari
University of Texas Press, 1997

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Iranian intellectuals have been preoccupied by issues of political and social reform, Iran's relation with the modern West, and autocracy, or arbitrary rule. Drawing from a close reading of a broad array of primary sources, this book offers a thematic account of the Iranian intelligentsia from the Constitutional movement of 1905 to the post-1979 revolution.

Ali Gheissari shows how in Iran, as in many other countries, intellectuals have been the prime mediators between the forces of tradition and modernity and have contributed significantly to the formation of the modern Iranian self image. His analysis of intellectuals' response to a number of fundamental questions, such as nationalism, identity, and the relation between Islam and modern politics, sheds new light on the factors that led to the Iranian Revolution—the twentieth century's first major departure from Western political ideals—and helps explain the complexities surrounding the reception of Western ideologies in the Middle East.

[more]

front cover of Iranians in Texas
Iranians in Texas
Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity
By Mohsen M. Mobasher
University of Texas Press, 2012

Thousands of Iranians fled their homeland when the 1978–1979 revolution ended the fifty-year reign of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Some fled to Europe and Canada, while others settled in the United States, where anti-Iranian sentiment flared as the hostage crisis unfolded. For those who chose America, Texas became the fourth-largest settlement area, ultimately proving to be a place of paradox for any Middle Easterner in exile. Iranians in Texas culls data, interviews, and participant observations in Iranian communities in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to reveal the difficult, private world of cultural pride, religious experience, marginality, culture clashes, and other aspects of the lives of these immigrants.

Examining the political nature of immigration and how the originating and receiving countries shape the prospects of integration, Mohsen Mobasher incorporates his own experience as a Texas scholar born in Iran. Tracing current anti-Muslim sentiment to the Iranian hostage crisis, two decades before 9/11, he observes a radically negative shift in American public opinion that forced thousands of Iranians in the United States to suddenly be subjected to stigmatization and viewed as enemies. The book also sheds light on the transformation of the Iranian family in exile and some of the major challenges that second-generation Iranians face in their interactions with their parents.

Bringing to life a unique population in the context of global politics, Iranians in Texas overturns stereotypes while echoing diverse voices.

[more]

front cover of Ireland's New Worlds
Ireland's New Worlds
Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922
Malcolm Campbell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
In the century between the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish Civil War, more than seven million Irish men and women left their homeland to begin new lives abroad. While the majority settled in the United States, Irish emigrants dispersed across the globe, many of them finding their way to another “New World,” Australia.
    Ireland’s New Worlds is the first book to compare Irish immigrants in the United States and Australia. In a profound challenge to the national histories that frame most accounts of the Irish diaspora, Malcolm Campbell highlights the ways that economic, social, and cultural conditions shaped distinct experiences for Irish immigrants in each country, and sometimes in different parts of the same country. From differences in the level of hostility that Irish immigrants faced to the contrasting economies of the United States and Australia, Campbell finds that there was much more to the experiences of Irish immigrants than their essential “Irishness.” America’s Irish, for example, were primarily drawn into the population of unskilled laborers congregating in cities, while Australia’s Irish, like their fellow colonialists, were more likely to engage in farming. Campbell shows how local conditions intersected with immigrants’ Irish backgrounds and traditions to create surprisingly varied experiences in Ireland’s new worlds. 
 
Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

“Well conceived and thoroughly researched . . . . This clearly written, thought-provoking work fulfills the considerable ambitions of comparative migration studies.”—Choice
 
 
[more]

front cover of Iris Murdoch Connected
Iris Murdoch Connected
Critical Essays on Her Fiction and Philosophy
Mark Luprecht
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
This volume compiles twelve essays that reflect the surging interest in the Irish-born author Iris Murdoch as both a writer and philosopher. Beyond her impressive body of philosophical works, Murdoch produced twenty-six novels, several plays, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays during her multifaceted career. The prolific novelist-philosopher has drawn attention from scholars in multiple disciplines, which reflects her range of interests as well as the accessibility of her work from varied perspectives.
            The first part of the collection focuses on Murdoch’s literary works and approach to art. Frances White’s opening essay examines the influence of Virginia Woolf on Murdoch, while Elaine Morley deals with attention and “unselfing” in the writer’s works. Much can be learned from Murdoch’s letters, as Miles Leeson and Anne Rowe demonstrate in their respective contributions. David James explores Murdoch’s influence on fellow Irish writer John Banville. Finally, Pamela Osborn and Rivka Isaacson offer vastly different perspectives on Murdoch’s fourth novel, The Bell, in the two essays that round out the literature-centric half of the collection.
            Part two highlights concepts in and approaches to Murdoch’s philosophical thought. Tony Milligan writes of the meanings of puritanism and truthfulness in Murdoch’s philosophical writings and essays and in her novel A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Julián Jiménez Heffernan’s contribution centers on Murdoch’s confrontation with the notion of contingency. Using the philosophical lens of metaxu, Kate Larson suggests a new approach to Murdoch’s thought by looking at it in relation to that of Simone Weil. Paul Martens locates the similarities of structure in Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Lastly, Matthew Martinuk delves into the affinity of thought between Charles Taylor and Murdoch.
            By examining both Murdoch’s influences and those she has influenced, Iris Murdoch Connected constructs complex new understandings of this formidable writer’s vast contributions to literature and philosophy.
[more]

logo for Intellect Books
Irish Drama in Poland
Staging and Reception, 1900-2000
Barry Keane
Intellect Books, 2016
Irish Drama in Poland is the first book to broadly assess Irish drama’s impact on both Poland’s theatrical world and its cultural and literary heritage in the twentieth century. With a wide-ranging analysis—from Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, and Behan, to Wilde, Shaw, and Beckett—this engaging study explores the translation, production, and reception of Irish plays in Poland. Barry Keane presents readers with the historical and literary context for each production, allowing readers to understand the many ways Irish theater has informed Poland’s theatrical and literary heritage. Including a foreword by translation scholar Michael Cronin, Irish Drama in Poland drives home the importance of exploring intercultural contexts, allowing readers a more informed understanding of European culture and identity.
[more]

