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In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (Transformation of the Classical Heritage #21)
by C. E. Nixon Barbara Saylor RodgersHere, for the first time, is an annotated English translation of the eleven later panegyrics (291-389 C.E.) of the XII Panegyrici Latini, with the original Latin text prepared by R. A. B. Mynors. Each panegyric has a thorough introduction, and detailed commentary on historical events, style, figures of speech, and rhetorical strategies accompanies the translations. The very difficult Latin of these insightful speeches is rendered into graceful English, yet remains faithful to the original.
In Praise of Mothers: A Literary Anthology
by Lilly GoldenFourteen unforgettable short stories about mothers by some of the finest writers of our time, contains fiction about both young mothers and older mothers, from the perspective of sons, daughters, and mothers themselves. These stories about motherhood and childhood explore their subject from different and sometimes startling angles, but each touches on the complexity and poignancy-not the sentimentality-of being or having a mother. More than anything else, these stories explore the relationships within all kinds of families-most powerfully, the relationship between mother and child. Included here are Michael Dorris's "Groom Service," about an arranged marriage within a matriarchal society; Frank O'Connor's hilarious "My Oedipus Complex," which describes a small boy's reluctance to share his mother; Alice Walker's "Everyday Use," about a mother's staunch defense of herself and her heritage against her daughter; Charles Baxter's "Fenstad's Mother," in which an aged mother is still wiser than her middle-aged son; and stories by, among others, Hortense Calisher, Mary Lavin, and Pearl S. Buck. In Praise of Mothers will be enjoyed by anyone who is a mother or has a mother-and most of all, by anyone who loves the literary short story
In Praise of Nonsense: Kant and Bluebeard
by Henry Pickford Winfried MenninghausShells, leafwork, picture frames, hummingbirds, wallpaper decorations, hems of clothing--such are the examples Kant's Critique of Judgment offers for a "free" and purely aesthetic beauty. Menninghaus's book demonstrates that all these examples refer to a widely unknown debate on the arabesque and that Kant, in displacing it, addresses genuinely "modern" phenomena. The early Romantic poetics and literature of the arabesque follow and radicalize Kant's move. Menninghaus shows parergonality and "nonsense" to be two key features in the spread of the arabesque from architecture and the fine arts to philosophy and finally to literature. On the one hand, comparative readings of the parergon in Enlightenment aesthetics, Kant, and Schlegel reveal the importance of this term for establishing the very notion of a self-reflective work of art. On the other hand, drawing on Kant's posthumous anthropological notebooks, Menninghaus extrapolates an entire Kantian theory of what it means to produce nonsense and why the Critique of Judgment defines genius precisely through the power (as well as the dangers) of doing so. Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." Menninghaus's close reading of this capricious narrative reveals a specifically Romantic--as opposed, say, to a Victorian or dadaistic--type of nonsense. Benjamin's as well as Propp's, Lévi-Strauss's, and Meletinskij's oppositions of myth and fairy tale lend additional credit to a Romantic poetics that inaugurates "universal poetry" while performing a bizarre trajectory through arabesque ornament, nonsense, parergonality, and the fairy tale.
In Pursuit of Disobedient Women: A Memoir of Love, Rebellion, and Family, Far Away
by Dionne SearceyWhen a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world. <P><P>In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. <P><P>In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. <P><P>As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. <P><P>Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. <P><P>The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.
In Pursuit of Moby-Dick: Of Whales and Their Gods
by Joseph S. CatalanoThis study presents Moby-Dick as a novel with three distinct but interconnecting stories: Ishmael’s, which he shares ten years after it has taken place; Ahab’s, which is Ishmael's account of the memorable captain of a whaling ship; and a third which centres on whales and whaling, which has not received significant critical attention. While each of these perspectives compete for prominence in the narrative, Ahab and Ishmael's stories have often distracted from the vital significance of the whaling narrative as what outlasts Ahab’s obsessive mission. Catalano rights this wrong by coming to a strikingly original and thought-provoking conclusion which becomes the heart of the book's argument: “the unity of Melville’s book comes, first, from the way the numerous literary, philosophical, and religious reflections are rooted in those magnificent beings, whales and in the men and ships that pursue them, and, second, in the way these reflections illuminate our own lives.”
