Author: Jennifer Drake Askey File Type: pdf The age of nationalism in nineteenth-century Germany generally conjures up images of the Prussian military, Furst Otto von Bismarck, and Hohenzollern kings who welded together a nation out of disparate principalities through war and domestic social policy. Good Girls, Good Germans looks at how girls and young women became national during this period by participating in the national community in the home, in state-sponsored Tochterschulen, and in their reading of Madchenliteratur. By learning to subordinate desires for individual agency to the perceived needs of the national community -- what Askey calls emotional nationalism -- girls could fulfill their class- and gender-specific roles in society and discover a sense of their importance for the progress of the German nation. Informed by recent historical research on nineteenth-century nationalism, Good Girls, Good Germans demonstrates how the top-down construction of a national identity, especially in girls education, came to be experienced by reading girls. Chapters in this book examine literature published for and taught to girls that encouraged readers to view domestic duties -- and even romance -- as potential avenues for national expression. By aligning her heart with the demands of the nation, a girl could successfully display her national involvement within the confines of the private sphere. Jennifer Drake Askey is Coordinator of Academic Program Development at Wilfrid Laurier University. **

Author: Rick Moody File Type: epub Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards wont sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, The Crawling Hand. Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planets first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally--a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives. The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22.From Publishers WeeklyNo amount of familiarity with Moodys body of work will prepare a reader for this distressingly impertinent exercise in bafflement. The plot originates in 2024 with Montese Crandall, a blocked writer whose list of woes includes a wife in a coma and an unsavory passion for baseball cards featuring bionically enhanced players, and whose major success is winning the right to author the novelization of the remake of the 1963 horror flick The Crawling Hand. The novelization, then, basically is the book. First, we have the space diaries of Col. Jed Richards, whose mission to Mars goes awry amid machete-wielding colonists, homoerotic encounters with fellow astronauts, and an insidious bacteria. Next, were back on Earth, swept up in NASAs efforts to curtail the murderous swath of the missions sole survivor Colonel Richardss severed arm. All the while, Crandall clears his chest of everything from primate sexuality and megachurches to Mexican wrestlers. The comedy of catharsis ought to be whacked-out good fun. Instead, it is desperately and exceedingly annoying. To accuse Moodys book of inanity is like calling a B-movies production values thrifty the inanity is the point. (July) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Bookmarks MagazineA brick-thick, rock-n-roll-dystopian, fast-and-loose-and-ambitious-as-Pynchon novel (New York Times Book Review), Moodys latest boldly exhibits its authors talents, including his cheeky creativity, linguistic acrobatics, and eccentric characters. However, this unwieldy fusion of SF satire and postmodern metafiction fell short of the critics expectations. Nearly all agreed that the novel, at nearly 750 pages, is too long, and they also complained that it is too calculated, too repetitive, too self-indulgent, too rambling, and too clever for its own good. Strained attempts at humor and intentionally poor writing rounded out the collective protest. Though Moodys admirers will likely overlook these weaknesses and enjoy this grab bag of sardonic fun (Dallas Morning News), other readers may want to steer clear.