front cover of Irish Nationalists in Boston
Irish Nationalists in Boston
Catholicism and Conflict, 1900-1928
Damien Murray
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the intersection of support for Irish freedom and the principles of Catholic social justice transformed Irish ethnicity in Boston. Prior to World War I, Boston’s middle-class Irish nationalist leaders sought a rapprochement with local Yankees. However, the combined impact of the Easter 1916 Rising and the postwar campaign to free Ireland from British rule drove a wedge between leaders of the city’s two main groups. Irish-American nationalists, emboldened by the visits of Irish leader Eamon de Valera, rejected both Yankees’ support of a postwar Anglo-American alliance and the latter groups’ portrayal of Irish nationalism as a form of Bolshevism. Instead, ably assisted by Catholic Church leaders such as Cardinal William O’Connell, Boston’s Irish nationalists portrayed an independent Ireland as the greatest bulwark against the spread of socialism. As the movement’s popularity spread locally, it attracted the support not only of Irish immigrants, but also that of native-born Americans of Irish descent, including businessman, left-leaning progressives, and veterans of the women’s suffrage movement.

For a brief period after World War I, Irish-American nationalism in Boston became a vehicle for the promotion of wider democratic reform. Though the movement was unable to survive the disagreements surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, it had been a source of ethnic unity that enabled Boston’s Irish community to negotiate the challenges of the postwar years including the anti-socialist Red Scare and the divisions caused by the Boston Police Strike in the fall of 1919. Furthermore, Boston’s Irish nationalists drew heavily on Catholic Church teachings such that Irish ethnicity came to be more clearly identified with the advocacy of both cultural pluralism and the rights of immigrant and working families in Boston and America.
[more]

front cover of Irish Peasants
Irish Peasants
Violence and Political Unrest, 1780–1914
Samuel Clark
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983

"The strength of this volume cannot be conveyed by an itemisation of its contents; for what it provides is an incisive commentary on the newly-recognised landmarks of Irish agrarian history in the modern period. . . . The importance, even indispensability, of this achievement is compounded by exemplary editing."—Roy Foster, London Times Literary Supplement

"As a whole, the volume demonstrates the wealth, complexity, and sophistication of Irish rural studies. The book is essential reading for anyone involved in modern Irish history. It will also serve as an excellent introduction to this rich field for scholars of other peasant communities and all interested in problems of economic and political developments."—American Historical Review

"A milestone in the evolution of Irish social history. There is a remarkable consistency of style and standard in the essays. . . . This is truly history from the grassroots."—Timothy P. O'Neill, Studia Hibernica

[more]

front cover of Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882-1964
Irish Writers in the Irish American Press, 1882-1964
Stephen G. Butler
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Literary anthologies feature many of Ireland's most well-known authors, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Seán O'Casey, James Joyce, and Brendan Behan among them. While a number of notable scholars have contended that middle-class Irish Americans rejected or ignored this rebellious group of poets, playwrights, and novelists in favor of a conservative Catholic subculture brought over with the mass migration of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen G. Butler demonstrates that the transatlantic relationship between these figures and a segment of Irish American journalists and citizens is more complicated—and sometimes more collaborative—than previously acknowledged.

Irish Writers in the Irish American Press spans the period from Oscar Wilde's 1882 American lecture tour to the months following JFK's assassination and covers the century in which Irish American identity was shaped by immigration, religion, politics, and economic advancement. Through a close engagement with Irish American periodicals, Butler offers a more nuanced understanding of the connections between Irish literary studies and Irish American culture during this period.
[more]

front cover of Iron Valley
Iron Valley
The Transformation of the Iron Industry in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, 1802–1913
Clayton J. Ruminski
The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Youngstown, Ohio, and the surrounding Mahoning Valley supplied the iron that helped transform the United States into an industrial powerhouse in the nineteenth century. The story of the Mahoning Valley’s unorthodox rise from mid-scale iron producer to twentieth-century “Steel Valley” is a tale of innovation, stagnation, and, above all, extreme change. Located halfway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, the Mahoning Valley became a major supplier of pig iron to America’s biggest industrial regions. For much of the nineteenth century, outside consumers relied on the Valley’s pig iron, but this reliance nurtured a reluctance on the part of Youngstown iron companies to diversify or expand their production.

In Iron Valley: The Transformation of the Iron Industry in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, 1802–1913, Clayton J. Ruminski argues that Youngstown-area iron manufacturers were content to let others in the industry innovate, and only modernized when market conditions forced them to do so. Desperate to find new markets, some Youngstown iron manufacturers eventually looked toward steel and endured a rapid, but successful, industrial transformation that temporarily kept their old enterprises afloat in a rapidly evolving industry. Richly illustrated with rare photographs of Mahoning Valley ironmasters, mills, furnaces, and workers, Iron Valley sheds light on a previously underrepresented and vital region that built industrial America.

[more]

front cover of The Irony of American History
The Irony of American History
Reinhold Niebuhr
University of Chicago Press, 2008
“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama
 
Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr’s masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue. Impassioned, eloquent, and deeply perceptive, Niebuhr’s wisdom will cause readers to rethink their assumptions about right and wrong, war and peace.

 “The supreme American theologian of the twentieth century.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Times

“Niebuhr is important for the left today precisely because he warned about America’s tendency—including the left’s tendency—to do bad things in the name of idealism. His thought offers a much better understanding of where the Bush administration went wrong in Iraq.”—Kevin Mattson, The Good Society
 
Irony provides the master key to understanding the myths and delusions that underpin American statecraft. . . . The most important book ever written on US foreign policy.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, from the Introduction
[more]

front cover of The Irony of the Solid South
The Irony of the Solid South
Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865–1944
Glenn Feldman
University of Alabama Press, 2013
The Irony of the Solid South examines how the south became the “Solid South” for the Democratic Party and how that solidarity began to crack with the advent of American involvement in World War II.
 