In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero
by Ace Atkins Lawrence BlockWhen Robert B. Parker passed in early 2010, the world lost two great men: Parker himself, iconic American crime writer whose books have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide, and his best-known creation, Spenser. Parker's Spenser series not only influenced the work of countless of today's writers, but is also credited with reviving and forever changing the genre. In Pursuit of Spenser offers a look at Parker and to Spenser through the eyes of the writers he influenced. Editor Otto Penzler-- proprietor of one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstores in the country, New York's The Mysterious Bookshop, and renowned mystery fiction editor whose credits include series editor for the Best American Crime Writing and Best American Mystery Stories, among many others (and about whom Parker himself once wrote, "Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything")-- collects some of today's bestselling mystery authors to discuss Parker, his characters, the series, and their impact on the world. From Hawk to Susan Silverman to Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, from the series' Boston milieu to Parker's own take on his character, In Pursuit of Spenser pays tribute to Spenser, and Parker, with affection, humor, and a deep appreciation for what both have left behind.
In Rough Country
by Joyce Carol OatesIn twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes--Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others--and the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty-eight years of marriage. "As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace, as it was to me when the effort of writing fiction seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime," Oates writes. "Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can't sleep, has been the solace, for me, that saying the Rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another." The results of those meditations are the essays of In Rough Country--balanced and illuminating investigations that demonstrate an artist working at the top of her form.
In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays
by Farah Jasmine GriffinNamed a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The Millions Lively, insightful writings on Black music, feminism, literature, and events from a “masterful critic and master teacher” (Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe). In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin’s rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women’s literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism. She reflects on pivotal moments in recent American history—including the banning of Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and celebrates the intellectuals, artists, and personal relationships that have shaped her identity and her work. Featuring new and unpublished essays along with ones first appearing in outlets such as the New York Times and NPR, In Search of a Beautiful Freedom is a captivating collection that celebrates the work of “one of the few great intellectuals in our time” (Cornel West).
In Search of a Simple Introduction to Communication
by Nimrod Bar-AmThis book is a philosophical introduction to the field of communication and media studies. In search of the philosophical backgrounds of that relatively young field, the book explores why this overwhelmingly popular discipline is in crisis. The book discusses classic introductions on communication, provides an update on lessons learned, and re-evaluates the work of pioneers in the light of up-to-date philosophical standards. It summarizes various debates surrounding the foundations of system theory and especially its applicability to the Social Sciences in general and to Communication Studies in particular. Communication schools promise their students an understanding of the source of a principal and dynamical power in their lives, a power shaping societies and identities, molding aspirations, and deciding their fates. They also promise students a practical benefit, a chance to learn the secret of controlling that dynamical power, improving a set of skills that would ensure them a critical edge in the future job market: become better media experts for all media. Yet no one seems to know how such promises are met. Can there be a general theory of communication? If not, what can (should) communication students learn? This book looks at the problem from a philosophical perspective and proposes a framework wherein critical cases can be tested.
In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought
by Souleymane Bachir Diagne Jean-Loup AmselleThis important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the postcolonial the first phase of a new universalism, one which would be truly universal because it would be fully inclusive, or is it on the contrary the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation? In addressing this issue Diagne and Amselle also tackle many related themes, such as the concepts of race, culture and identity, the role of languages in philosophy as practised in different cultural areas, the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa, and the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his writings on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. While Amselle seeks to expose the essentialist and culturalist logics that might underlie postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diagne consistently refuses to adopt the trappings of the Afrocentrist and particularist thinker. He argues instead for a total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all ‘centrisms’ and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time. This volume is a timely contribution to current debates on the postcolonial question and its new decolonial form. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from African studies and Black studies to philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the debates around postcolonial studies and decolonial thought
In Search of Annie Drew: Jamaica Kincaid's Mother and Muse
by Daryl Cumber DanceThere is perhaps no other person who has been so often and obsessively featured in any writer's canon as Jamaica Kincaid's mother, Annie Drew. In this provocative new book, Daryl Dance argues that everything Kincaid has written, regardless of its apparent theme, actually relates to Kincaid's efforts to free herself from her mother, whether her subject is ostensibly other family members, her home nation, a precolonial world, or even Kincaid herself.A devoted reader of Kincaid's work, Dance had long been aware of the author's love-hate relationship with her mother, but it was not until reading the 2008 essay "The Estrangement" that Dance began to ponder who this woman named Annie Victoria Richardson Drew really was. Dance decided to seek the answers herself, embarking on a years-long journey to unearth the real Annie Drew.Through interviews and extensive research, Dance has pieced together a fuller, more contextualized picture in an attempt to tell Annie Drew's story. Previous analyses of Kincaid's relationship with her mother have not gone beyond the writer's own carefully orchestrated and sometimes contrived portraits of her. In Search of Annie Drew offers an alternate reading of Kincaid's work that expands our understanding of the object of such passionate love and such ferocious hatred, an ordinary woman who became an unforgettable literary figure through her talented daughter's renderings.
