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Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
by Maurice S. LeeThe role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life, as Americans attempted to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance policies, military strategy, and financial dealings. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers confronted questions of doubt and belief. Poe's detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods; Melville's works struggle to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance; Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism; Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order; and Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today--fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.
The Uncanny (PDF)
by Nicholas RoyleThis is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important topic for contemporary thinking on literature, film, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer history.
Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties
by Jo CollinsThis book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.
Unbuttoning America: A Biography of "Peyton Place"
by Ardis CameronPublished in 1956, Peyton Place became a bestseller and a literary phenomenon. A lurid and gripping story of murder, incest, female desire, and social injustice, it was consumed as avidly by readers as it was condemned by critics and the clergy. Its author, Grace Metalious, a housewife who grew up in poverty in a New Hampshire mill town and had aspired to be a writer from childhood, loosely based the novel's setting, characters, and incidents on real-life places, people, and events. The novel sold more than 30 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and it was adapted into a hit Hollywood film in 1957 and a popular television series that aired from 1964 to 1969. More than half a century later, the term "Peyton Place" is still in circulation as a code for a community harboring sordid secrets.In Unbuttoning America, Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon. She argues that Peyton Place, with its frank discussions of poverty, sexuality, class and ethnic discrimination, and small-town hypocrisy, was more than a tawdry potboiler. Metalious's depiction of how her three central female characters come to terms with their identity as women and sexual beings anticipated second-wave feminism. More broadly, Cameron asserts, the novel was also part of a larger postwar struggle over belonging and recognition. Fictionalizing contemporary realities, Metalious pushed to the surface the hidden talk and secret rebellions of a generation no longer willing to ignore the disparities and domestic constraints of Cold War America.
The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France
by Emily ButterworthThe Unbridled Tongue looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France in order to uncover what was specific about these practices in the period. Taking its cue from Erasmus's Lingua, in which both the subjective and political consequences of an idle and unbridled tongue are emphasised, the book investigates the impact of gossip and rumour on contemporary conceptions of identity and political engagement. Emily Butterworth discusses prescriptive literature on the tongue and theological discussions of Pentecost and prophecy, and then covers nearly a century in chapters focused on a single text: Rabelais's Tiers Livre, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, Ronsard's Discours des misères de ce temps, Montaigne's 'Des boyteux', Brantôme's Dames galantes and the anonymous Caquets de l'accouchée. In covering the 'long sixteenth century', the book is able to investigate the impact of the French Wars of Religion on perceptions of gossip and rumour, and place them in the context of an emerging public sphere of political critique and discussion, principally through the figure of the 'public voice' which, although it was associated with unruly utterance, was nevertheless a powerful rhetorical tool for the expression of grievances. The Cynic virtue of parrhesia, or free speech, is similarly ambivalent in many accounts, oscillating between bold truth-telling (liberté) and disordered babble (licence). Drawing on modern and pre-modern theories of the uses and function of gossip, the book argues that, despite this ambivalence in descriptions of the tongue, gossip and idle talk were finally excluded from the public sphere by being associated with the feminine and the irrational.
Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)
by William RobertA study of religion through the lens of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. In Unbridled, William Robert uses Equus, Peter Shaffer’s enigmatic play about a boy passionately devoted to horses, to think differently about religion. For several years, Robert has used Equus to introduce students to the study of religion, provoking them to conceive of religion in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable ways. In Unbridled, he is inviting readers to do the same. A play like Equus tangles together text, performance, practice, embodiment, and reception. Studying a play involves us in playing different roles, as ourselves and others, and those roles, as well as the imaginative work they require, are critical to the study of religion. By approaching Equus with the reader, turning the play around and upside-down, Unbridled transforms standard approaches to the study of religion, engaging with themes including ritual, sacrifice, worship, power, desire, violence, and sexuality, as well as thinkers including Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jonathan Z. Smith. As Unbridled shows, the way themes and theories play out in Equus challenges us to reimagine the study of religion through open questions, contrasting perspectives, and alternative modes of interpretation and appreciation.
