Author: Armin Mattes Notions of democracy and nationhood constitute the pivotal legacy of the American Revolution, but to understand their development one must move beyond a purely American context. Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland explores the simultaneous emergence of modern concepts of democracy and the nation on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolutions. Armin Mattes argues that in their origin the two concepts were indistinguishable because they arose from a common revolutionary impulse directed against the prevailing hierarchical political and social order. The author shows how the reconceptualization of democracy and the nation, which resulted from this revolutionary impulse, received its decisive form from the French Revolution. Although the French Revolution was instrumental in redefining the two terms, however, neither were these changes confined to France, nor did the new meanings merely radiate from France to other countries. To illustrate the transatlantic emergence of these ideas, Mattes considers the works of pairs of prominent intellectual contemporariesone in America and the other in Europeeach writing on a common topic. The thinkers and topics include Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke on the transatlantic revolutions, John Adams and Friedrich von Gentz on the mixed constitution, James Madison and Immanuel Kant on perpetual peace, and Thomas Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy on the nation. Mattes's approach highlights the significant impact that the French Revolution had on the evolution of thought in the period, demonstrating that the emergence and early development of modern concepts of democracy and the nation in America were intimately tied to revolutionary events and processes in the larger Atlantic world.Preparation of this volume has been supported by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.Jeffersonian America

Author: edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie foreword by Marietta Messmer Emily Dickinson, who regarded a letter as a joy of Earth, was herself a gifted epistolary artistcryptic and allusive in style, dazzling in verbal effects, and sensitively attuned to the recipients of her many letters. In this volume, distinguished literary scholars focus intensively on Dickinsons letter-writing and what her letters reveal about her poetics, her personal associations, and her self-awareness as a writer. Although Dickinsons letters have provided invaluable perspective for biographers and lovers of poetry since Mabel Loomis Todd published the first selection in 1894, todays scholarly climate opens potential for fresh insights drawn from new theoretical approaches, informed cultural contextualizations, and rigorous examination of manuscript evidence. Essays in this collection explore ways that Emily Dickinson adapted nineteenth-century epistolary conventions of womens culture, as well as how she directed her writing to particular readers, providing subtly tactful guidance to ways of approaching her poetics. Close examination of her letters reveals the conscious artistry of Dickinsons writing, from her auditory effects to her experiments with form and tone. Her well-known correspondences with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Susan Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Otis Phillips Lord are examined here, but so too are previously neglected family communications with her aunt Kate Sweetser and cousin Eugenia Montague. Contributors find in these various letters evidence of Dickinsons enthusiastic participation in a sort of epistolary book club involving multiple friends, as well as her loving attentiveness to individuals in times of both suffering and joy. These inquiries highlight her thoughts on love, marriage, gender roles, art, and death, while unraveling mysteries ranging from legal discourse to Etruscan smiles. In addition to a foreword by Marietta Messmer, the volume includes essays by Paul Crumbley, Karen Dandurand, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Judith Farr, James Guthrie, Ellen Louise Hart, Eleanor Heginbotham, Cindy MacKenzie, Martha Nell Smith, and Stephanie Tingley.

Author: By Karla Mallette When Muslim invaders conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they took control of a weakened Greek state in cultural decadence. When, two centuries later, the Normans seized control of the island, they found a Muslim state just entering its cultural prime. Rather than replace the practices and idioms of the vanquished people with their own, the Normans in Sicily adopted and adapted the Greco-Arabic culture that had developed on the island. Yet less than a hundred years later, the cultural and linguistic mix had been reduced, a Romance tradition had come to dominate, and Sicilian poets composed the first body of love lyrics in an Italianate vernacular.Karla Mallette has written the first literary history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Where other scholars have separated out the island's literature along linguistic grounds, Mallette surveys the literary production in Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Romance dialects, in addition to the architectural remains, numismatic inscriptions, and diplomatic records, to argue for a multilingual, multicultural, and coherent literary tradition. Drawing on postcolonial theory to consider institutional and intellectual power, the exchange of knowledge across cultural boundaries, and the containment and celebration of the other that accompanies cultural transition, the book includes an extensive selection of poems and documents translated from the Arabic, Latin, Old French, and Italian. The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250 opens up new venues for understanding the complexity of a place and culture at the crossroads of East and West, Islam and Christianity, tradition and innovation.

Author: Francesca D'Alessandro Behr Feeling History is a study of apostrophe (i.e., the rhetorical device in which the narrator talks directly to his characters) in Lucans Bellum Civile. Through the narrators direct addresses, irony, and grotesque imagery, Lucan appears not as a nihilist, but as a character deeply concerned about ethics. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how Lucans style represents a criticism of the Roman approach to history, epic, ethics, and aesthetics. The books chief interest lies in the ethical and moral stance that the poet-narrator takes toward his characters and his audience. To this end, Francesca DAlessandro Behr studies the ways in which the narrator communicates ethical and moral judgments. Lucans retelling of this central historical epic triggers in the mind of the reader questions about the validity of the Roman imperial project as a whole. An analysis of selected apostrophes from the Bellum Civile allows us to confront issues that are behind Lucans disquieting imagery: how can we square the poets Stoic perspectives with his poetically conveyed emotional urgency? Lucans approach seems inspired by Aristotle, especially his Poetics, as much as by Stoic philosophy. In Lucans aesthetic project, participation and alienation work as phases through which the narrator leads the reader to a desired understanding of his work of art. At the same time, the reader is confronted with the ends and limits of the aesthetic enterprise in general. Lucans long-acknowledged political engagement must therefore be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic stance. In the same way that Lucan is unable to break free from the Virgilian model, neither can he develop a defense of morality outside of the Stoic mold. His philosophy is not a crystal ball to read the future or a numbing drug imposing acceptance. The philosophical vision that Lucan finds intellectually and aesthetically compelling does not insulate his characters (and readers) from suffering, nor does it excuse them from wrongdoing. Rather, it obligates them to confront the responsibilities and limits of acting morally in a chaotic world.