In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond
by Eric Walrond"Set in the Caribbean, Panama, the U.S., and England, [Walrond’s] fiction captures the experiences of working-class peoples, often migrants, as they confront the depredations of colonialism, racial prejudice, and economic exploitation. . . . A significant and fascinating collection."--African American Review "Brings together a number of interesting pieces of fiction and non-fiction by this Guyana-born, Barbados- and Panama-bred author."--New West Indian Guide "Forms part of a gradual rehabilitation of Walrond’s work that has been taking place in recent years."--Caribbean Review of Books "Place[s] Walrond squarely on the map. . . . In Search of Asylum could not have arrived at a more propitious time."--sx salon "A substantial step forward for black diaspora and black transnational literary studies."--Gary Edward Holcomb, author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha "Fills a significant void in our understanding of the life and literary career of Eric Walrond. By collecting, for the first time, the writings Walrond produced following his departure from the U.S. in 1928, Parascandola and Wade have done scholars a rich service."--Heather Hathaway, author of Caribbean Waves Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Very little of his later work has been subsequently published or made readily available to American scholars. His writings, set in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, discuss imperialism, racism, the role of the black writer, black identity, and immigration--all topics of vital concern today. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Walrond moved to New York City in 1918 where he worked briefly for Marcus Garvey and became a protégé of Charles S. Johnson. During that time, he wrote short fiction as well as nonfiction and gained a measure of fame for his 1926 collection, Tropic Death. In Search of Asylum compiles Walrond’s European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient. Louis Parascandola and Carl Wade have assembled a collection that at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond’s life, providing insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.
In Search of Chaucer (The Alexander Lectures Series #1958-59)
by Bertrand H. BronsonIn this volume, Professor Bronson is primarily interested in the three worlds which appear in Chaucer's poetry: the dream world; the world of the mundane existence and waking observation; and the world of imagined life through reading. A study of these worlds raises questions about the kind of truth which resides in each, the literary values which can be extracted from them, their essential relation to one another, and the perennial problem of appearance and reality. <P><P>Professor Bronson is also concerned with the general critical approach to Chaucer's writings. He feels that many recent Chaucerian scholars have been misled by their application of critical disciplines nourished on the metaphysical poets to a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being followed by a moderately attentive ear. The fact that Chaucer's poetry was composed for oral delivery has received no more than lip service from critics; yet Chaucer's relation to his audience is obviously of the greatest importance in understanding his poems. It behooves us, therefore, to clarify our thoughts as to the kind of techniques we may fittingly apply. Professor Bronson suggests that a less sophisticated way of looking at the subject might yield better results. <P> Professor Bronson's book is a form of introduction to this new view of Chaucer; it is not a complete guide but an explanatory visit to each sphere of Chaucer's world, skillfully evocative of the people of the dream legends, the pilgrimage, the literary heroes and heroines of the Middle Ages, whom Chaucer brought into his poetry. This book is decorated with drawings in the manner of woodcuts taken from the three worlds of Chaucer's poetry. The Alexander Lectures for 1958-59.
In Search of Creative Commons: Proceedings of the ICSSR Funded International Conference 2023
by Dhritiman Chakraborty Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty Mukunda MishraThis book contains selected papers presented at the international conference titled 'In Search of Creative Commons: Crisis, Catastrophe, and Responsive Literature in India', held at the Abid Ali Khan Centre for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures, Gour Mahavidyalaya (College) from 31 August to 2 September, 2023 in collaboration with the Department of English, Dr. Meghnad Saha College. The conference was funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). In this book, three basic questions are considered. First, as humans try to live in-and-through catastrophes and exceptional situations in the contemporary world, what new perspective can literature as a creative form offer for healing and restorative purposes? Second, what new idioms and narrative styles, massive crises such as famine, partition, migration, the decimation of forests, rivers, and the disappearance of villages held up in creative articulations in colonial and postcolonial times in India? Can these representations be called “responsive literature”? Further, and this is the third major contention of this book, how can responsive literature be thought of as a conceptual category? What new transdisciplinary optic should be adopted to go beyond the limits of the “literary” and eventually include the “non-literary”? The objective of these discussions was to contribute to the larger discursive literature on disaster studies, which we believe has been excessively hegemonized by concepts from the West. By bringing in indigenous ideas from Bhasa Sahitya (language and literature), the images of samaj (society), samata (equity), and ahimsa (non-violence), the existing literature on catastrophe and crisis studies can finally be decolonized.
In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on the Bondwoman's Narrative
by Hollis Robbins Henry Louis Gates Jr.Three years ago, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered an unpublished manuscript, The Bondwoman's Narrative, By Hannah Crafts, A Fugitive Recently Escaped From North Carolina, which turned out to be the first novel by a female African-American slave ever found, and possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere. The Bondwoman's Narrative was published in 2002. In Search of Hannah Crafts now brings together twenty-two authorities on African-American studies to examine such issues as authenticity, and the history and criticism of this unique novel, including Nina Baym, Jean Fagan Yellin, William Andrews, Lawrence Buell, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Shelley Fisher-Fishkin. The Bondwoman's Narrative will take its place in the African-American canon, and In Search of Hannah Crafts is the book that scholars and students of African-American Studies, of women writers, and of slavery, need to have to understand this unprecedented historical and literary event.
In Search of Indian English: History, Politics and Indigenisation
by Ranjan Kumar AuddyThis book presents a historical account of the development of an acrolectal variety of the English language in colonial India. It highlights the phenomenon of Indianization of the English language and its significance in the articulation of the Indian identity in pre-Independence India. This volume also discusses the sociocultural milieu in which English became the first choice for writers and political leaders. Using examples primarily from the writings of Rammohan Roy, Bankimchandra, Krupabai Satthianadhan, and Gandhi and from the speeches of Vivekananda, Tagore, and Subhas Bose, this book argues that prose written in English in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century scripted a nationalist discourse through its appropriation of the colonizer’s language. It also examines how these works, which absorbed elements of Indian culture and languages, paved the path for the emergence of Indian English as a distinct dialect of the English language. This book will be useful for teachers, scholars, and students of English literature, linguistics, and cultural studies. It will also be of use to general readers interested in the history of the English language and the history of modern India.
In Search of Lost Books: The Forgotten Stories of Eight Mythical Volumes
by Giorgio Van Straten Simon Carnell Erica SegreThe gripping and elegiac stories of eight lost books, and the mysterious circumstances behind their disappearances.They exist as a rumour or a fading memory. They vanished from history leaving scarcely a trace, lost to fire, censorship, theft, war or deliberate destruction, yet those who seek them are convinced they will find them. This is the story of one man's quest for eight mysterious lost books.Taking us from Florence to Regency London, the Russian Steppe to British Columbia, Giorgio van Straten unearths stories of infamy and tragedy, glimmers of hope and bitter twists of fate. There are, among others, the rediscovered masterpiece that he read but failed to save from destruction; the Hemingway novel that vanished in a suitcase at the Gare du Lyon; the memoirs of Lord Byron, burnt to avoid a scandal; the Magnum Opus of Bruno Schulz, disappeared along with its author in wartime Poland; the mythical Sylvia Plath novel that may one day become reality. As gripping as a detective novel, as moving as an elegy, this is the tale of a love affair with the impossible, of the things that slip away from us but which, sometimes, live again in the stories we tell.
