Author: By Susan Branson In 1823, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and eagerly read, memoirs of the age. This tale of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows and attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania tantalized its audience with illicit love, betrayal, and murder.Carson's ghostwriter, Mary Clarke, was no less daring. Clarke pursued dangerous associations and wrote scandalous exposes based on her own and others' experiences. She immersed herself in the world of criminals and disreputable actors, using her acquaintance with this demimonde to shape a career as a sensationalist writer.In Dangerous to Know, Susan Branson follows the fascinating lives of Ann Carson and Mary Clarke, offering an engaging study of gender and class in the early nineteenth century. According to Branson, episodes in both women's lives illustrate their struggles within a society that constrained women's activities and ambitions. She argues that both women simultaneously tried to conform to and manipulate the dominant sexual, economic, and social ideologies of the time. In their own lives and through their writing, the pair challenged conventions prescribed by these ideologies to further their own ends and redefine what was possible for women in early American public life.

Author: Alejandro A. Vallega As the only full-length treatment in English of spatiality in Martin Heideggers work, this book makes an important contribution to Heidegger studies as well as to research on the history of philosophy. More generally, it advances our understanding of philosophy in terms of its exilic character, a sense of alterity that becomes apparent when one fully engages the temporality or finitude essential to conceptual determinations.By focusing on Heideggers treatment of the classical difficulty of giving conceptual articulation to spatiality, the author discusses how Heideggers thought is caught up in and enacts the temporality it uncovers in Being and Time and in his later writings. Ultimately, when understood in this manner, thought is an exilic experiencea determination of being that in each case comes to pass in a loss of first principles and origins and, simultaneously, as an opening to conceptual figurations yet to come. The discussion engages such main historical figures as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and indirectly Husserl, as well as contemporary European and American Continental thought.

The thoughttormented characters in T S Eliots early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body thought and action The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it In T S Eliots Dialectical Imagination Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths Together or in tandem these two principlesdialectic and relativismconstitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliots imagination The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence Brooker considers Eliots poetry in three blocks each represented by a signature masterpiece The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land and Four Quartets She correlates these works with stages in the poets intellectual and spiritual life disjunction ambivalence and transcendence Using a methodology that is both inductivemoving from texts to theoriesand comparativejuxtaposing the evolution of Eliots mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetryBrooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts The first book to read Eliots poems alongside all of his prose and letters T S Eliots Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art as well as of literary modernism

Author: James Richardson The poems are elegies for everything, including myself, writes James Richardson. Beyond this, I cannot pretend to be certain of much about them. I suppose they reflect a self with only a tenuous grip on its surroundings, threatened by their (and its own) continuous vanishing. The poems respond with a helplessness, fitful control, and not a little tenderness. Like the protagonists of The Encyclopedia of Stones: A Pastoral, I am very slow, both unsettled and inspired by the vertiginous strangeness and speed of events. I suspect these melancholy and disembodied poems are attempts to arrest the moment long enough to say farewell, to let things go rather than be subject to their disappearance.Originally published in 1977.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.