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Rituality and Social: The Historical Anthropology of Popular Carnival in Europe (Routledge Studies in Cultural History #98)
by Alessandro TestaCarnival has been described as one of the foundational elements of European culture, bearing an emblematic and iconic status as the festive phenomenon par excellence. Its origins are partly obscure, but its stratified and complex history, rich symbolic diversity, and sundry social configurations make it an exceptional object of cultural analysis. The product of more than 12 years of research, this book is the first comparative historical anthropology of popular European Carnival in the English language, with a focus on its symbolic, religious, and political dimensions and transformations throughout the centuries. It builds on a variety of theories of social change and social structures, questioning existing assumptions about what folklore is and how cultural gaps and differences take shape and reproduce through ritual forms of collective action. It also challenges recent interpretations about the performative and political dimension of European festive culture, especially in its carnivalesque declension. While presenting and exploring the most important features and characteristics of European pre-modern Carnival and discussing its origins and developments, this thorough study offers fresh evidence and up-to-date analyses about its transversal and long-lasting significance in European societies.
Rival Queens
by Felicity NussbaumIn eighteenth-century England, actresses were frequently dismissed as mere prostitutes trading on their sexual power rather than their talents. Yet they were, Felicity Nussbaum argues, central to the success of a newly commercial theater. Urban, recently moneyed, and thoroughly engaged with their audiences, celebrated actresses were among the first women to achieve social mobility, cultural authority, and financial independence. In fact, Nussbaum contends, the eighteenth century might well be called the "age of the actress" in the British theater, given women's influence on the dramatic repertory and, through it, on the definition of femininity.Treating individual star actresses who helped spark a cult of celebrity--especially Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy--Rival Queens reveals the way these women animated issues of national identity, property, patronage, and fashion in the context of their dramatic performances. Actresses intentionally heightened their commercial appeal by catapulting the rivalries among themselves to center stage. They also boldly rivaled in importance the actor-managers who have long dominated eighteenth-century theater history and criticism. Felicity Nussbaum combines an emphasis on the celebrated actresses themselves with close analysis of their diverse roles in works by major playwrights, including George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Colley Cibber, Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Richard Sheridan. Hers is a comprehensive and original argument about the importance of actresses as the first modern subjects, actively shaping their public identities to make themselves into celebrated properties.
The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine (The Early Modern Englishwoman, 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions)
by Tiffany PotterElizabeth Cooper's The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine provides a unique opportunity to restore to scholarly and pedagogical attention a neglected female writer and a play with broad and significant implications for studies of eighteenth-century history, culture and gender. Following the adventures of Lady Bellair, a "glowing, joyous young Widow," the storyline regenders standard expectations about desire, marriage, libertinism and sentiment. The play has not been reprinted since 1735; therefore this old-spelling edition gives scholars access to an important but neglected resource for studies of women writers and eighteenth-century theatre. In an original and extensive introduction, Tiffany Potter presents cultural and historical information that highlights the scholarly implications of this newly available play. She offers a brief biographical sketch of the playwright; a summary of sources for specific elements of the play; an overview of the theatrical climate of the time (with particular focus on the conditions leading to the Licensing Act of 1737); a discussion of the place of women in eighteenth-century society; a summary of symbiotic cultural discourses of libertinism and sensibility in the early eighteenth century; and a discussion of the general cultural significance of Cooper's demonstration of the malleability of prescriptive gender roles. Further value is added to this edition through its appendices, which reproduce documents relating to the playwright Elizabeth Cooper and to the Licensing Act of 1737 (including the text of the Act itself).
Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales
by Nancy Mason BradburyIn this elegantly written study, Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary.In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers.Revelatory and persuasive, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern English literature as well as those interested in proverbs and the Canterbury Tales.
A River Called Titash (Voices from Asia #7)
by Adwaita MallabarmanOriginally published in 1956, A River Called Titash is among the most highly acclaimed novels in Bengali literature. A unique combination of folk poetry and ethnography, Adwaita Mallabarman's tale of a Malo fishing village at the turn of the century captures the songs, speech, rituals, and rhythms of a once self-sufficient community and culture swept away by natural catastrophe, modernization, and political conflict.Both historical document and work of art, this lyrical novel provides an intimate view of a community of Hindu fishers and Muslim peasants, coexisting peacefully before the violent partition of Bengal between India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Mallabarman's story documents a way of life that has all but disappeared.
The River Fans Out: Literature and its Theories in China (China Academic Library)
by Yiheng ZhaoThis book presents 18 highly influential essays on Chinese literature and semiotics by Professor Zhao Yiheng, including his analysis and discussions of the development of Chinese literature and its characteristics from traditional to modern times. It is divided into three parts: traditional Chinese literature, contemporary Chinese literature, and semiotics. In the first part, Professor Zhao summarizes the core elements of narrative cultural relations, ethical dilemmas, and narrative features. He also provides a comprehensive description of the formal structures in Chinese traditional literature. Taking the traditional Chinese play White Rabbit as a case, he discusses the connections between the narrative structure and the characteristics of Chinese novels and stratification of Chinese culture.
