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American Autobiography
Retrospect And Prospect
Paul John Eakin
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

The first four essays review the major historical periods of American autobiography, placing the classic texts of American autobiographical literature from Captain John Smith to Malcolm X in the illuminating context of lesser-known contemporary narratives.  Daniel B. Shea writes on colonial America, Lawrence Buell on the American Renaissance, Susanna Egan on the years after the Civil War, and Albert E. Stone on the twentieth century.
    The second part of American Autobiography  shows the diversity of voices, forms, audiences, and modes of identity in the literature of American autobiography.  Provocative essays by William Boelhower and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong on immigrant autobiography discuss the changes in the sense of self that occur when strangers come to a strange land.  Arnold Krupat writes about how American Indians conceptualize the self and about the relationship between oral and written discourse.  William L. Andrews evaluates the strong body of critical theory that has grown up around African-American autobiography, showing how both the genre and its criticism have responded to contemporary historical pressures.  Carol Holly explores the model of personal identity that underlies nineteenth-century women’s autobiographies, and Blanche Gelfant examines the narrative and political strategies of Emma Goldman’s autobiography, especially her use of popular romance and melodrama. 
    The last essay offers a more personal perspective on contemporary autobiography:  a “dialogue” between Robert and Jane Coles about how they developed their method of eliciting first-person oral narratives for their famous Children of Crisis and Women of Crisis series.
    These essays raise  theoretical issues that are examined in Paul John Eakin’s incisive introduction:  How do we define a literary genre of protean shape and perplexing cultural multiplicity?  How do we approach the special problems created by documents that are both historical and literary texts, ones that pose difficult questions about truth and representation?  Most important, how is the canon of American autobiography to be constructed, and how is its history to be written?  Tracing that critical history, Eakin explains how changing ideas about “the mainstream” and “the marginal” have revitalized our retrospective view of American autobiography and opened up new and exciting prospects for today’s reader.

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Emerson
Prospect and Retrospect
Joel Porte
Harvard University Press, 1982
Published to mark the centenary of his death, this book helps us take measure of the work and influence of one of America's foremost thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. These nine essays attempt both to come to terms with Emerson's modernity and to look back at his origins and development. They suggest how extensively Emerson is linked to the present and show how firmly he was rooted in America's past. Though Transcendentalism has often been considered synonymous with aloofness and high-minded abstraction, the essays show that Emerson in fact aimed at the greatest possible inclusiveness in his own thought and writing. His work constitutes a great storehouse of reflection on every subject conceivable to a capacious nineteenth-century imagination; it continues to invite criticism proportionate to its own scope.
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Human Natures
Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect
Paul R. Ehrlich
Island Press, 2000

The Bell Curve, The Moral Animal, The Selfish Gene -- these and a host of other books and articles have made a seemingly overwhelming case that our genes determine our behavior. Now, in a new book that is sure to stir controversy, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists shows why most of those claims of genetic destiny cannot be true, and explains how the arguments often stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution itself.

"You can't change human nature," the saying goes. But you can, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich shows us in Human Natures, and in fact, evolution is the story of those changing natures. He makes a compelling case that "human nature" is not a single, unitary entity, but is as diverse as humanity itself, and that changes in culture and other environmental variations play as much of a role in human evolution as genetic changes. We simply don't have enough genes to specify behavior at the level that is often asserted.

Never has knowledge of our evolutionary past been more important to our future. Developing intelligent strategies for antibiotic use, pest control, biodiversity protection -- and even for establishing more equitable social arrangements -- all depend on understanding evolution and how it works. A hallmark of Human Natures is the author's ability to convey lucidly that understanding in the course of presenting an engrossing history of our species. Using personal anecdote, vivid example, and stimulating narrative, Ehrlich guides us through the thicket of controversies over what science can and cannot say about the influence of our evolutionary past on everything from race to religion, from sexual orientation to economic development.

A major work of synthesis and scholarship, Human Natures gives us the fruit of a lifetime's thought and research on evolution and environment by a modern master of scientific understanding. Ehrlich's innovative vision lights the way to a fresh view of human nature and evolution, bringing insight and clarity to urgent questions of where we are as a species, and where we may be headed.

