Fiction has become nearly synonymous with literature itself, as if Homer and Dante and Pynchon were all engaged in the same basic activity. But one difficulty with this view is simply that a ...literature trafficking in openly invented characters is a quite recent development. Novelists before the nineteenth century ceaselessly asserted that their novels were true stories, and before that, poets routinely took their basic plots and heroes from the past. We have grown accustomed to thinking of the history of literature and the novel as a progression from the ideal to the real. Yet paradoxically, the modern triumph of realism is also the triumph of a literature that has shed all pretense to literalness.Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Noveloffers a new understanding of the early history of the genre in England and France, one in which writers were not slowly discovering a type of fictionality we now take for granted but rather following a distinct set of practices and rationales. Nicholas D. Paige reinterprets Lafayette'sLa Princesse de Clèves, Rousseau'sJulie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, Diderot'sLa Religieuse, and other French texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in light of the period's preoccupation with literal truth. Paige argues that novels like these occupied a place before fiction, a pseudofactual realm that in no way leads to modern realism. The book provides an alternate way of looking at a familiar history, and in its very idiom and methodology charts a new course for how we should study the novel and think about the evolution of cultural forms.
A multifaceted picture of the dynamic concepts of time and temporality is demonstrated in medieval and Renaissance art, as adopted in speculative, ecclesiastical, socio-political, propagandist, ...moralistic, and poetic contexts. Questions regarding perception of time are investigated through innovative aspects of Renaissance iconography.
This cultural history of American federalism argues that
nation-building cannot be understood apart from the process of
industrialization and the making of the working class in the
...late-eighteenth-century United States. Citing the coincidental rise
of federalism and industrialism, Laura Rigal examines the creations
and performances of writers, collectors, engineers, inventors, and
illustrators who assembled an early national "world of things," at
a time when American craftsmen were transformed into wage laborers
and production was rationalized, mechanized, and put to new
ideological purposes. American federalism emerges here as a culture
of self-making, in forms as various as street parades, magazine
writing, painting, autobiography, advertisement, natural history
collections, and trials and trial transcripts. Chapters center on
the craftsmen who celebrated the Constitution by marching in
Philadelphia's Grand Federal Procession of 1788; the
autobiographical writings of John Fitch, an inventor of the
steamboat before Fulton; the exhumation and museum display of the
"first American mastodon" by the Peale family of Philadelphia;
Joseph Dennie's literary miscellany, the Port Folio ; the
nine-volume American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson; and
finally the autobiography and portrait of Philadelphia locksmith
Pat Lyon, who was falsely imprisoned for bank robbery in 1798 but
eventually emerged as an icon for the American working man. Rigal
demonstrates that federalism is not merely a political movement, or
an artifact of language, but a phenomenon of culture: one among
many innovations elaborated in the "manufactory" of early American
nation-building.
Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion offers a rigorous account of the Gothic impulses informing British, American and European literary culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...centuries.
The first English translation of Volkmann's Bilderschriften der Renaissance, the pioneering review of the influence of the hieroglyph on Renaissance culture, focused on the literature of emblem and ...device in Germany and France.
In The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the ...workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences—both ancient and modern—a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
Roman imagery and iconography are typically studied under the more general umbrella of Roman art and in broader, medium-specific studies. This handbook focuses primarily on visual imagery in the ...Roman world, examined by context and period, and the evolving scholarly traditions of iconographic analysis and visual semiotics that have framed the modern study of these images. As such topics—or, more directly, the isolation of these topics from medium-specific or strictly temporal evaluations of Roman art—are uncommon in monograph-length studies, our goal is that this handbook will be an important reference for both the communicative value of images in the Roman world and the tradition of iconographical analysis. The chapters herein represent contributions from a number of leading and emerging authorities on Roman imagery and iconography from across the world, representing a variety of academic traditions and methods of image analysis.
Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse ...discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects.
Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world-in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.
The story of a hands-on genre of prints: how innovative paper engineering redefined the relationship of early modern viewers to art, humanism, and science.