Unbridled: Studying Religion in Performance (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)
by William RobertA study of religion through the lens of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus. In Unbridled, William Robert uses Equus, Peter Shaffer’s enigmatic play about a boy passionately devoted to horses, to think differently about religion. For several years, Robert has used Equus to introduce students to the study of religion, provoking them to conceive of religion in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable ways. In Unbridled, he is inviting readers to do the same. A play like Equus tangles together text, performance, practice, embodiment, and reception. Studying a play involves us in playing different roles, as ourselves and others, and those roles, as well as the imaginative work they require, are critical to the study of religion. By approaching Equus with the reader, turning the play around and upside-down, Unbridled transforms standard approaches to the study of religion, engaging with themes including ritual, sacrifice, worship, power, desire, violence, and sexuality, as well as thinkers including Judith Butler, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jonathan Z. Smith. As Unbridled shows, the way themes and theories play out in Equus challenges us to reimagine the study of religion through open questions, contrasting perspectives, and alternative modes of interpretation and appreciation.
Unbounded Dependency Constructions: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives (Oxford Surveys in Syntax & Morphology #10)
by Michael T. Putnam Rui P. ChavesThis book is about one of the most intriguing features of human communication systems: the fact that words that go together in meaning can occur arbitrarily far away from each other. In the sentence This is technology that most people think about, but rarely consider the implications of, the word 'technology' is interpreted as if it were simultaneously next to the words 'about' and 'of'. This kind of long-distance dependency has been the subject of intense linguistic and psycholinguistic research for the last half century, and offers a unique insight into the nature of grammatical structures and their interaction with cognition. The constructions in which these unbounded dependencies arise are remarkably difficult to model and come with a rather puzzling array of constraints that have often defied characterization or proper explanation. This work provides a detailed survey of these constructions and the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, describes new experimental evidence that sheds light on the nature of the phenomenon, and suggests new avenues for future research. The volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in the fields of morphosyntax, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.
Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment And Politics In The Age Of The French Revolution
by Harriet GuestUnbounded Attachment is about the uses of the language of sentiment in British women's writing from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jane Austen. It focuses on a range of writers for whom this language has the potential to hold together disparate elements in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century society. This potential is important to the complex politics of Charlotte Smith's response, in her long poem The Emigrants, to the onset of war with France in 1793. The language of sentiment eases the transitions in Mary Robinson's writing between courtly praise for the French queen and liberal political opinion, and shapes her attitudes to the exchange between personal sociability and the expanding commercial market for her work. For women writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Elizabeth Inchbald the display of sentiment makes it possible to negotiate between the demands of commercial success and sociable or political allegiance. William Godwin admired Mary Wollstonecraft's capacity for an all-embracing sentiment of 'unbounded attachment' to humanity, and posthumous accounts such as Mary Hays's, as well as fictional heroines loosely based on Wollstonecraft's reputation, emphasised the strength of feeling, the enthusiasm, which united her private character and her politics, and evoked powerful responses from both her immediate social circle and her readers. The success of Jane Austen's novels depended on the access they gave readers to the privacy of her heroines' minds, where their sensibility apprehends an underlying coherence in the apparently disjointed social worlds in which they lived.
Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns
by Suzanne HobsonThis volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.
Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture: Doubting Moderns
by Suzanne HobsonThis volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.