Relying on a sophisticated analysis of secondary research—as well as a wealth of deep research in primary sources such as letters, diaries, interviews, court cases, newspapers, and other archival materials—Glenn Feldman argues in The Irony of the Solid South that the history of the solid Democratic south is actually marked by several ironies that involve a concern with the fundamental nature of southern society and culture and the central place that race and allied types of cultural conservatism have played in ensuring regional distinctiveness and continuity across time and various partisan labels. Along the way, this account has much to say about the quality and nature of the New Deal in Dixie, southern liberalism, and its fatal shortcomings.
 
Feldman focuses primarily on Alabama and race but also considers at length circumstances in the other southern states as well as insights into the uses of emotional issues other than race that have been used time and again to distract whites from their economic and material interests. Feldman explains how conservative political forces (Bourbon Democrats, Dixiecrats, Wallace, independents, and eventually the modern GOP) ingeniously fused white supremacy with economic conservatism based on the common glue of animus to the federal government. A second great melding is exposed, one that joined economic fundamentalism to the religious kind along the shared axis of antidemocratic impulses.
 
Feldman’s study has much to say about southern and American conservatism, the enduring power of cultural and emotional issues, and the modern south’s path to becoming solidly Republican.
[more]

front cover of Irony's Antics
Irony's Antics
Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition
Erica Weitzman
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Irony’s Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic and its relationship to irony in German letters.
Combining theoretical breadth with close textual analysis, Erica Weitzman shows how irony, a key term for the German romantics, reemerged in the early twentieth century from a postromantic relegation to the nonsensical and the nihilistic in a way that both rethought romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach.
Through readings of works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth against the rich history of comic theory (particularly Hegel and Freud), Weitzman traces the development of a specifically comic irony in modern German-language literature and philosophy, a play with the irony that is itself the condition for all play. She thus provides a crucial reevaluation of German literary history and offers new insights into the significance of irony and the comic from the Enlightenment to the present day.
[more]

front cover of Irrationalism
Irrationalism
Lukacs and the Marxist View of Reason
Tom Rockmore
Temple University Press, 1991

This is the first detailed study, following the recent collapse of political Marxism in Eastern Europe, of twentieth-century Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács and his position as the leading proponent of the Marxist theory of reason. Lukács's History and Class Consciousness has been called one of the three most influential philosophical works of this century, and he, the outstanding Marxist philosopher. Marxism has long suffered relative neglect in philosophical discussion as a result of its own invidious distinction between itself and the supposed irrationality of what it regards as bourgeois philosophy.

Tom Rockmore offers a uniquely detailed philosophical analysis of Lukács's entire position as a theory of reason, based on the distinction between reason and unreason, or irrationalism. The author gives special emphasis to Lukács's connection to German neo-Kantianism, particularly Lask, and on his last, unfinished work.

Rockmore begins with an account of the roots of Lukács's Marxism, followed by an in-depth analysis of his often mentioned, but still incompletely understood, seminal essay "Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat." He then traces the evolution and later demise of the distinction between reason and irrationalism in Lukács's final thought. The author thus makes available for the first time in English a strictly philosophical discussion of Georg Lukács's Marxist phase and brings consideration of his thought into the wider philosophical discussion.

[more]

front cover of Irresistible Empire
Irresistible Empire
America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe
Victoria de Grazia
Harvard University Press, 2005

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe’s bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia’s brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today.

De Grazia describes how, as America’s market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it—first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich’s command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World’s values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States’ market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome’s Spanish Steps and Paris’s Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America’s advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America’s exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

[more]

logo for University of Wisconsin Press
Irving Wallace
A Writer's Profile
John Leverence
University of Wisconsin Press, 1974

This profile of the man and the writer is an introduction to the personality behind The Chapman Report and The Fan Club. Through correspondence, diaries, manuscript annotations, interviews and other private sources, the profile reveals the man who began as a sports stringer for a Wisconsin newspaper and is now one of the world's most popular novelists.

[more]

front cover of Is It Nation Time?
Is It Nation Time?
Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism
Edited by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2002
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Black Power movement provided the dominant ideological framework through which many young, poor, and middle-class blacks made sense of their lives and articulated a political vision for their futures. The legacy of the movement is still very much with us today in the various strands of black nationalism that originated from it; we witnessed its power in the 1995 Million Man March, and we see its more ambiguous effects in the persistent antagonisms among former participants in the civil rights coalition. Yet despite the importance of the Black Power movement, very few in-depth, balanced treatments of it exist.

Is It Nation Time? gathers new and classic essays on the Black Power movement and its legacy by renowned thinkers who deal rigorously and unsentimentally with such issues as the commodification of blackness, the piety of cultural recovery, and class tensions within the movement. For anyone who wants to understand the roots of the complex political and cultural desires of contemporary black America, this will be an essential collection.

Contributors:
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Phillip Brian Harper
Gerald Horne
Robin D. G. Kelley
Wahneema Lubiano
Adolph Reed Jr.
Jeffrey Stout
Will Walker
S. Craig Watkins
Cornel West
E. Francis White
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Is There a Measure on Earth?
Foundations for a Nonmetaphysical Ethics
Werner Marx
University of Chicago Press, 1987
The search for an ethics rooted in human experience is the crux of this deeply compassionate work, here translated from the 1983 German edition. Distinguished philosopher Werner Marx provides a close reading, critique, and Weiterdenken, or "further thinking," of Martin Heidegger's later work on death, language, and poetry, which has often been dismissed as both obscure and obscurantist. In it Marx seeks, and perhaps finds, both a measure for distinguishing between good and evil and a motive for preferring the former.