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Prospect Of Cities
John Friedmann
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
A major figure offers a sweeping evaluation of the place of the city in the global future. In essays as engaging as they are informative, a leading figure in urban planning and geography broadly surveys the complex terrain of global urbanization. Unique in its scope and its prospective view of city-regions as substantially autonomous "quasi city-states," this book offers an unprecedented look at the global urban future, focusing on models of development, transnational migration, citizenship, representation, and the good city as a utopian construct. Beginning with an overview of global urbanization patterns-particularly the entropic forces that exacerbate poverty, increase violence, and discourage democratic life in peripheral areas-The Prospect of Cities goes on to address specific contemporary issues. These range in subject and scale from the impact of transnational migration on global cities whose populations are at least 30 percent of foreign origin to the critical importance of everyday life, as it is experienced on the streets and in neighborhoods, for a full understanding of urban planning. The final chapter traces the author's evolution as one of the world's foremost theorists of city-regional development and planning, deepening the perspective mapped out over the course of the volume and providing new insight into the study of the urban landscape in a global environment. Whether arguing for a new approach to sustainable development, finding the moral focus of nonterritorial citizenship, or mounting a spirited, pragmatic defense of utopian thinking in urban planning, John Friedmann offers an informed, workable, and hopeful prospect for the cities of our time and of the future. John Friedmann is professor emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was the founding chair of the Department of Urban Planning. He is also an honorary professor at the University of British Columbia. His recent books include Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development (1992) and, as coeditor, Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age (1998).
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Rural Development in China
Prospect and Retrospect
Hsiao-tung Fei
University of Chicago Press, 1989
This collection of essays written from 1947-1986 by Fei Hsiao-tung, China's most distinguished sociologist and anthropologist, presents a rich and representative sampling of the research that has characterized his long career. In 1936, Fei conducted field work in Kaixian'gong, a village in Jiangsu province in east China. This village became the subject of his now classic study Peasant Life in China, in which he argued that, because of China's huge population and the scarcity of cultivable land, household industries such as production of raw silk were vital to the peasants' economic survival. His conclusions, long rejected by China's policymakers, have recently been embraced by the government under the political leadership of Deng Xiaopeng.

Returning to Kaixian'gong in 1957 and again in the 1980s, Fei examined the changes that had occurred since his initial research. Three essays that resulted from these follow-up studies are included in this collection, providing a rare summary and analysis of developments in the village between 1936 and 1986. Also included here are four articles based on Fei's 1983-84 research in other areas of Jiangsu province. His explorations of the contrast between the wealth of southern Jiangsu and the long-standing poverty of the northern half of the province address key issues of public policy in China today. Useful to students of rural sociology as well as of Chinese history, politics, economics, and anthropology, this collection will provide an overview not only of developments in the small towns of China but also of Fei's thought.
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South American Indian Languages
Retrospect and Prospect
Edited by Harriet E. Manelis Klein and Louisa R. Stark
University of Texas Press, 1985

This book fills the crucial need for a single volume that gives broad coverage and synthesizes findings for both the general reader and the specialist. This collection of twenty-two essays from fifteen well-known scholars presents linguistic research on the indigenous languages of South America, surveying past research, providing data and analysis gathered from past and current research, and suggesting prospects for future investigation.

Of interest not only to linguists but also to anthropologists, historians, and geographers, South American Indian Languages offers a wide perspective, both temporal and regional, on an area noted for its enormous linguistic diversity and for the lack of knowledge of its indigenous languages. An invaluable source book and reference tool, its appearance is especially timely when exploitation of the rich natural resources in a number of areas in South America must surely result in the demise and/or acculturation of some indigenous groups.

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The World Economy
History & Prospect
By W. W. Rostow
University of Texas Press, 1978

This monumental study is an account of the world economy from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, an analysis and prescription for the future, and a challenge to the neo-Keynesian theories of income determination and growth. It is based on some forty years of research and teaching.

Originally published in 1978, the volume looks back over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes an analysis of how the world's population expanded from about 1 billion in 1800 to 4 billion in 1976, with some 6.5 billion in sight for the year 2000; an account of the expansion and distribution of industrial production and trade during this period; and an analysis of price and relative price movements since the eighteenth century. Rostow gives a detailed description of the Kondratieff long cycles in the relative scarcity and abundance of food and raw materials and reasons that the world economy entered the fifth Kondratieff upswing at the close of 1972. He also examines the changing pattern of business cycles over the whole sweep of modern economic growth and the failure of the post-1945 world economy to control inflation. The volume also includes short economic histories of twenty national economies responsible for 80 percent of the world's production, based on a collection of computerized aggregate and sectoral data.

Each historical section leads naturally into one or more of the major problems dealt with in the final portion of the book, which looks to the future of the world economy: food, population, energy, raw materials, the environment, and the tasks of national and international policy. Rostow argued, counter to the Limits to Growth doctrine, that the critical period for industrial civilization lay in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, rather than in the twenty-first century, and that what we did or failed to do in that generation would determine the shape of the longer future.

No other economic history of this depth and breadth exists. It is a reference for economists, economic historians, and other social scientists as well as the informed lay reader.

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