The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan
by Adam KabatIn Edo-period Japan, readers relished works known as kibyōshi that combined text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga. Monsters often took center stage in these stories. This book presents a selection of Edo monster comics in English for the first time, introducing readers to a captivating, humorous, and eye-opening genre of popular fiction.The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales collects five kibyōshi published between 1778 and 1807, chosen for both entertainment value and stylistic variety. Their authors reinvent traditional Japanese monsters as contemporary characters who mirror the foibles of the human world. They tell stories such as: The lover of the long-necked rokuro-kubi makes a ridiculous attempt to rescue her from her human captor. A mischievous river creature steals a jewel lodged deep inside a boy’s buttocks, setting off a curious chain of events involving a historical samurai and a real-life “fart man.” A demon girl from hell is sent to the world of the living in order to destroy a sacred Buddhist statue—but things don’t go quite as she plans. Exploring the grotesque, comic, bumbling, salacious, and charming world of these creatures, the stories also provide a glimpse into the society and culture of Edo-period Japan through the monsters’ distorted lens. The kibyōshi are reproduced in their entirety, conveying the feel of the original comics and allowing readers to experience the full visual impact of the monsters.
River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (Routledge Library Editions: Romanticism #6)
by Colin ClarkeFirst published in 1969. This title concerns itself with the ambivalence of Lawrence’s attitude towards corruption. Clarke demonstrates that Lawrence’s attitude to ‘will’ and to sensational or disintegrative sex is much more equivocal than conceded. At the same time this is a study of Lawrence’s debt as a novelist to the English Romantic poets. A tradition of metaphor is traced from the second half of the eighteenth century, through the poetry of the major Romantics to the Decadents, and so to Lawrence, whose attitudes to mechanism and corruption are shown to be articulated, above all, through ambivalent images of dissolution and disintegration. This title will be of interest to students of literature.
River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (Southern Literary Studies)
by Thomas Ruys SmithEven in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life.Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature.From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
A River without Banks
by William JohnsonA River without Banks chronicles one family's journey to Idaho, with all of its uncertainties, promises, and hopes. The book explores their encounters with a place still partly wild, whose communities and landscapes teach them how to respect the earth and each other. William Johnson's essays move from a family vacation spent observing moose, to a comparison of the creation myths from Genesis and the Nez Perce, to watching a raptor seeking prey. Johnson meditates on how places, animals, and people teach us "how to see, and how we do, and don't, belong." In prose that reveals a poet's eye, Johnson examines how family relationships affect how we see the natural world. He explores the power of words to divide and to heal. He illuminates the challenges of sustaining a vital relationship with a home place. A River without Banks will appeal to readers interested in the literature of place, ecology, natural history, indigenous culture, and conservation.
Rivers in Russian Literature
by Margaret ZiolkowskiRivers in Russian Literature focuses on the Russian literary and folkloric treatment of five rivers—the Dnieper, Volga, Neva, Don, and Angara. Each chapter traces, within a geographical and historical context, the evolution of the literary representation of one river. Imagination may endow a river with aesthetic or spiritual qualities; ethnic, national, or racial associations; or commercial or agricultural symbolism of many kinds. Russian literary responses to these five rivers have much to tell us about the society that produced them as well as the rivers they treat.Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS
The Riverside Reader
by Joseph F. Trimmer Maxine HairstonThe seventh edition of The Riverside Reader, like its predecessors, presents essays by acknowledged masters of prose style, including George Orwell, Flannery O'Connor, and Maya Angelou, along with many new voices such as Judith Ortiz Cofer, Natalie Angier, John Berendt, and Wendy Lesser. Almost half of the selections are new to this edition. As always, introductions, readings, study questions, and writing assignments are simple, clear, and cogent.
Riveting Reports (The Effective Writing Series)
by Bruce Ross-LarsonWhether you are composing a Web page on the Internet or agonizing over an annual budget report, these books are the key to clarity, accuracy, and economy in any writing task. Covers everything from the first spark of inspiration to the final draft. Writers will see how a series of careful questions will lead them to the messages of their reports, and will learn how to let those messages drive the structure of the piece. From this foundation they will be able to create a paragraph-by-paragraph plan of their entire report. A final chapter explains the author's techniques for editing reports of any length.