The poet Hölderlin posed the question, "Is there a measure on earth?" His own answer was emphatic, "There is none," for he was convinced that the measure for man was to be found only in the domain of the heavenly beings. Such metaphysical assumptions, as well as the attempt to found ethical conduct in the nature of man as a rational being, have been rejected by many contemporary thinkers, particularly Heidegger. Yet these thinkers have not been able to provide a satisfactory alternative to metaphysical foundations of the standards for responsible human conduct.

Marx, therefore, goes beyond Heidegger in demonstrating how several of his most basic notions could be relevant to a secular morality in our age. It is death, Marx claims, that unsettles man and transforms his conduct toward his fellow man. the common experience of mortality nourishes ethical life—and leads to the measures of compassion, love, and recognition of one's fellow human beings.

"It is only on the basis of these 'traditional virtues,'" Marx writes, "that we can find a motive for averting the impending dangers which have often enough been described so vividly and convincingly."
[more]

front cover of Isa Genzken
Isa Genzken
Sculpture as World Receiver
Lisa Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2017
The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.
           
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.
[more]

front cover of Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism
Isaac Babel and the Self-Invention of Odessan Modernism
Rebecca Jane Stanton
Northwestern University Press, 2012

In what marks an exciting new critical direction, Rebecca Stanton contends that the city of Odessa—as a canonical literary image and as a kaleidoscopic cultural milieu—shaped the narrative strategies developed by Isaac Babel and his contemporaries of the Revolutionary generation. Modeling themselves on the tricksters and rogues of Odessa lore, Babel and his fellow Odessans Val­entin Kataev and Yury Olesha manipulated their literary personae through complex, playful, and often subversive negotiations of the boundary between autobiography and fiction. In so doing, they cannily took up a place prepared for them in the Russian canon and fostered modes of storytelling that both reflected and resisted the aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Stanton concludes with a rereading of Babel’s “autobiographical” stories and examines their leg­acy in post-Thaw works by Kataev, Olesha, and Konstantin Paustovsky.

[more]

front cover of Isaac Rosenberg
Isaac Rosenberg
The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Isaac Rosenberg was among the greatest poets of the First World War. The British-born son of impoversihed Russian Jews, Rosenberg fought as a private in the trenches of the Great Was and died on the Western Front in 1918 as the age of 27. In Isaac Rosenberg, Wilson examines the influence of Rosenberg's class and heritage on his writings, as well as the development of his poetic technique. She traces his maturation from his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London to art school, his travels to South Africa, and finally his harrowing service as a private in the British Army.
 
Rosenberg was also a gifted painter and this beautifully illustrated volume oncludes some hitherto inseen self-portraits, along with photogrpahs of Rosenberg and his family. Wilson's biogrpahy brings together all known Rosenberg material with a mass of important new discoveries. Isaac Rosenberg is a long-overdue consideration of a remarkable war poet.
[more]

front cover of Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative
Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative
Susan Hardy Aiken
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition.

In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre.

In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.
[more]

front cover of Isherwood in Transit
Isherwood in Transit
James J. Berg
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

New perspectives on Christopher Isherwood as a searching and transnational writer

“Perhaps I had traveled too much, left my heart in too many places,” muses the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Prater Violet (1945), which he wrote in his adopted home of Los Angeles after years of dislocation and desperation. In Isherwood in Transit, James J.Berg and Chris Freeman bring together diverse Isherwood scholars to understand the challenges this writer faced as a consequence of his travel. 

Based on a conference at the Huntington Library, where Isherwood’s recently opened papers are held, Isherwood in Transit considers the writer not as an English, continental, or American writer but as a transnational one, whose identity, politics, and beliefs were constantly transformed by global connections and engagements arising from journeys to Germany, Japan, China, and Argentina; his migration to the United States; and his conversion to Vedanta Hinduism in the 1940s.

Approaching Isherwood’s rootlessness and restlessness from various perspectives, these essays show that long after he made a new home in California and became an American citizen, Christopher Isherwood remained unsettled, although his wanderings became spiritual and personal rather than geographic.

Contributors: Barrie Jean Borich, DePaul U; Jamie Carr, Niagara U; Robert L. Caserio, Penn State U, University Park; Lisa Colletta, American U of Rome; Lois Cucullu, U of Minnesota; Jaime Harker, U of Mississippi; Carola M. Kaplan, California State U, Pomona; Calvin W. Keogh, Central European U, Budapest; Victor Marsh; Wendy Moffat, Dickinson College; Xenobe Purvis; Bidhan Roy, California State U, Los Angeles; Katharine Stevenson, U of Texas at Austin; Edmund White. 

[more]

front cover of Ishikawa Sanshir.’s Geographical Imagination
Ishikawa Sanshir.’s Geographical Imagination
Transnational Anarchism and the Reconfiguration of Everyday Life in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Nadine Willems
Leiden University Press, 2020
Antiestablishment ideas in contemporary Japan are tied closely to its recent history of capitalist development and industrialization. Activist Ishikawa Sanshiro exemplifies this idea, by merging European and Japanese thought throughout the early twentieth century. Ishikawa Sanshiro’s Geographical Imagination investigates the emergence of a strand of nonviolent anarchism and uses it to reassess the role of geographic thought in modern Japan as both a tool for political dissent and a basis for dialogue between radical thinkers and activists from the East and West. By tracing Ishikawa’s travels, intellectual interests, and real-life encounters, Nadine Willems identifies a transnational “geographical imagination” that valued ethics of cooperation in the social sphere and explored the interactions between man and nature. Additionally, this work explores anarchist activism and the role played by the practices of everyday life as a powerful force of sociopolitical change.
[more]

front cover of Islam and Popular Culture
Islam and Popular Culture
Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, Mark LeVine, and Martin Stokes
University of Texas Press, 2016

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim.

With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures
A Ziauddin Sardar Reader
Edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Gail Boxwell
Pluto Press, 2003

Ziauddin Sardar is a prolific writer and an insightful cultural commentator. His latest book, Why Do People Hate America?, has been a regular feature in bestseller lists in several countries. In the UK, he is known as a leading intellectual and his regular contributions to the Observer, the Independent and the New Statesman have brought his writings to a wide audience. As one of our most high-profile Muslim intellectuals, he has also become an increasingly important voice in the media since the events of September 11th 2001.

