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.
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and ...anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.
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.
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.
Architectural Styles Margaret Fletcher, Robbie Polley
2021, 2020, 2021-01-26
eBook
A hand-drawn guide to architectural styles throughout history Architectural Styles is an incomparable guide to architectural styles across the centuries and around the world. Modeled after an ...architect's plein air sketchbook, the volume features hundreds of detailed drawings by esteemed architectural illustrator Robbie Polley alongside incisive and informative descriptions. This unique guidebook takes readers from Europe and the Americas to Egypt, China, and India. It covers a host of historical and contemporary architectural styles, from ancient and classical to Pre-Columbian, Romanesque, Renaissance, Palladian, art nouveau, Brutalist, and biomorphic. It describes the histories and characteristics of the building traditions of each era and region of the world, and looks at key architectural elements such as buttresses, spandrels, curtain walls, and oculi. The book also includes a section on building parts—from domes and columns to towers, arches, roofs, and vaulting—along with a detailed glossary and bibliography.Comprehensive and authoritative, Architectural Styles is an essential resource for architects and designers and a must-have illustrated guide for anyone interested in architecture or drawing.