In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
by Fiona SampsonCoinciding with the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, a prize-winning poet delivers a major new biography of Mary Shelley—as she has never been seen before. We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail—the death of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, within days of her birth; the upbringing in the house of her father, William Godwin, in a house full of radical thinkers, poets, philosophers, and writers; her elopement, at the age of seventeen, with Percy Shelley; the years of peripatetic travel across Europe that followed. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person—what she actually thought and felt and why she did what she did—despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life. In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a nineteen-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished, and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later. No previous biographer has ever truly considered this question, let alone answered it.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
by Alice WalkerA collection of essays by Alice Walker covering topics of feminism and race. Some of the themes included in her award winning novel "The Color Purple" are reflected in several of these essays. The final one tells of how she was blinded in one eye at age 8.
In Search of Robinson Crusoe
by Tim SeverinInsightful travel writing, riveting narrative history, and clever scholarly discoveries make this a remarkably rich and varied book. Tim Severin has once again demonstrated a superb ability to bring together literature and adventure in an engrossing narrative.
In Search of Russian Modernism (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)
by Leonid LivakA critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural historiography.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language AssociationThe writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism. Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak's approach opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly inquiry beyond traditional artistic media in order to account for modernism's socioeconomic and institutional history. Writing with a student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian modernism as a minority culture coexisting with other cultural formations while addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when discussing modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is also intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.
In Search of Stanislavsky’s Creative State on the Stage: With a Practice as Research Case Study
by Gabriela CurpanThis book rediscovers a spiritual way of preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable artistic creativity defined by Konstantin Stanislavski as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox background, as well as his yogic or Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the artist, from being oneself towards becoming the character, being structured in three major horizontal stages and developed on another three vertical, interconnected levels. Throughout the book, Gabriela Curpan aims to question both the cartesian approach to acting and the realist-psychological line, generally viewed as the only features of Stanislavski’s work. This book will be of great interest to theatre and performance academics as well as practitioners in the fields of acting and directing.
In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul (Distinguished Speakers Series)
by Svetlana Alexievich"I love life in its living form, life that’s found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans." So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral history, and creative writing.Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.
In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender (Open Access Lib And Hc Ser.)
by Barbara Fass LeavyIn her compendious study, [of the folktale of the runaway wife] Leavy argues that the contradictory claims of nature and culture are embodied in the legendary figure of the swan maiden, a woman torn between the human and bestial worlds. --The New York Times Book Review This is a study of the meaning of gender as framed by the swan maiden tale, a story found in the folklore of virtually every culture. The swan maiden is a supernatural woman forced to marry, keep house, and bear children for a mortal man who holds the key to her imprisonment. When she manages to regain this key, she escapes to the otherworld, never to return. These tales have most often been interpreted as depicting exogamous marriages, describing the girl from another tribe trapped in a world where she will always be the outsider. Barbara Fass Leavy believes that, in the societies in which the tale and its variants endured, woman was the other--the outsider trapped in a society that could never be her own. Leavy shows how the tale, though rarely explicitly recognized, is frequently replayed in modern literature. Beautifully written, this book reveals the myriad ways in which the folktales of a society reflect its cultural values, and particularly how folktales are allegories of gender relations. It will interest anyone involved in literary, gender, and cultural studies.
In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender
by Barbara Fass LeavyIn her compendious study, [of the folktale of the runaway wife] Leavy argues that the contradictory claims of nature and culture are embodied in the legendary figure of the swan maiden, a woman torn between the human and bestial worlds. --The New York Times Book Review This is a study of the meaning of gender as framed by the swan maiden tale, a story found in the folklore of virtually every culture. The swan maiden is a supernatural woman forced to marry, keep house, and bear children for a mortal man who holds the key to her imprisonment. When she manages to regain this key, she escapes to the otherworld, never to return. These tales have most often been interpreted as depicting exogamous marriages, describing the girl from another tribe trapped in a world where she will always be the outsider. Barbara Fass Leavy believes that, in the societies in which the tale and its variants endured, woman was the other--the outsider trapped in a society that could never be her own. Leavy shows how the tale, though rarely explicitly recognized, is frequently replayed in modern literature. Beautifully written, this book reveals the myriad ways in which the folktales of a society reflect its cultural values, and particularly how folktales are allegories of gender relations. It will interest anyone involved in literary, gender, and cultural studies.