This is the first collection of his writings that offers a comprehensive introduction to his thought. Starting with his analysis of his own position as a British Muslim and a writer, it goes on to explore issues of Islam and cultural change, education, identity, post-modernism and the future. Drawn from a broad range of his work in scholarly journals as well as from his many books on aspects of culture and society, it includes his most frequently cited papers and makes an ideal introduction to the immense scope of his work in cultural studies.

Ziaddin Sardar is currently the editor of Third Text and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at City University, London. His books for Pluto Press include Postmodernism and the Other and Aliens R Us.

[more]

front cover of Islamic Liberalism
Islamic Liberalism
A Critique of Development Ideologies
Leonard Binder
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s influenced many in the Islamic world to reject Western norms of liberal rationality and to return, instead, to their own tradition for political and cultural inspiration. This rejection of foreign thought threatens to end the centuries-long dialogue between Islam and the West, a dialogue that has produced a nascent Middle Eastern liberalism, along with many less desirable forms of discourse. With Islamic Liberalism, Leonard Binder hopes to reinvigorate that dialogue, asking whether political liberalism can take root in the Middle East without a vigorous Islamic liberalism. But, Binder asks, is an Islamic liberalism possible?

The Islamic political community presents special problems to the development of an indigenous liberalism. That community is conceived of as divinely ordained, and its notions of the good are to be derived from scriptural revelation, not arrived at through rational discourse. Liberal politics would seem to stand little chance of surviving in such an atmosphere, let alone thriving.

Binder responds to the challenge of Edward Said's critique of Orientalism, of a range of neo-Marxian development theorists, of Sayyid Qutb's fundamentalist vision, of Samir Amin's vision of Egypt's role in the Arab awakening, of Tariq al-Bishri's new populism, of Zaki Najib Mahmud's pragmatism, and the structuralism of Arkoun and Laroui. The deconstruction of these varied texts produces a number of persuasive hermeneutical conclusions that are sequentially woven together in a critical argument that refocuses our attention on the central question of political freedom and democracy. In the course of constructing this argument, Binder reopens the dialogue between Western modernity and Islamic authenticity and reveals the surprising extent to which there is a convergent interest in liberal, democratic, civil society. Finally, in a concluding chapter, he addresses the prospects for liberalism in the three major bourgeois states of Islam—Egypt, Turkey, and Iran.
[more]

front cover of Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria
Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria
Roman Loimeier
Northwestern University Press, 1997
The 1970s and 1980s were times of political and religious turmoil in Nigeria, characterized by governmental upheaval, and aggressive confrontations between the Sufi brotherhoods and the Izala movement. In Islamic Reform and Political Change in Northern Nigeria, Roman Loimeier explores the intermeshing of religion in the struggle for political influence and preservation of the interests of Nigerian Muslims.

Loimeier's careful scholarship combines astute readings of the work of previous scholars--both published and unpublished--with archival material and the findings of his own fieldwork in Nigeria. His work fills a substantial gap in contemporary Nigerian studies. This book provides invaluable and essential reading for serious students of Nigerian politics and of Islamic movements in Africa.
[more]

front cover of Islamism and Modernism
Islamism and Modernism
The Changing Discourse in Iran
By Farhang Rajaee
University of Texas Press, 2007

While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam's role and those who take a hardline defensive stance.

Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajahee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology.

Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha'eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari'ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.

[more]

front cover of Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda
Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda
By François Burgat
University of Texas Press, 2008

A renowned authority on Islamic movements, François Burgat lived for eighteen years in the Arab world, including his time as director of the French Center for Archaeology and Social Sciences at Yemen. He also dedicated many months to fieldwork in North Africa. Bringing Burgat's decades of expertise to the complex dialogues that have marked the post-9/11 world, Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda delivers much-needed clarity and historical perspective.

In Burgat's eyes, most of the West's political and media rhetoric has only fueled al-Qaeda's case, revealing a woeful lack of comprehension regarding the violent authoritarianism that divides the Middle East and creates a breeding ground for terrorism. Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda provides a primer of the three eras of political Islam, from the 1928 founding of the Muslim Brothers to the rise of post-colonial dictatorships and the current radicalization of "Generation al-Qaeda." Offering a new roadmap for stability, Burgat bridges the ideologies—political, religious, and cultural—that must be traversed if the deadly sectarianism is to be superseded.

[more]

front cover of The Island
The Island
War and Belonging in Auden’s England
Nicholas Jenkins
Harvard University Press, 2024

A groundbreaking reassessment of W. H. Auden’s early life and poetry, shedding new light on his artistic development as well as on his shifting beliefs about political belonging in interwar England.

From his first poems in 1922 to the publication of his landmark collection On This Island in the mid-1930s, W. H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. His early works are prized for their psychological depth, yet Nicholas Jenkins argues that they are political poems as well, illuminating Auden’s intuitions about a key aspect of modern experience: national identity. Two historical forces, in particular, haunted the poet: the catastrophe of World War I and the subsequent “rediscovery” of England’s rural landscapes by artists and intellectuals.

The Island presents a new picture of Auden, the poet and the man, as he explored a genteel, lyrical form of nationalism during these years. His poems reflect on a world in ruins, while cultivating visions of England as a beautiful—if morally compromised—haven. They also reflect aspects of Auden’s personal search for belonging—from his complex relationship with his father, to his quest for literary mentors, to his negotiation of the codes that structured gay life. Yet as Europe veered toward a second immolation, Auden began to realize that poetic myths centered on English identity held little potential. He left the country in 1936 for what became an almost lifelong expatriation, convinced that his role as the voice of Englishness had become an empty one.

Reexamining one of the twentieth century’s most moving and controversial poets, The Island is a fresh account of his early works and a striking parable about the politics of modernism. Auden’s preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and the problems of identity are of their time. Yet they still resonate profoundly today.

