Author: Catherine Robson Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's Casabianca, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Charles Wolfe's Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's Invictus and Rudyard Kipling's If--, asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.
Author: By Helena Zlotnick
The status of women in the ancient Judaism of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic texts has long been a contested issue. What does being a Jewess entail in antiquity? Men in ancient Jewish culture are defined primarily by what duties they are expected to perform, the course of action that they take. The Jewess, in contrast, is bound by stricture.Writing on the formation and transformation of the ideology of female Jewishness in the ancient world, Zlotnick places her treatment in a broad, comparative, Mediterranean context, bringing in parallels from Greek and Roman sources. Drawing on episodes from the Hebrew Bible and on Midrashic, Mishnaic, and Talmudic texts, she pays particular attention to the ways in which they attempt to determine the boundaries of communal affiliation through real and perceived differences between Israelites, or Jews, on one hand and non-Israelites, or Gentiles, on the other.Women are often associated in the sources with the forbidden, and foreign women are endowed with a curious freedom of action and choice that is hardly ever shared by their Jewish counterparts. Delilah, for instance, is one of the most autonomous women in the Bible, appearing without patronymic or family ties. She also brings disaster. Dinah, the Jewess, by contrast, becomes an agent of self-destruction when she goes out to mingle with gentile female friends. In ancient Judaism the lessons of such tales were applied as rules to sustain membership in the family, the clan, and the community.While Zlotnick's central project is to untangle the challenges of sex, gender, and the formation of national identity in antiquity, her book is also a remarkable study of intertextual relations within the Jewish literary tradition.
Author: Patricia Laurence
Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communitiesBloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalancesand thus the architecture of modernist, postcolonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studiesby placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.
Author: H. Victor Conde
This newly revised, greatly expanded, and updated edition is the essential tool for navigating the language of international human rights related to law, jurisprudence, politics, diplomacy, and philosophy. Broadening the scope and enhancing our understanding of international human rights, the second edition of A Handbook of International Human Rights Terminology contains over four hundred new commonly used key terms and acronyms as well as corrections to terms that have taken on new meaning since the publication of the original. It also includes new treaty instruments and citations of important human rights instruments. Designed to be accessible to persons from different systems and regions of the world, this handbook fills an important void in the burgeoning discourse of international human rights and will become a vital reference work for specialists, students, and newcomers to this field.
Author: Valeria Finucci
Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the inner life is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the external social and economic spheres. Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny. The essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and focus on the fluidity of gender, the economics of sexual and sibling rivalry, the power of the visual, and the cultural echoes of the uncanny. The discussion of each topic highlights language as the medium of desire, transgression, or oppression. The section Faking It: Sex, Class, and Gender Mobility contains essays by Marjorie Garber (Middleton), Natasha Korda (Castiglione), and Valeria Finucci (Ariosto). The contributors to Ogling: The Circulation of Power include Harry Berger (Spenser), Lynn Enterline (Petrarch), and Regina Schwartz (Milton). Loving and Loathing: The Economics of Subjection includes Juliana Schiesari (Machia-velli) and William Kerrigan (Shakespeare). Dreaming On: Uncanny Encounters contains essays by Elizabeth J. Bellamy (Tasso) and David Lee Miller (Jonson).
Author: Mary Whyte
We the peoplethese words embody the ethos of what it means to be an American citizen. As individuals we are a tapestry of colors and creeds; united we are a nation committed to preserving our hard-earned freedom. In this heart-stirring collection of watercolor portraits of military veteransone from each of the fifty statesartist Mary Whyte captures this ethos as well as the dedication, responsibility, and courage it takes to fulfill that promise.Those who raise their hands to serve may join for different reasons, but allalong with their familiesmake the extraordinary commitment to place the needs of the country before their own. Whyte gives us the opportunity to meet and to see some of themto really see them. Whyte's portrait of America includes individuals from many walks of life, some still active duty, and from every branch: women and men, old and young, and from a wide swath of ethnicities, befitting our glorious melting pot. From a mayor to an astronaut, from a teacher to a garbage collector, from a business entrepreneur to someone who is homeless, Whyte renders their unique and exceptional lives with great care and gentle brush strokes.We the People is not only a tour across and through these vast United States, it is a tour through the heart and soul, the duty and the commitment of the people who protect not only our Constitution and our country but our very lives. We can only be deeply grateful, inspired, and humbled by all of them.
Author: Lawrence J. Jackson
Articles by prominent archaeologists and geological scientists shed new light on the late Palaeo-Indian cultures of the Great Lakes during a time of staggering environmental change and challenge, as the ice sheets retreated northward. The human response to the dramatic environmental upheaval produced unique cultural patterns, which we are just beginning to understand.
Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Most studies of emancipation's consequences have focused on the South. Moving the discussion to the North, Leslie Schwalm enriches our understanding of the national impact of the transition from slavery to freedom. ###Emancipation's Diaspora# follows the lives and experiences of thousands of men and women who liberated themselves from slavery, made their way to overwhelmingly white communities in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and worked to live in dignity as free women and men and as citizens.
Author: Showalter, Dennis
With his victory over the Russian army at the battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, Paul von Hindenburg became a war hero. By 1916 he had parlayed an exaggerated reputation for decisive victory into near dictatorial powers. After Germanys defeat at Verdun and War Minister Erich von Falkenhayns dismissal in late 1916, Hindenburg, along with his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff, took over strategic direction of the war. The eponymous Hindenburg Program attempted with some success to mobilize Germanys economy for war. He also oversaw many of Germanys most important wartime decisions, including the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Bethmann Hollwegs dismissal as chancellor, Russias defeat and negotiation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the oLudendorff Offensiveso of 1918, which sought decisive victory on the Western Front but ended in Germanys catastrophic defeat. After the war, Hindenburg played a crucial role in creating the Dolchstosslegende (the myth that the German Army had been ostabbed in the backo by a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy on the homefront), in leading Germany as president of the Weimar Republic, and, most tragically, in acquiescing to Adolf Hitlers rise to power.