Author: Wilkie Collins Written 150 years ago, never published, and presumed lost for nearly a century, Wilkie Collins's earliest novel now appears in print for the first time. Iolani is a sensational romance--a tale of terror and suspense, bravery and betrayal, set against the lush backdrop of Tahiti. The book's complicated history is worthy of a writer famous for intricate plots hinging on long-kept secrets. Collins wrote the book as a young man in the early 1840s, twenty years before The Moonstone and The Woman in White made his name among Victorian novelists. He failed to find a publisher for the work, shelved the manuscript for years, and eventually gave it to an acquaintance. It disappeared into the hands of private collectors and remained there--acquiring mythical status as a lost novel--from the turn of the century until its sudden appearance on the rare book market in New York in 1991. This first edition appears with the permission of the new owners, who keep the mystery alive by remaining anonymous.The novel is set in Tahiti prior to European contact. It tells the story of the diabolical high priest, Iolani , and the heroic young woman, Idua, who bears his child. Determined to defy the Tahitian custom of killing firstborn children, Idua and her friend Aimata flee with the baby and take refuge among Iolani's enemies. The vengeful priest pursues them, setting into motion a plot that features civil war, sorcery, sacrificial rites, wild madmen, treachery, and love. Collins explores themes that he would return to again and again in his career: oppression by sinister, patriarchal figures; the bravery of forceful, unorthodox women; the psychology of the criminal mind; the hypocrisy of moralists; and Victorian ideas of the exotic. As Ira Nadel shows in his introduction, the novel casts new light on Collins's development as a writer and on the creation of his later masterpieces. A sample page from the manuscript appears as the frontispiece to this edition. The publication of Iolani is a major literary event: a century and half late, Wilkie Collins makes his literary debut.Originally published in 1999.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: Louise McReynolds
In this lively account of the rise of a commercial newspaper industry in imperial Russia, Louise McReynolds explores how the mass-circulation press created a forum for popular opinion advocating political change. From the Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II in 1855 to the Bolsheviks' shut-down of the newspapers in 1917, she chronicles the exploits of publishers and editors, writers and readers. Arguing that this prosperous industry both expressed and shaped the development of ideas among new social groups, McReynolds provides insight into the growth in Russia of a fragile pluralism characteristic of modern societies. Her discussion of the relationship between communications and politics, which draws especially on Jurgen Habermas, combines a variety of interrelated ingredients: institutional histories of major newspapers, biographical sketches of journalists, the intellectual impact of the new language of newspaper journalism, the political ramifications of public opinion under the auspices of an autocratic government. Comparing the Russian press with independent commercial newspaper industries in the United States, England, and France, McReynolds examines the extent to which Russia was evolving according to Western political and socioeconomic patterns before the Bolshevik Revolution.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: Scott Black
No genre manifests the pleasure of readingand its power to consume and enchantmore than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodoruss Ethiopian Story, Cervantess Don Quixote, Fieldings Tom Jones, Sternes Tristram Shandy, and Burneys The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.
Author: Andy Birtwistle
Cinesonica: sounding film and video explores previously neglected and under-theorised aspects of film and video sound, drawing on detailed case study analyses of Hollywood cinema, art cinema, animated cartoons, and avant-garde film and video.
Author: MARK T MITCHELL
Many Americans are longing for an alternative politics that is rooted in strong communities, a recognition of limits, and respect for the natural world. These issues are not the possession of one political party. Rather, they refer to ideas rooted deeply in the best aspects of our common tradition, and they represent yearnings that many, regardless of political affiliation, share. This book articulates a cultural and political vision that leads off the couch and into the garden, out of the shopping mall and into the farmers market, away from Washington and in the direction of home.In this postpartisan call to action, Mitchell develops the concept of the politics of gratitude, which is centered around four ideas: creatureliness, gratitude, human scale, and place, culminating in a distinctive, fruitful view of human nature and community at odds with the prevailing norms of individualism (and, not so paradoxically, statism), giantism, and hypermobility. Going beyond the liberal-conservative factionalism that has reduced our political and cultural discourse to cliches and vitriol, he urges us to become responsible stewards of the earth who are committed to family and community and who abide in gratitude, taking nothing for granted.The result is a political and cultural vision that is at once local, limited, modest, republican, greenand grateful.
What is faith Is it a thing one has or a human activity What is revelation Is it a deposit of truths in the past or Gods action in the presentThese questions are addressed by renowned religious educator Gabriel Moran who draws upon biblical and theological traditions set within todays interreligious dialogue A church of moral and liturgical activity in relation to a revealing God is the needed response to both a dismissal of religion and apocalyptic violence in its name The future role of Christianity in the world and in individual lives may well hang in the balance The Christian ideas of faith and revelation will either be the chief obstacle to dialogue with the contemporary world or else the main foundation to a Christian spiritual life that can give substance and direction to religious searchingGabriel Moran is a professor in the Department of Humanities and the Social Sciences at New York University He is widely credited with reshaping the field of religious education in the United States and beyond Moran is author of twenty books on religion and education including Religious Education as a Second Language Both Sides The Story of Revelation and most recently Speaking of Teaching Lessons from History
Author: Karen Ann Brown
In Pins and Needles, Karen Brown explores love and loss between mother and child, husband and wife, close friends, and virtual strangers. In many of these stories, Brown shows how love emerges as infidelityincongruous and disruptive, threatening the stability of daily life. In She Fell to Her Knees, Nell inherits the neglected house in which her mother died years before, and begins an affair with the neighbor. The narrator of Apparitions, who has recently returned the blind grandson she was raising to the care of his mother, invites a confused young man into her home. In The Ropewalk, a bartender haunted by her abandonment of her own child aids a customer in a struggle for custody of her daughters. A pregnant teenager in Unction comes to accept the reality of her situation while working a summer job counting parts in a bookbinding machine shop. Annie, the young mother with a tragic past in Pins and Needles, leaves her infant daughter to go on an errand in a snowstorm, and picks up a boy she doesn't know. What remains a constant in these stories is the tangible presence of the natural world. Each story moves toward the moment in which its characters, navigating loss, learn acceptance. Like the single mother in Destiny, they see their lives happenall around, just then, forever.
Author: Edited by Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky
When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the marquis of Queensberry for destroying the high Priest of the Decadents. But reports of the death of decadence were greatly exaggerated, and today, more than one hundred years after the famous trial and at the beginning of a new millennium, the phenomenon of decadence continues to be a significant cultural force.Indeed, decadence in the nineteenth century, and in our own period, has been a concept whose analysis yields a broad set of associations. In Perennial Decay, Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Sylvia Molloy, Michael Riffaterre, Barbara Spackman, Marc Weiner, and others extend the critical field of decadence beyond the traditional themes of morbidity, the cult of artificiality, exoticism, and sexual nonconformism. They approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.
Author: John T. Ellisor
Historians have traditionally viewed the Creek War of 1836 as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that, in fact, the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after peace was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisors study also broadly illuminates southern society just prior to the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War, which raged over three states, was fueled not only by Native determination but also by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.