[more]

front cover of Islanders in the Empire
Islanders in the Empire
Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai'i
JoAnna Poblete
University of Illinois Press, 2014
In the early 1900s, workers from new U.S. colonies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico held unusual legal status. Denied citizenship, they nonetheless had the right to move freely in and out of U.S. jurisdiction. As a result, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans could seek jobs in the United States and its territories despite the anti-immigration policies in place at the time.
 
JoAnna Poblete's Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai'i takes an in-depth look at how the two groups fared in a third new colony, Hawai'i. Using plantation documents, missionary records, government documents, and oral histories, Poblete analyzes how the workers interacted with Hawaiian government structures and businesses, how U.S. policies for colonial workers differed from those for citizens or foreigners, and how policies aided corporate and imperial interests.
 
A rare tandem study of two groups at work on foreign soil, Islanders in the Empire offers a new perspective on American imperialism and labor issues of the era.
[more]

front cover of Isolarion
Isolarion
A Different Oxford Journey
James Attlee
University of Chicago Press, 2007

Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.

Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood.

From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization?

Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.

[more]

front cover of Isolation and Engagement
Isolation and Engagement
Presidential Decision Making on China from Kennedy to Nixon
William Waltman Newmann
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Presidents and their advisors consistently seek to improve the management of their foreign policy decision processes. This book analyzes the successes and failures of administrations from Kennedy to Nixon as they sought to strike a balance between the personal style of the president and the need for a strong interagency structure that could systematically evaluate policy options. The narrative focuses on US decision making on China and Taiwan during the crucial era when the US was considering moving from a policy of isolating China to a policy of engagement, culminating in Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China. William Waltman Newmann has created an Evolution-Balancing model, tested with case studies focusing on China policy by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, showing how the relationships between a president and his advisors change based on the weaknesses or pathologies of the president’s management style. The author’s research is based on declassified archival material from the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford presidential libraries.
[more]

front cover of Israel
Israel
A History
Anita Shapira
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Written by one of Israel’s most notable scholars, this volume provides a breathtaking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century to the present day. Organized chronologically, the volume explores the emergence of Zionism in Europe against the backdrop of relations among Jews, Arabs, and Turks, and the earliest pioneer settlements in Palestine under Ottoman rule. Weaving together political, social, and cultural developments in Palestine under the British mandate, Shapira creates a tapestry through which to understand the challenges of Israeli nation building, including mass immigration, shifting cultural norms, the politics of war and world diplomacy, and the creation of democratic institutions and a civil society. References to contemporary diaries, memoirs, and literature bring a human dimension to this narrative history of Israel from its declaration of independence in 1948 through successive decades of waging war, negotiating peace, and building a modern state with a vibrant society and culture. Based on archival sources and the most up-to-date scholarly research, this authoritative history is a must-read for anyone with a passionate interest in Israel. Israel: A History will be the gold standard in the field for years to come.
[more]

front cover of Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas
Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas
A Brief Romance
By Yaron Peleg
University of Texas Press, 2008

Over the past two decades, profound changes in Israel opened its society to powerful outside forces and the dominance of global capitalism. As a result, the centrality of Zionism as an organizing ideology waned, prompting expressions of anxiety in Israel about the coming of a post-Zionist age. The fears about the end of Zionism were quelled, however, by the Palestinian uprising in 2000, which spurred at least a partial return to more traditional perceptions of homeland. Looking at Israeli literature of the late twentieth century, Yaron Peleg shows how a young, urban class of Israelis felt alienated from the Zionist values of their forebears, and how they adopted a form of escapist romanticism as a defiant response that replaced traditional nationalism.

One of the first books in English to identify the end of the post-Zionist era through inspired readings of Hebrew literature and popular media, Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas examines Israel's ambivalent relationship with Jewish nationalism at the end of the twentieth century.

[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Israeli Rejectionism
A Hidden Agenda in the Middle East Peace Process
Zalman Amit
Pluto Press, 2011
The Palestine-Israel conflict is one of the longest running and seemingly intractable confrontations in the modern world. This book delves deep into the "peace process" to find out why so little progress has been made on the key issues. Zalman Amit and Daphna Levit find overwhelming evidence of Israeli rejectionism as the main cause for the failure of peace. They demonstrate that the Israeli leadership has always been against a fairly negotiated peace and have deliberately stalled negotiations for the last 80 years. The motivations behind this rejectionist position have changed, as have the circumstances of the conflict, but the conclusion has remained consistent_-- peace has not been in the interest of the state of Israel. A fascinating read, and particularly timely as the Obama administration tries once more for a peace settlement, this book draws on a wealth of sources_-- including Hebrew documents and transcripts -- to show that it is the Palestinians who lack a viable "partner for peace."
[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Israel's Long War with Hezbollah
Military Innovation and Adaptation Under Fire
Raphael D. Marcus
Georgetown University Press, 2018

The ongoing conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah is now in its fourth decade and shows no signs of ending. Raphael D. Marcus examines this conflict since the formation of Hezbollah during Israel’s occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s. He critically evaluates events including Israel’s long counterguerrilla campaign throughout the 1990s, the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, the 2006 summer war, and concludes with an assessment of current tensions on the border between Israel and Lebanon related to the Syrian civil war.

Israel’s Long War with Hezbollah is both the first complete military history of this decades-long conflict and an analysis of military innovation and adaptation. The book is based on unique fieldwork in Israel and Lebanon, extensive research into Hebrew and Arabic primary sources, and dozens of interviews Marcus conducted with Israeli defense officials, high-ranking military officers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), United Nations personnel, a Hezbollah official, and Western diplomats. As an expert on organizational learning, Marcus analyzes ongoing processes of strategic and operational innovation and adaptation by both the IDF and Hezbollah throughout the long guerrilla conflict. His conclusions illuminate the dynamics of the ongoing conflict and illustrate the complexity of military adaptation under fire.

