Author: Jane Bennett It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Author: Paraic Finnerty One of the messages that Emily Dickinson wanted to communicate to the world was her great love of William Shakespeareher letters abound with references to him and his works. This book explores the many implications of her admiration for the Bard. Paraic Finnerty clarifies the essential role that Shakespeare had in Dickinsons life by locating her allusions to his writings within a nineteenth-century American context and by treating reading as a practice that is shaped, to a large extent, by culture. In the process, he throws new light on Shakespeares multifaceted presence in Dickinsons world: in education, theater, newspapers, public lectures, reading clubs, and literary periodicals. Through analysis of letters, journals, diaries, records, periodicals, newspapers, and marginalia, Finnerty juxtaposes Dickinsons engagement with Shakespeare with the responses of her contemporaries. Her Shakespeare emerges as an immoral dramatist and highly moral poet; a highbrow symbol of class and cultivation and a lowbrow popular entertainer; an impetus behind the emerging American theater criticism and an English author threatening American creativity; a writer culturally approved for women and yet one whose authority women often appropriated to critique their culture. Such a context allows the explication of Dickinsons specific references to Shakespeare and further conjecture about how she most likely read him. Finnerty also examines those of Dickinsons responses to Shakespeare that deviated from what might have been expected and approved of by her culture. Imaginatively departing from the commonplace, Dickinson chose to admire three of Shakespeares most powerful and transgressive female charactersCleopatra, Queen Margaret, and Lady Macbethinstead of his more worthy and virtuous heroines. More startling, although the poet found resonance for her own life in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth, she chose, in the racially charged atmosphere of nineteenth-century America, to identify with Shakespeares most controversial character, Othello, thereby defying expectations once again.

Author: Sterling A. Stoudemire Where the only previous translations of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Natural History of the West Indies (1555 and 1625) are now unreadable, Sterling A. Stoudemire's translated edition offers this foundational text to the modern reader in an accessible format. The original text, published in 1525, is a beautiful Gothic example of the early Spanish-American chronicle, and is of great rarity. It offers the eyewitness account of a true historian and naturalist, and is the source of some of Europe's first descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Americas. Stoudemire offers comprehensive introductory material on the author of the text and its writing, drawing not only on the original text, but the excellent work of Enrique Alvarez Lopez, a naturalist who has published excellent versions of the Natural History in modern Spanish. This leads Stoudemire's English version to be a beautiful rendition that is both accurate and readable. It presents the heart of Oviedo's work without the interminable unpunctuated sentences of the original, and as such is an excellent introduction to both the Chronicle as a genre, and to Oviedo's oeuvre.

Author: Christine E. Tulley In How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley examines the composing processes of fifteen faculty leaders in the field of rhetoric and writing, revealing through in-depth interviews how each scholar develops ideas, conducts research, drafts and revises a manuscript, and pursues publication. The book shows how productive writing faculty draw on their disciplinary knowledge to adopt attitudes and strategies that not only increase their chances of successful publication but also cultivate writing habits that sustain them over the course of their academic careers. The diverse interviews present opportunities for students and teachers to extrapolate from the personal experience of established scholars to their own writing and professional lives.