Unauthorized Outlooks on Second Languages Education and Policies: Voices from Colombia
by Carmen Helena Guerrero-NietoThis edited book presents a critical vision of language and education policies and practices in Colombia, examining neoliberal perspectives which influence the promotion of English at all levels in the Colombian educational system. Some of the chapters emphasize questions of language teacher recognition and empowerment, while others focus on both teachers and students’ visions of national policies, particularly with regard to colonial and Eurocentric discourses and subsequent discriminatory practices. The volume throws light on recent language and education policies and practices in a South American country where much current research in this area is published in Spanish but not in English, and it gives visibility to voices that are often missing from the global conversation around English language teaching (ELT). Making these voices heard is part of a decolonial project that gives legitimacy to "unauthorized outlooks", embodies knowledge, and focuses on presenting alternatives to second language teaching-learning and research practices from the Global North ontoepistemology. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of ELT, Language Policies and Planning, Applied Linguistics, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies. It also has international appeal, as its localized gaze can bring about important considerations regarding other local knowledges.
"Unaufhörlich Lenz gelesen...": Studien zu Leben und Werk von J. M. R. Lenz
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz ist ein äußerst produktiver Einzelgänger, dessen Werke sich den herrschenden ästhetischen Normen des 18. Jahrhunderts entziehen und auf die Moderne vorausweisen. Dieser Band behandelt bisher vernachlässigte Aspekte seines Werks, stellt aber auch Texte vor, die neuerdings Lenz zugeschrieben werden und analysiert unbekannte Handschriften sowie kaum bekannte biographische Details.
Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics (Breaking Feminist Waves)
by L. GillmanIn an important new book, Laura Gillman argues that in this post-identity politics era, identities can still yield reliable knowledge. Focusing on womanist and mestiza theoretical writings, literary texts, and popular cultural representations, Gillman advances a comparative theoretical model of identity and consciousness that foregrounds a naturalist-realist account. She demonstrates that reason and knowledge originate from diverse human practices enacted in the social and natural world and can be explained and justified entirely in terms of them.
Unarten: Kleist und das Gesetz der Gattung (Lettre)
by Andrea Allerkamp Matthias Preuss Sebastian SchönbeckIm Umgang mit Gattungen zeigen sich Konventionalität und Rebellion, Opportunismus und Widerständigkeit, Normativität und Anarchie des Schreibens. Vor dem Hintergrund der Gattungsfrage versammelt dieser Band kultur- und literaturwissenschaftliche Annäherungen an Kleist. Gattung wird in den Beiträgen nicht allein literaturgeschichtlich verstanden, sondern als philosophische, anthropologische, biologische, ästhetische und politische Kategorie diskutiert. Dabei rücken Figuren der Transgression, Restitution und Inkorporation von Ordnungssystemen ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. Kleist verleiht der Gattungsfrage um 1800 ein neues Gewicht.
Unarchived Histories: The "mad" and the "trifling" in the colonial and postcolonial world (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories)
by Gyanendra PandeyFor some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume. Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.
Unarchived Histories: The "mad" and the "trifling" in the colonial and postcolonial world (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories)
by Gyanendra PandeyFor some time now, scholars have recognized the archive less as a neutral repository of documents of the past, and rather more as a politically interested representation of it, and recognized that the very act of archiving is accompanied by a process of un-archiving. Michel Foucault pointed to "madness" as describing one limit of reason, history and the archive. This book draws attention to another boundary, marked not by exile, but by the ordinary and everyday, yet trivialized or "trifling." It is the status of being exiled within – by prejudices, procedures, activities and interactions so fundamental as to not even be noticed – that marks the unarchived histories investigated in this volume. Bringing together contributions covering South Asia, North and South America, and North Africa, this innovative analysis presents novel interpretations of unfamiliar sources and insightful reconsiderations of well-known materials that lie at the centre of many current debates on history and the archive.
The Unappeasable Shadow: Shelley's Influence on Yeats (Routledge Library Editions: W. B. Yeats)
by Adele M. DalsimerYeats and his shadow are one of the most closely scrutinised pairs in contemporary literary history. The meaning and significance Yeats gave to the entity by which he was constantly pursued and with which he held frequent colloquy have been held under the critical microscope, and the shadow has emerged alternately as the course of human history, the poet’s alter-ego, his inner self, the natural man, or as anything that Yeats wanted but believed himself not to be. This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence that Shelley had on Yeats and this ‘shadow’. The study concentrates primarily on the complex influence of Shelley’s Alastor on Yeats, tracing the problems it suggests and the questions it raises from Yeats’s early, highly imitative poems through the austere, unromantic middle poems to the late poems where Yeats sees himself as the "last of the romantics". This title will be of interest to students of literature.