With Hezbollah playing an ongoing role in the civil war in Syria and the simmering hostilities on the Israel-Lebanon border, students, scholars, diplomats, and military practitioners with an interest in Middle Eastern security issues, Israeli military history, and military innovation and adaptation can ill afford to neglect this book.

[more]

front cover of Italian Immigration in the American West
Italian Immigration in the American West
1870-1940
Kenneth Scambray
University of Nevada Press, 2021
In this carefully researched and engaging book, Kenneth Scambray surveys the lives and contributions of Italian immigrants in thirteen western states. He covers a variety of topics, including the role of the Roman Catholic Church in attracting and facilitating Italian settlement; the economic, political, and cultural contributions made by Italians; and the efforts to preserve Italian culture and to restore connections to their ancestral identity.

The lives of immigrants in the West differed greatly from those of their counterparts on the East Coast in many ways. The development of the West—with its cheap land and mining, forestry, and agriculture industries\--created a demand for labor that enabled newcomers to achieve stability and success. Moreover, female immigrants had many more opportunities to contribute materially to their family’s well-being, either by overseeing new revenue streams for their farms and small businesses, or as paid workers outside the home.

Despite this success, Italian immigrants in the West could not escape the era’s xenophobia. Scambray also discusses the ways that Italians, perceived by many as non-White, interacted with other Euro-Americans, other immigrant groups, and Native Americans and African Americans.

By placing the Italian immigrant experience within the context of other immigrant narratives, Italian Immigration in the American West provides rich insights into the lives and contributions of individuals and families who sought to build new lives in the West. This unique study reveals the impact of Italian immigration and the immense diversity of the immigrant experience outside the East’s urban centers.
[more]

front cover of An Italian Journey
An Italian Journey
Jean Giono
Northwestern University Press, 1998
In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.
[more]

front cover of Italian Political Cinema
Italian Political Cinema
Figures of the Long ’68
Mauro Resmini
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition

Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.

Italian Political Cinema conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.

A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

[more]

front cover of Italian Signs, American Streets
Italian Signs, American Streets
The Evolution of Italian American Narrative
Fred L. Gardaphé
Duke University Press, 1996
In the first major critical reading of Italian American narrative literature in two decades, Fred L. Gardaphé presents an interpretive overview of Italian American literary history. Examining works from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, he develops a new perspective—variously historical, philosophical, and cultural—by which American writers of Italian descent can be read, increasing the discursive power of an ethnic literature that has received too little serious critical attention.
Gardaphé draws on Vico’s concept of history, as well as the work of Gramsci, to establish a culture-specific approach to reading Italian American literature. He begins his historical reading with narratives informed by oral traditions, primarily autobiography and autobiographical fiction written by immigrants. From these earliest social–realist narratives, Gardaphé traces the evolution of this literature through tales of “the godfather” and the mafia; the “reinvention of ethnicity” in works by Helen Barolini, Tina DeRosa, and Carole Maso; the move beyond ethnicity in fiction by Don DeLillo and Gilbert Sorrentino; to the short fiction of Mary Caponegro, which points to a new direction in Italian American writing.
The result is both an ethnography of Italian American narrative and a model for reading the signs that mark the “self-fashioning” inherent in literary and cultural production. Italian Signs, American Streets promises to become a landmark in the understanding of literature and culture produced by Italian Americans. It will be of interest not only to students, critics, and scholars of this ethnic experience, but also to those concerned with American literature in general and the place of immigrant and ethnic literatures within that wide framework.
[more]

front cover of Italians Then, Mexicans Now
Italians Then, Mexicans Now
Immigrant Origins and the Second-Generation Progress, 1890-2000
Joel Perlmann
Russell Sage Foundation, 2005
According to the American dream, hard work and a good education can lift people from poverty to success in the "land of opportunity." The unskilled immigrants who came to the United States from southern, central, and eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely realized that vision. Within a few generations, their descendants rose to the middle class and beyond. But can today's unskilled immigrant arrivals—especially Mexicans, the nation's most numerous immigrant group—expect to achieve the same for their descendants? Social scientists disagree on this question, basing their arguments primarily on how well contemporary arrivals are faring. In Italians Then, Mexicans Now, Joel Perlmann uses the latest immigration data as well as 100 years of historical census data to compare the progress of unskilled immigrants and their American-born children both then and now. The crucial difference between the immigrant experience a hundred years ago and today is that relatively well-paid jobs were plentiful for workers with little education a hundred years ago, while today's immigrants arrive in an increasingly unequal America. Perlmann finds that while this change over time is real, its impact has not been as strong as many scholars have argued. In particular, these changes have not been great enough to force today's Mexican second generation into an inner-city "underclass." Perlmann emphasizes that high school dropout rates among second-generation Mexicans are alarmingly high, and are likely to have a strong impact on the group's well-being. Yet despite their high dropout rates, Mexican Americans earn at least as much as African Americans, and they fare better on social measures such as unwed childbearing and incarceration, which often lead to economic hardship. Perlmann concludes that inter-generational progress, though likely to be slower than it was for the European immigrants a century ago, is a reality, and could be enhanced if policy interventions are taken to boost high school graduation rates for Mexican children. Rich with historical data, Italians Then, Mexicans Now persuasively argues that today's Mexican immigrants are making slow but steady socio-economic progress and may one day reach parity with earlier immigrant groups who moved up into the heart of the American middle class. Copublished with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
[more]

front cover of Itineraries of Expertise
Itineraries of Expertise
Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America's Long Cold War
Andra Chastain and Timothy Lorek
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.
[more]

