Author: Adrian Kempton File Type: pdf Epistolary fiction was in full flower during the period from 1652 to 1802, featuring the masterworks of Guilleragues, Richardson, Rousseau and Laclos. This study traces the development of the art of letter-writing and familiar correspondence and its adaptation by women writers into a remarkable range of literary genres, both fictional and non-fictional. In addition to the better known categories of the monodic love-letter sequence and the polyphonic epistolary novel, these sub-genres include letter miscellanies, essays, travelogues, educational novels and verse epistles. To all these, women writers made a valuable, and sometimes totally original, contribution. Indeed, it could be said that it was essentially through letter-writing that women achieved literary recognition. This volume examines each of these epistolary categories in turn, revealing how women writers from either country excelled in a particular genre the French, for example, in the epistolary monody and fictional foreign correspondence, the English in the miscellany and verse epistle, and both in the polyphonic letter-novel. Finally, the study notes how, despite the rapid decline of epistolary fiction in the nineteenth century, a select number of letter-novels by American, English and French women writers still continue to be published. **

Author: Erika Gasser File Type: mobi Stories of witchcraft and demonic possession from early modern England through the last official trials in colonial New England.Those possessed by the devil in early modern England usually exhibited a common set of symptoms fits, vomiting, visions, contortions, speaking in tongues, and an antipathy to prayer. However, it was a matter of interpretation, and sometimes public opinion, if these symptoms were visited upon the victim, or if they came from within. Both early modern England and colonial New England had cases that blurred the line between witchcraft and demonic possession, most famously, the Salem witch trials. While historians acknowledge some similarities in witch trials between the two regions, such as the fact that an overwhelming majority of witches were women, the histories of these cases primarily focus on local contexts and specifics. In so doing, they overlook the ways in which manhood factored into possession and witchcraft cases. Vexed with Devils is a cultural history of witchcraft-possession phenomena that centers on the role of men and patriarchal power. Erika Gasser reveals that witchcraft trials had as much to do with who had power in the community, to impose judgement or to subvert order, as they did with religious belief. She argues that the gendered dynamics of possession and witchcraft demonstrated that contested meanings of manhood played a critical role in the struggle to maintain authority. While all men were not capable of accessing power in the same ways, many of the people involvedthose who acted as if they were possessed, men accused of being witches, and men who wrote possession propagandainvoked manhood as they struggled to advocate for themselves during these perilous times. Gasser ultimately concludes that the decline of possession and witchcraft cases was not merely a product of change over time, but rather an indication of the ways in which patriarchal power endured throughout and beyond the colonial period. Vexed with Devils reexamines an unnerving time and offers a surprising new perspective on our own, using stories and voices which emerge from the records in ways that continue to fascinate and unsettle us.

Author: William S. Wilkerson File Type: pdf New Critical Theory surveys contemporary leftist thought while introducing the tenets of this new form of critical theory. Beginning with an exploration of the relationship between Marxism, Habermas, and the politics of identity, William S. Wilkerson and Jeffrey R. Paris present a collection that critiques the globalization of capital. The development of personality appears as subject to socialized standards in an age of global capitalism. Only after scrutinizing the effects of such a system can liberation be found. The essays within join Critical Theory with postmodern insights on language and subjectivity to provide a more comprehensive view of emancipatory social theory. Through this and other refelctions on critical race, gender, and queer theories, Wilkerson and Paris emerge with an encompassing volume defining New Critical Theory. **Review This collection brings together some of the most exciting voices writing in critical theory today. The essays included in the volume show us how critical theory can be expanded to include the burning issues of multiculturalism racial, ethnic, and language politics and the pressing demands of feminism. (Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University) In this collection, Wilkerson and Paris have brought together seasoned veterans of critical theory such as Douglas Kellner, Andrew Feenberg, and James L. Marsh with a new generation of critical theorists including Patricia Huntington, Eduardo Mendieta, Bill Martin, and Cynthia Willett. Although there is no single perspective that unites the authors across topics ranging as widely as the Chiapas Rebellion, queer theory, African-Amercian notions of subjectivity, and Marcuses early debts to Heidegger, what they share in common is the attempt to renew the critical, radical edge of what we might think of as a critical theory industry dominated by Habermasians. A new, post-Habermasian critical theory finds greater inspiration in the radicalism of HerbertMarcuse than in the critical-theoretic rapprochement with liberalism that has characterized its mainstream development in the United States over the past couple of decades. Anyone interested in answering the question Nancy Fraser once asked, Whats Critical About Critical Theory?, will be informed and challenged by this volume. The critical theory that appears here is especially noteworthy for its willingness to learn from and engage in constructive dialogues with postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial t (Thomas Jeannot, Gonzaga University) An important, philosophically sophisticated book that ought to be read by anyone who has felt the pull of philosophical dissonance. It is a book that ought to be read by all those who are intellectually accustomed to reading the works of those who continue to testify against continuing injustice. It is also a book that demands to be read by all of those frustrated by the futile in-fighting that has dogged Critical theory for several decades. This book has the potential for cunstructing new bridges both between the various clans that comprise Critical theory and across to other intellectual traditions that have been unduly neglected by an overly canonical reading of Critical theory. (Andrew Fagan, University of Essex) New Critical Theory is an important, philosophically sophisticated book that ought to be read by anyone who has felt the pull of philosophical dissonance. It is a book that ought to be read by all those who are intellectually accustomed to reading the works of those who continue to testify against continuing injustice. It is also a book that demands to be read by all of those frustrated by the futile in-fighting that has dogged Critical theory for several decades. This book has the potential for constructing new bridges both between the various clans that comprise Critical theory and across to other intellectual traditions that have been unduly neglected by and overly canonical reading of Critical theory. (Philosophy in Review) One is unlikely to encounter an anthology on recent applications of critical theory that is as thorough in its coverage as this one. The editors have done a terrific job assembling an all-star cast of scholars the writing is impassioned and the territory coveredfrom philosophical foundations and postmodern challenges to globalization, technology, post-colonialism, race, gender, and sexual orientationis fresh and exciting. (David Ingram, Loyola University, Chicago) In this collection, Wilkerson and Paris have brought together seasoned veterans of critical theory such as Douglas Kellner, Andrew Feenberg, and James L. Marsh with a new generation of critical theorists including Patricia Huntington, Eduardo Mendieta, Bill Martin, and Cynthia Willett. Although there is no single perspective that unites the authors across topics ranging as widely as the Chiapas Rebellion, queer theory, African-Amercian notions of subjectivity, and Marcuses early debts to Heidegger, what they share in common is the attempt to renew the critical, radical edge of what we might think of as a critical theory industry dominated by Habermasians. A new, post-Habermasian critical theory finds greater inspiration in the radicalism of Herbert Marcuse than in the critical-theoretic rapprochement with liberalism that has characterized its mainstream development in the United States over the past couple of decades. Anyone interested in answering the question Nancy Fraser once asked, Whats Critical About Critical Theory?, will be informed and challenged by this volume. The critical theory that appears here is especially noteworthy for its willingness to learn from and engage in constructive dialogues with postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial theory, and multiculturalism, moving its readers beyond the increasingly sterile debates that dominate the ivory tower, to the concrete, world-historical struggles for liberation on which the soul, the vitality, and ultimately the future of critical theory depends. (Thomas Jeannot, Gonzaga University) About the Author William S. Wilkerson is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Jeffrey R. Paris is visiting professor at the University of San Francisco.

Author: Kate Clarke Lemay File Type: pdf An investigation into the relationship between history, art, architecture, memory, and diplomacy. Between 1948 and 1956, the United States government planned an enormous project to build fourteen permanent overseas military cemeteries in Europe. These park-like burial grounds eventually would hold the graves of approximately 80,000 American soldiers and nurses who died during or immediately after World War II. Five of these cemeteries are located in France, more than any other nation two in Normandy one in Provence and two in Lorraine. In Triumph of the Dead American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France, Kate Clarke Lemay explores the relationship between art, architecture, war memory, and Franco-American relations. She addresses the many functions, both original and more recent, that the American war cemeteries have performed, such as war memorials, diplomatic gestures, Cold War political statements, prompts for debate about Franco-American relations, and the nature of French identity itself. Located on or near former battlefields, the American war cemeteries are at once history lessons, sites of memory, and commemorative monuments. As places of mourning, war cemeteries are considerably different than civic cemeteries in their rituals, designs, and influences on collective memory. As transatlantic sites, the cemeteries both construct and sustain an American memory of World War II for a Francophile and European audience. The book features ten color photographs, fifty black and white photographs,and four maps. Scholars as well as enthusiasts of World War II history, mid-century art and architecture, and cultural diplomacy will be interested in reading this richly researched book, the first in-depth history of some of the most important sites of American World War II remembrance. **