Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society
Author: By Thomas H. Bestul In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels. Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.
Author: Donald Haase
In the 1970s, feminists focused critical attention on fairy tales and broke the spell that had enchanted readers for centuries. By exposing the role of fairy tales in the cultural struggle over gender, feminism transformed fairy-tale studies and sparked a debate that would change the way society thinks about fairy tales and the words happily ever after. Now, after three decades of provocative criticism and controversy, this book reevaluates the feminist critique of fairy tales. The eleven essays within Fairy Tales and Feminism challenge and rethink conventional wisdom about the fairy-tale heroine and offer new insights into the tales produced by female writers and storytellers. Resisting a one-dimensional view of the woman-centered fairy tale, each essay reveals ambiguities in female-authored tales and the remarkable potential of classical tales to elicit unexpected responses from women. Exploring new texts and contexts, Fairy Tales and Feminism reaches out beyond the national and cultural boundaries that have limited our understanding of the fairy tale. The authors reconsider the fairy tale in French, German, and Anglo-American contexts and also engage African, Indian Ocean, Iberian, Latin American, Indo-Anglian, and South Asian diasporic texts. Also considered within this volume is how film, television, advertising, and the Internet test the fairy tale's boundaries and its traditional authority in defining gender. From the Middle Ages to the postmodern age-from the French fabliau to Hollywood's Ever After and television's Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?-the essays assembled here cover a broad range of topics that map new territory for fairy-tale studies. Framed by a critical survey of feminist fairy-tale scholarship and an extensive bibliography-the most comprehensive listing of women-centered fairy-tale research ever assembled-Fairy Tales and Feminism is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the intersection of fairy tales and feminism.
Author: by Bruno Netti Third Edition, Revised and Expanded by Helen Myers
Folding a River, a collection of elegies, shows a pleasing range of free-verse forms that develop themes sustained throughout: loss, exile, myth, landscape. Kawita Kandpals poems are explorations of EastWest cultures, taking her into an emo-mythic place not to be found on any map. Kandpals mood in Folding a River is melancholy, articulated with intelligence and grace, and her phrasing can rise to the level of proverb: This time next year you will have evolved into an idea. In its personal evocations of geographical and linguistic exile from the subcontinent, centered on a lost father, her work recalls that of Li-Young Lee, yet with a feminine perspective often haunting in its own right: tenderly / taking back the mistakes of men.
Author: Bob Luke
One of the best-known teams in the old Negro Leagues, the Elite Giants of Baltimore featured some of the outstanding African American players of the day. Sociologist and baseball writer Bob Luke narrates the untold story of the team and its interaction with the city and its people during the long years of segregation. To convey a sense of the action on the field and the major events in the teams history, Luke highlights important games, relives the standout performances of individual players, and discusses key decisions made by management. He introduces the teams eventual major league stars: Roy Campanella, who went on to a ten-year Hall of Fame career with the Brooklyn Dodgers; Joe Black, the first African American pitcher to win a World Series game; and James Junior Gilliam, a player and coach with the Dodgers for twenty-five years. Luke also describes the often contentious relationship between the team and major league baseball before, during, and after the major leagues were integrated. The Elite Giants did more than provide entertainment for Baltimores black residents; the team and its star players broke the color barrier in the major leagues, giving hope to an African American community still oppressed by Jim Crow. In recounting the history of the Elite Giants, Luke reveals how the team, its personalities, and its fans raised public awareness of the larger issues faced by blacks in segregation-era Baltimore. Based on interviews with former players and Baltimore residents, articles from the black press of the time, and archival documents, and illustrated with previously unpublished photographs, The Baltimore Elite Giants recounts a barrier-breaking teams successes, failures, and eventual demise.