front cover of It’s All a Kind of Magic
It’s All a Kind of Magic
The Young Ken Kesey
Rick Dodgson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
Counterculture icon and best-selling author of the anti-authoritarian novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey said he was “too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie.” It’s All a Kind of Magic is the first biography of Kesey. It reveals a youthful life of brilliance and eccentricity that encompassed wrestling, writing, farming, magic and ventriloquism, CIA-funded experiments with hallucinatory drugs, and a notable cast of characters that would come to include Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, Tom Wolfe, Neal Cassady, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, and Hunter S. Thompson.
            Based on meticulous research and many interviews with friends and family, Rick Dodgson’s biography documents Kesey’s early life, from his time growing up in Oregon through his college years, his first drug experiences, and the writing of his most famous books. While a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey worked the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration hospital, where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs for medical studies. Soon he and his bohemian crowd of friends were using the same substances to conduct their own experiments, exploring the frontiers of their minds and testing the boundaries of their society.
            With the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey moved to La Honda, California, in the foothills of San Mateo County, creating a scene that Hunter S. Thompson remembered as the “world capital of madness.” There, Kesey and his growing band of Merry Prankster friends began hosting psychedelic parties and living a “hippie” lifestyle before anyone knew what that meant. Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test mythologized Kesey’s adventures in the 1960s.
            Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, It’s All a Kind of Magic depicts a precocious young man brimming with self-confidence and ambition who—through talent, instinct, and fearless spectacle—made his life into a performance, a wild magic act that electrified American and world culture.

“Rick Dodgson has pored over Kesey’s published and unpublished writings, interviews, and historical records to write a colorful biography of this charismatic American character. The resulting portrayal challenges assumptions about Kesey’s place in the counterculture.”—Journal of American History
 
“Dodgson’s painstaking research unearths hidden gems of Kesey’s life that marked him as a fascinating figure.”—H-Net
 
 
 
[more]

front cover of It's Hard to Talk about Yourself
It's Hard to Talk about Yourself
Natalia Ginzburg
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life.

Ginzburg's marriage to Leone Ginzburg, who met his death at the hands of the Nazis for his anti-Fascists activities, and her work for the Einaudi publishing house placed her squarely in the center of Italian political and cultural life. But whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, where her family was interned during World War II, or contemporary Rome, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history-even if she approached them only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.

Intensely reserved, Ginzburg said that she "crept toward autobiography stealthily like a wolf." But she did openly discuss her life and her work in an extraordinary series of interviews for Italian radio in 1990. Never before published in English, It's Hard to Talk about Yourself presents a vivid portrait of Ginzburg in her own words on the forces that shaped her remarkable life-politics, publishing, literature, and family. This fluid translation will join Ginzburg's autobiography, Family Sayings, as one of the most important records of her life and, as the editors write in their preface, "the last, unexpected, original book by Natalia Ginzburg."

[more]

front cover of Ivy and Industry
Ivy and Industry
Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980
Christopher Newfield
Duke University Press, 2003
Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in the United States. Christopher Newfield traces major trends in the intellectual and institutional history of the research university from 1880 to 1980. He pays particular attention to the connections between the changing forms and demands of American business and the cultivation of a university-trained middle class. He contends that by imbuing its staff and students with seemingly opposed ideas—of self-development on the one hand and of an economic system existing prior to and inviolate of their own activity on the other—the university has created a deeply conflicted middle class.

Newfield views management as neither inherently good nor bad, but rather as a challenge to and tool for negotiating modern life. In Ivy and Industry he integrates business and managerial philosophies from Taylorism through Tom Peters’s “culture of excellence” with the speeches and writings of leading university administrators and federal and state education and science policies. He discusses the financial dependence on industry and government that was established in the university’s early years and the equal influence of liberal arts traditions on faculty and administrators. He describes the arrival of a managerial ethos on campus well before World War II, showing how managerial strategies shaped even fields seemingly isolated from commerce, like literary studies. Demonstrating that business and the humanities have each had a far stronger impact on higher education in the United States than is commonly thought, Ivy and Industry is the dramatic story of how universities have approached their dual mission of expanding the mind of the individual while stimulating economic growth.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Iwo Jima
Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero
Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall
Harvard University Press, 1991

In the split second that it took Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal to snap the shutter of his Speed Graphic, a powerful and enduring American symbol was born. Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero tells the story of that icon as it appeared over the next forty years in bond drive posters, stamps, Hollywood movies, political cartoons, and sculpture, most notably the colossal Marine Corps War Memorial outside Washington, D.C. The book is also a brilliant and moving study of the soldiers who fought one of our bloodiest battles and of the impact of Iwo Jima on the rest of their lives.

When the famous photograph first appeared in newspapers in 1945 it was little more than a grainy outline of massed men and their wafting flag, but for millions it captured the essence of American grit and determination. The Marines pictured were in fact in no immediate danger—they were replacing a small flag planted earlier atop Mt. Suribachi with a larger, more visible one—but to an enthusiastic public they were heroes risking their lives for Old Glory. The Battle of Iwo Jima raged for many days beyond the capture of this one position, and ultimately claimed the lives of almost seven thousand American servicemen, yet already the tableau symbolized victory and, as a politician said at the time, “the dauntless permanency of the American spirit.”

With passion and meticulous care Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall illuminate the ironies and misconceptions that proliferated around the two Iwo Jima flag raisings. Pride and nostalgia exalted the glorious epiphany of Rosenthal’s image and suppressed the grisly and at times mundane reality of war. The ordinary men whose action had been immortalized became uneasy celebrities, while the planters of the first flag were doomed to oblivion. From John Wayne’s epic Sands of Iwo Jima to the gargantuan bronze boots of the War Memorial to the parade-floats of Mt. Suribachi done in sweet peas and orchid-colored pompoms, overwrought patriotism blended with true valor.

The authors weave a fast-paced and vivid story from the reminiscences of survivors, rare archival sources, and dozens of documentary photographs. They give the first comprehensive account of the building of the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954. And in a riveting final chapter they follow a group of American veterans who returned to the island in 1985 and met Japanese survivors. Dedicated to the men who fought on Iwo Jima, this groundbreaking study in cultural iconography transcends the icon to show the honor in remembering what really happened.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter