A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY130 start with D start with D
Italian doctor Leonardo Pazzi and Alcesta, his “future lover,” travel through the picturesque, hilly region of Sloboda, near Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine. They experience a series of encounters with local Ukrainians and nature, disappearances, and transformations filled with paradoxes. The characters are bright, marionette-like caricatures whom the author constructs and moves ostentatiously in full view of the reader, revealing his artistic devices with a sense of absurd, mischievous humor.
A novel of exuberance and whim that deconstructs the very principles of writing and estranges everyday phenomena, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey marks the highpoint of Ukrainian modernism right before it was violently cut down by Stalin’s repressions. The novel shifts away from character or plot as such and instead celebrates the places and spaces in which these things come into being, and the sheer joy of movement and experience. In this sense, Maik Yohansen’s heroes echo Mykola Hohol, whose tour through Russia’s vast spaces in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an obvious reference point, and Laurence Sterne, whose irreverent narrative style and textual games Yohansen emulates. Presented here in a contemporary, deft English translation, the novel is a must read for everyone interested in discovering the rich heritage of Ukrainian modernism.
An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelgänger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader.
Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives. Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as a vehicle of identity.
Revealing a profound and heretofore unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.
Leonora Bernardi (1559–1616), a gentlewoman of Lucca, was a highly regarded poet, dramatist, and singer. She was active in the brilliant courts of Ferrara and Florence at a time when creative women enjoyed exceptional visibility in Italy. Like many such figures, she has since suffered historical neglect. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy presents the first-ever study of Bernardi’s life along with a modern edition of her recently discovered literary corpus, which mostly exists in manuscripts. Her writings are presented in the original Italian with new English translations, scholarly notes, and critical essays. Based on new archival research, the substantial opening section reconstructs Bernardi’s unusually colorful life. The second major section presents her pastoral tragicomedy Clorilli, one of the earliest secular dramatic works by a woman. The third section presents Bernardi’s secular and religious verse, which engaged with new trends in lyric and poetry for music, and was set by various key composers across Italy. The volume thus firmly positions Leonora Bernardi as a distinctive voice and dynamic player in the extraordinarily rich social, cultural, and geo-political networks of late-Renaissance Italy.
The theater of Agustín Moreto y Cavana (1618–1669) badly needs reevaluation. Present estimation of the work of this Spanish playwright has frozen into a sterile pattern of praise for his technical skill and disapproval of his borrowings. There has been uncritical acceptance of the contention that Moreto's plays are simple reworkings, and no real effort has been made to assess the relevance of this generally accepted belief.
The road to a fair estimation and appreciation of Moreto, Frank Casa believes, is through a rigorous investigation of his plays and their sources. To achieve this purpose he has carefully selected five different comedias, of varying degrees of indebtedness to earlier works: a hagiographic play, San Franco de Sena; El licenciado Vidriera, based on Cervantes' short story; a reinterpretation of a classical theme, Antíoco y Seleuco; a reworked drama, El valiente justiciero; and the comedy El lindo don Diego. In each case he analyzes the original, then the Moreto version, pointing out differences in characterization, attitudes, dramatic elaboration, and themes. Casa proves that, in spite of their similarity to works of predecessors, Moreto's plays should be considered independent literary creations and their author a dramatist with a high degree of artistic integrity.
Throughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences.
Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
—Perry Gethner
Norris Professor of French, Oklahoma State University
Drawing (in) the Feminine celebrates and examines the richness of contemporary women’s production in French and Francophone comics art and considers the history of representations made by both dominant and marginalized creators. Bridging historical and contemporary comics output, these essays illuminate the interfaces among genre, gender, and cultural history. Contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, and across a variety of methodologies and disciplinary orientations, challenge prevailing claims about the absence of women creators, characters, and readers in bande dessinée, arguing that women have always been part of its history. While still far from achieving parity with their male counterparts, female creators are occupying an increasingly significant portion of the French-language comics publishing industry, and creators of all genders are putting forth stories that reflect on the diversity and richness of women’s and gender-nonconforming people’s experiences. In the essays collected here, contributors push back against the ways in which the marginalization of women within bande dessinée history has overshadowed their significant contributions, extending avenues for further exploring the true diversity of a flourishing contemporary production.