The Road into the Open
by Arthur Schnitzler Roger Byers Russell Berman<p>A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austrian liberal society under the impact of nationalism and anti-semitism, The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie, 1908) is a remarkable novel by a major Austrian writer of the early twentieth century. Set in fin-de-siècle Austria―the cafés, salons, and musical concerts frequented by the Viennese elite―Schnitzler's perceptive exploration of the creative process and the private lives and public aspirations of urban Jewish intellectuals ranks with the highest achievements of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. <p>The novel's central character, Baron Georg von Wergenthin, is a handsome young composer whose troubled relations with women, musical collaborators, and representatives of the old social order make Schnitzler's book a revealing investigation of individual psychology and social allegory. In his comprehensive introduction, Russell Berman situates the book within the literary and political history of Central Europe and analyzes its relation to psychoanalysis, Marxism, musical aesthetics, and the legacy of European modernism.</p>
The Road Less Traveled: Seventh Grade Reader (Reading to Learn)
by Tim KennedyThe Road Less Traveled, Grade 7 Reader (Reading to Learn Series)
ROAD-MAPPING English Medium Education in the Internationalised University
by Emma Dafouz Ute SmitThis book is the first to offer a conceptual framework of English-medium education that can be used across different international higher education (HE) contexts. It provides readers with an understanding of the complexities, possibilities and challenges that this phenomenon raises in the 21st century. Making the case for the pressing need for an overarching conceptualisation, the authors discuss, from a theoretical point of view, the recently introduced ROAD-MAPPING framework for ‘English Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings’ (EMEMUS). Drawing on current research and examples from a variety of settings, the book makes a strong case for the applicability of the framework in two important directions: as a methodological tool for researching educational practices and as an analytical guide to examine policies and teacher education programmes.
The Road Not Taken
by David OrrA cultural "biography" of Robert Frost's beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . ." One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost's immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr's The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem's enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem's cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. "The Road Not Taken" seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking "the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering?What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, "The Road Not Taken" is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor.Published for the poem's centennial--along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost's poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself--The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.
The Road Not Taken
by David OrrA cultural "biography" of Robert Frost's beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . ." One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost's immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr's The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem's enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem's cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. "The Road Not Taken" seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking "the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering?What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, "The Road Not Taken" is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor.Published for the poem's centennial--along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost's poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself--The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.
The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
by Marcus BoonFrom the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history. In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.
The Road to Dune
by Kevin J. Anderson Brian Herbert Frank HerbertDune is perhaps the most popular sf series created in the last fifty years. Now, for the first time, readers can see into the mind of the author as he writes about and writes Dune. His son and Kevin J. Anderson provide a novel based on an original design of Dune that never happened and provide several short stories and introductory notes before each new section.
The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
by Tom Shippey&“Uniquely qualified to explicate Tolkien&’s worldview,&” this journey into the roots of the Lord of the Rings is a classic in its own right (Salon.com).From beloved epic fantasy classic to record-breaking cinematic success, J.R.R. Tolkien's story of four brave hobbits has enraptured the hearts and minds of generations. Now, readers can go deeper into this enchanting lore with a revised edition of Tom Shippey's classic exploration of Middle-earth. From meditations on Tolkien's inspiration to analyses of the influences of his professional background, The Road to Middle-earth takes a closer look at the novels that made Tolkien a legend. Shippey also illuminates Tolkien's more difficult works set in the same world, including The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the myth cycle, and examines the remarkable twelve-volume History of Middle-earth, written by J.R.R.'s son Christopher Tolkien. At once a celebration of a beloved classic and a revealing literary study, The Road to Middle-earth is required reading for fantasy fans and English literature scholars alike.
The Road to Oz: Twists, Turns, Bumps, and Triumphs in the Life of L. Frank Baum
by Kathleen Krull Illustrated by Kevin HawkesKATHLEEN KRULL’S LIVELY text traces the life of L. Frank Baum from his dreamy privileged childhood in mid-19th-century upstate New York through the many detours on his road to Oz. A failure as an actor, a breeder of prize chickens, a merchant in a wild west town, among other occupations, he finally made a success doing exactly what he had always loved to do: tell stories for children. Along the way, we see the antecedents of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, green glasses, and other characters and attributes of the famous fantasy land. This is the first biography of L. Frank Baum that children can enjoy. With the same verve she brought to her biography of Dr. Seuss, Kathleen Krull’s wry prose couples with Kevin Hawke’s exuberant paintings and drawings to create a book not to be missed by Oz fans of all ages.
Road to Reading: A Program for Preventing and Remediating Reading Difficulties
by Benita A. Blachman Darlene M. TangelRoad to Reading provides a framework for providing both early intervention to prevent reading difficulties and remedial instruction for students who are struggling to learn to read.
The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (Routledge Library Editions: Cinema)
by Jon LewisThis book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority – school, church, family. Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston, Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, Theodor Adorno, Simon Frith, and Dick Hebdige, the author draws an innovative and flexible model of a cultural history of youth. Originally published in 1992.