An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism.   With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and ...work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work.   Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics.   Chesnutt and Realism also addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.   
In an "other world" composed of language-it could be a fathomless Martian well, a labyrinthine hotel or forest-a narrative unfolds, and with it the experiences, memories, and dreams that constitute ...reality for Haruki Murakami's characters and readers alike. Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts-people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer's extraordinary fiction.
Fervently acclaimed worldwide, Murakami's wildly imaginative work in many ways remains a mystery, its worlds within worlds uncharted territory. Finally in this book readers will find a map to the strange realm that grounds virtually every aspect of Murakami's writing. A journey through the enigmatic and baffling innermost mind, a metaphysical dimension where Murakami's most bizarre scenes and characters lurk,The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakamiexposes the psychological and mythological underpinnings of this other world. Matthew Carl Strecher shows how these considerations color Murakami's depictions of the individual and collective soul, which constantly shift between the tangible and intangible but in this literary landscape are undeniably real.
Through these otherworldly depthsThe Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakamialso charts the writer's vivid "inner world," whether unconscious or underworld (what some Japanese critics callachiragawa, or "over there"), and its connectivity to language. Strecher covers all of Murakami's work-including his efforts as a literary journalist-and concludes with the first full-length close reading of the writer's newest novel,Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a growing notion of the value of a large populace created a sense of urgency about reproduction; accordingly, a wide array of English writers of the ...time voiced the need not merely to add more people but also to ensure that England had an abundance of the right kinds of people. This need, in turn, called for a variety of institutions to train-and thus make, through a kind of nonbiological procreation—pious, enterprising, and dutiful subjects. In Increase and Multiply, David Glimp examines previously unexplored links between this emergent demographic mentality and Renaissance literature.
Classical Form Caplin, William E
2000, 1998, 1998-05-14
eBook
Building on ideas first advanced by Arnold Schoenberg and later developed by Erwin Ratz, this book introduces a new theory of form for instrumental music in the classical style. The theory provides a ...broad set of principles and a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of classical form, from individual ideas, phrases, and themes to the large-scale organization of complete movements. It emphasizes the notion of formal function, that is, the specific role a given formal unit plays in the structural organization of a classical work.
Winner of the 21st International Book of the Year Prize in Iran This book investigates the convergence of philosophy, scriptural exegesis, and mysticism in the thought of the celebrated Islamic ...philosopher Mull? ?adr? (d. 1050/1640). Through a careful presentation of the theoretical and practical dimensions of ?adr?'s Qur'?nic hermeneutics, Mohammed Rustom highlights the manner in which ?adr? offers a penetrating metaphysical commentary upon the F?ti?a, the chapter of the Qur'?n that occupies central importance in Muslim daily life. Engaging such medieval intellectual giants as Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z? (d. 606/1210) and Ibn 'Arab? (d. 638/1240) on the one hand, and the wider disciplines of philosophy, theology, Sufism, and Qur'?nic exegesis on the other, ?adr?'s commentary upon the F?ti?a provides him with the opportunity to modify and recast many of his philosophical positions within a scripture-based framework. He thereby reveals himself to be a profound religious thinker who, among other things, argues for the salvation of all human beings in the afterlife.
Melchizedek is a mysterious figure to many people. Adopting discourse analysis and text-linguistic approaches, Chan attempts to tackle the Melchizedek texts in Genesis 14, Psalm 110, and Hebrews 5-7. ...This seminal study illustrates how the mysterious figure is understood and interpreted by later biblical writers, "... Using the “blessing” motif as a framework, Chan also argues that Numbers 22-24, 2 Samuel 7 and the Psalter: Books I-V (especially Psalms 1-2) provide a reading paradigm of interpreting Psalm 110. In addition, the structure of Hebrews provides a clue to how the author interprets the Old Testament texts.
The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized ...this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
The first book devoted to Coleridge’s influence on Emerson and the development of American Transcendentalism. As Samantha Harvey demonstrates, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought galvanized Emerson at ...a pivotal moment in his intellectual development in the years 1826-1836, giving him new ways to harmonize the Romantic triad of nature, spirit and humanity. Emerson did not think about Coleridge: he thought with Coleridge, resulting in a unique case of assimilative influence. In addition to examining his specific literary, philosophical, and theological influences on Emerson, this book reveals Coleridge’s centrality for Boston Transcendentalism and Vermont Transcendentalism, a movement which profoundly affected the development of modern higher education, the national press, and the emergence of Pragmatism.
Moral Enterprise: Literature and Education in Antebellum America, by Derek Pacheco, investigates an important moment in the history of professional authorship. Pacheco uses New England “literary ...reformers” Horace Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller to argue that writers came to see in educational reform, and the publication venues emerging in connection with it, a means to encourage popular authorship while validating literary work as a profession. Although today’s schools are staffed by systematically trained and institutionally sanctioned teachers, in the unregulated, decentralized world of antebellum America, literary men and women sought the financial stability of teaching while claiming it as moral grounds for the pursuit of greater literary fame.
Examining the ethically redemptive and potentially lucrative definition of antebellum author as educator, this book traces the way these literary reformers aimed not merely at social reform through literature but also at the reform of literature itself by employing a wide array of practices—authoring, editing, publishing, and distributing printed texts—brought together under the aegis of modern, democratic education. Moral Enterprise identifies such endeavors by their dual valence as bold, reformist undertakings and economic ventures, exploring literary texts as educational commodities that might act as entry points into, and ways to tame, what Mann characterized as the “Alexandrian library” of American print culture.