Contributors:
Armelle Blin-Rolland, Véronique Bragard, Michelle Bumatay, Benoît Crucifix, Isabelle Delorme, Jacques Dürrenmatt, Margaret C. Flinn, Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, Jennifer Howell, Jessica Kohn, Sylvain Lesage, Catriona MacLeod, Mark McKinney
Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.
From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.
In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.
Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley
What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do?
In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV’s reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun’s famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king’s secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.
The dream of “progress” that animated many nineteenth-century artistic and political movements gave way at the turn of the century to a dissatisfaction with the Industrial Civilization and a recurrent pessimism about a future dominated by mechanization. Art Nouveau, which was both a style and a movement, embodied this dissatisfaction, marking the turn-of-the-century period with an aesthetic that consciously set out to revolutionize literature, the arts, and society within the framework of a brutalizing, wildly burgeoning Industrial Civilization. Generally associated with northern European culture, Art Nouveau also had a great impact in the south, particularly in Spain.
A Dream of Arcadia is the first work to explore Spain’s fertile and imaginative Art Nouveau. Through the eyes of four major Spanish writers, Lily Litvak views several different aspects of the turn-of-the-century struggle against the advances of industrialism in Spain. Her interpretation of the early works of Ramón del Valle Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), and Pío Baroja exposes a longing for a preindustrial arcadia based on a return to nature, the revival of handicrafts and medieval art, an attraction to rural primitive societies, and a revulsion against the modern city. Set against the European literary and artistic background of the period, her observations place the Spanish manifestations of Art Nouveau within the context of the better-known northern phenomena. Of particular interest is her discussion of the influences of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites, which demonstrates how the general European mood was articulated in Spain.
Litvak concludes that Valle Inclán, Unamuno, Azorín, and Baroja must be considered as more than simply fin de siècle writers, for they became part of a general movement, generated by Art Nouveau, that spans an entire century. A Dream of Arcadia demonstrates that Art Nouveau was more than a flash on Europe's artistic horizon; it is a philosophy with ramifications that have led to communes, handcrafted articles, and nomadic adolescents in search of truth.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.
With this volume, Dutton and Galbraith provide a critical apparatus that situates The Duchess of Suffolk in historical context and suggests an explanation for its continued resonance. They account for the play’s censorship in 1624 by detailing how it evoked contemporary parallels to the controversial foreign policy of King James I. More specifically, the editors offer an introduction that includes a historical overview of the author, staging, printing, and reception. Facing facsimiles of the original are pages with the updated text, complete with annotations to clarify language and staging details. This edition of The Duchess of Suffolk will have something to offer to early modern drama scholars as well as scholars of book history.
Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization.
In this issue: John S. Langdon and Stephen W. Reinert, “Speros Vryonis Jr.: 1928–2019”; Abraham Terian, “Monastic Turmoil in Sixth-Century Jerusalem and the South Caucasus: The Letter of Patriarch John IV to Catholicos Abas of the Caucasian Albanians”; Coleman Connelly, “Continued Celebration of the Kalends of January in the Medieval Islamic East”; Victoria Gerhold, “The Legend of Euphratas: Some Notes on Its Origins, Development, and Significance”; Christos Simelidis, “Two Lives of the Virgin: John Geometres, Euthymios the Athonite, and Maximos the Confessor”; Georgios Makris, “Living in Turbulent Times: Monasteries, Settlements, and Laypeople in Late Byzantine Southwest Thrace”; Philipp Niewöhner, “The Significance of the Cross before, during, and after Iconoclasm: Early Christian Aniconism in Constantinople and Asia Minor”; Stefania Gerevini, “Art as Politics in the Baptistery and Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice”; Laura Pfuntner, “Between Science and Superstition: Photius, Diodorus Siculus, and ‘Hermaphrodites’”; Baukje van den Berg, “John Tzetzes as Didactic Poet and Learned Grammarian”; Matthew Kinloch, “In the Name of the Father, the Husband, or Some Other Man: The Subordination of Female Characters in Byzantine Historiography”; Levente László, “Rhetorius, Zeno’s Astrologer, and a Sixth-Century Astrological Compendium”; and Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early History of the Hagiopolitan Daily Office in Constantinople: New Perspectives on the Formative Period of the Byzantine Rite.”
Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization.
In this issue: Margaret Mullet, “Ruth Juliana Macrides: 1949–2019”; Sihong Lin, “Justin under Justinian: The Rise of Emperor Justin II Revisited”; David Gyllenhaal, “Byzantine Melitene and the Social Milieu of the Syriac Renaissance”; Pavel Murdzhev, “The Introduction of the Moldboard Plow to Byzantine Thrace in the Eleventh Century”; Annemarie Weyl Carr, “The Lady and the Juggler: Mary East and West”; Robert S. Nelson, “A Miniature Mosaic Icon of St. Demetrios in Byzantium and the Renaissance”; Esra Akin-Kivanç, “In the Mirror of the Other: Imprints of Muslim–Christian Encounters in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean”; Anna Chrysostomides, “John of Damascus’s Theology of Icons in the Context of Eighth-Century Palestinian Iconoclasm”; Max Ritter, “The Byzantine Afterlife of Procopius’s Buildings”; Jonathan L. Zecher, “Myths of Aerial Tollhouses and Their Tradition from George the Monk to the Life of Basil the Younger”; Nektarios Zarras, “Illness and Healing: Τhe Ministry Cycle in the Chora Monastery and the Literary Oeuvre of Theodore Metochites”; and Aleksandr Andreev, “The Order of the Hours in the Yaroslavl Horologion.”
Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time—whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hägglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hägglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust’s Recherche, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov’s Ada.
Through his readings of literary works, Hägglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. Dying for Time opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
In Dying to Know, eminent critic George Levine makes a landmark contribution to the history and theory of scientific knowledge. This long-awaited book explores the paradoxes of our modern ideal of objectivity, in particular its emphasis on the impersonality and disinterestedness of truth. How, asks Levine, did this idea of selfless knowledge come to be established and moralized in the nineteenth century?
Levine shows that for nineteenth-century scientists, novelists, poets, and philosophers, access to the truth depended on conditions of such profound self-abnegation that pursuit of it might be taken as tantamount to the pursuit of death. The Victorians, he argues, were dying to know in the sense that they could imagine achieving pure knowledge only in a condition where the body ceases to make its claims: to achieve enlightenment, virtue, and salvation, one must die.
Dying to Know is ultimately a study of this moral ideal of epistemology. But it is also something much more: a spirited defense of the difficult pursuit of objectivity, the ethical significance of sacrifice, and the importance of finding a shareable form of knowledge.
This first full-scale treatment of the early prose of Dylan Thomas demonstrates the unity of his total work. Pratt argues that the inward journey of the poetic imagination which is implicit in poetry is often explicit in prose. Her study of Thomas’ early prose alongside his early poetry helps to elucidate all of his writing.
Pratt includes three appendices: a chronology, a summary of the critics’ attitudes toward the problem of influence, and a bibliographical sketch of materials in the Parris surrealist magazine transition, which are paralleled in Thomas’ prose.
Daub builds this conception of dynasty in a syncretic study of literature, sciences, and the history of ideas, engaging with remnants of dynastic ideology in the work of Richard Wagner, Émile Zola, and Stefan George, and in the work of early feminists and pioneering psychoanalysts. At every stage of cultural progression, Daub reveals how the relation of dynastic to nuclear families inflected modern intellectual history.
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