Author: Kate Gartner Frost
Composed on the occasion of the poet's near-fatal bout with typhus in 1623, the Devotions contains the essential germ of John Donne's mature thought, embodied in obscurely structured verse/prose divisions. Because of its seeming digressiveness, critics have struggled to understand this most significant of Renaissance texts as a whole. Kate Gartner Frost, however, shows that the Devotions, which combines odd bits of natural history, personal life-data, quotations from scripture, and descriptions of unpleasant medical nostrums with personal religious outpourings, is a unified work belonging to the tradition of English devotional literature and spiritual autobiography from Augustine onward. Frost examines how Donne patterned his work on models and structures that allowed the blending of chronology, experience, anecdote, and insight into the fullness of extended metaphor reflecting the human condition. Donne's use of biblical typology is treated, as well as his adherence to a poetics rooted in pre-Copernican cosmology, which relies on underlying spatial structures. Finally, Frost reveals the actual numerological structures present in the Devotions and addresses the problem of discursive reading in relation to spatially organized premodern works.Originally published in 1991.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Beau Breslin
In the 225 years since the United States Constitution was first drafted, no single book has addressed the key questions of what constitutions are designed to do, how they are structured, and why they matter. In From Words to Worlds, constitutional scholar Beau Breslin corrects this glaring oversight, singling out the essential functions that a modern, written constitution must incorporate in order to serve as a nations fundamental law. Breslin lays out and explains the basic functions of a modern constitutionincluding creating a new citizenry, structuring the institutions of government, regulating conflict between layers and branches of government, and limiting the power of the sovereign. He also discusses the theoretical concepts behind the fundamentals of written constitutions and examines in depth some of the most important constitutional charters from around the world. In assaying how states put structural ideas into practice, Breslin asks probing questions about whyand ifconstitutions matter. Solidly argued and engagingly written, this comparative study in constitutional thought demonstrates clearly the key components that a states foundational document must address. Breslin draws a critically important distinction between constitutional texts and constitutional practice.
Author: John Hill Ferguson
Historians have shown us the drama and sweep of the swathe Sherman's March cut through the South. Officers have bequeathed us accounts of what happened in strategic and practical terms. But for a gritty, day-by-day, on-the-ground view of what the march to Atlanta meant to the common soldier, nothing can compare to the diary of an enlisted man like John Hill Ferguson.A Scottish immigrant and a U.S. citizen since 1856, Ferguson enlisted in the Illinois Veteran Volunteers in 1860 and shortly afterward began to keep a diary. The annotated entries presented here, from 1864 and 1865, describe life in the Tenth Illinois as the troops made their way through the Carolinas and Georgia under Sherman. In these pages the details of Civil War soldiering become real, immediate, and personal, as do the daily dramas of life on the march. Smallpox struck Ferguson's unit early on, decimating his company; food, when there was any, was invariably poor; and always Confederate defenders waited up ahead, exacting a heavy toll on the advancing Northerners. These events and details, conveyed with all the force of Ferguson's fine intellect and superior powers of observation, offer an unforgettable firsthand view of that savage contest.
Author: Channette Romero
Since the 1980s, many activists and writers have turned from identity politics toward ethnic religious traditions to rediscover and reinvigorate their historic role in resistance to colonialism and oppression. In her examination of contemporary fiction by women of colorincluding Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, Toni Cade Bambara, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon SilkoChannette Romero considers the way these novels newly engage with Vodun, Santeria, Candomble, and American Indian traditions. Critical of a widespread disengagement from civic participation and of the contemporary novels disconnection from politics, this fiction attempts to transform the novel and the practice of reading into a means of political engagement and an inspiration for social change.
Author: John J. Harney
When the Empire of Japan defeated the Chinese Qing Dynasty in 1895 and won its first colony, Taiwan, it worked to establish it as a model colony. The Japanese brought Taiwan not only education and economic reform but also a new pastime made popular in Japan by American influence: baseball.But unlike in many other models, the introduction of baseball to Taiwan didnt lead to imperial indoctrination or nationalist resistance. Taiwan instead stands as a fascinating counterexample to an otherwise seemingly established norm in the cultural politics of modern imperialism. Taiwans baseball culture evolved as a cultural hybrid between American, Japanese, and later Chinese influences. In Empire of Infields John J. Harney traces the evolution and identity of Taiwanese baseball, focusing on three teams: the Nenggao team of 192425, the Kano team of 1931, and the Hongye schoolboy team of 1968. Baseball developed as an aspect of Japanese cultural practices that survived the end of Japanese rule at the end of World War II and was a central element of Japanese influence in the formation of popular culture across East Asia.The Republic of China (which reclaimed Taiwan in 1945)onlyembraced baseball in 1968 as an expression of a distinct Chinese nationalism and asa vehicle for political narratives.Empire of Infields explores not only the development of Taiwanese baseball but also the influence of baseball on Taiwans cultural identity in its colonial years and beyond as a clear departure from narratives of assimilation and resistance.