The Unappeasable Shadow: Shelley's Influence on Yeats (Routledge Library Editions: W. B. Yeats #3)
by Adele M. DalsimerYeats and his shadow are one of the most closely scrutinised pairs in contemporary literary history. The meaning and significance Yeats gave to the entity by which he was constantly pursued and with which he held frequent colloquy have been held under the critical microscope, and the shadow has emerged alternately as the course of human history, the poet’s alter-ego, his inner self, the natural man, or as anything that Yeats wanted but believed himself not to be. This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence that Shelley had on Yeats and this ‘shadow’. The study concentrates primarily on the complex influence of Shelley’s Alastor on Yeats, tracing the problems it suggests and the questions it raises from Yeats’s early, highly imitative poems through the austere, unromantic middle poems to the late poems where Yeats sees himself as the "last of the romantics". This title will be of interest to students of literature.
Unamuno's Theory of the Novel
by C.A. LonghurstMiguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is widely regarded as Spain's greatest and most controversial writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Professor of Greek, and later Rector, at the University of Salamanca, and a figure with a noted public profile in his day, he wrote a large number of philosophical, political and philological essays, as well as poems, plays and short stories, but it is his highly idiosyncratic novels, for which he coined the word nivola, that have attracted the greatest critical attention. Niebla (Mist, 1914) has become one of the most studied works of Spanish literature, such is the enduring fascination which it has provoked. In this study, C. A. Longhurst, a distinguished Unamuno scholar, sets out to show that behind Unamuno's fictional experiments there lies a coherent and quasi-philosophical concept of the novelesque genre and indeed of writing itself. Ideas about freedom, identity, finality, mutuality and community are closely intertwined with ideas on writing and reading and give rise to a new and highly personal way of conceiving fiction.
Unamuno's Theory of the Novel
by C.A. LonghurstMiguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) is widely regarded as Spain's greatest and most controversial writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Professor of Greek, and later Rector, at the University of Salamanca, and a figure with a noted public profile in his day, he wrote a large number of philosophical, political and philological essays, as well as poems, plays and short stories, but it is his highly idiosyncratic novels, for which he coined the word nivola, that have attracted the greatest critical attention. Niebla (Mist, 1914) has become one of the most studied works of Spanish literature, such is the enduring fascination which it has provoked. In this study, C. A. Longhurst, a distinguished Unamuno scholar, sets out to show that behind Unamuno's fictional experiments there lies a coherent and quasi-philosophical concept of the novelesque genre and indeed of writing itself. Ideas about freedom, identity, finality, mutuality and community are closely intertwined with ideas on writing and reading and give rise to a new and highly personal way of conceiving fiction.
Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary France
by Roger PearsonWhat is the public value of poetry? How do poets envisage their own role and function within society? How do we? Do poets seek to shape public opinion and behaviour? Should they? Or do they offer alternatives—perhaps sacred alternatives—to political and religious ideologies? Are they what Shelley in 1821 called 'the unacknowledged legislators of the World'? And what might that mean? During the decades immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789 the status of contemporary poetry in France was at its lowest ebb. At the same time the perceived power of the writer to influence public events reached a high-water mark with Voltaire's triumphant return to Paris in 1778. In the course of the next century French poetry enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance and flowering, perhaps its greatest. But what of the poet's public influence? In 1881 the people of Paris processed for six hours past the home of Victor Hugo on the occasion of his 79th birthday, and in 1885 an estimated two million people witnessed his state funeral. But who or what were they acknowledging? Poetry or republicanism? Or perhaps their own power? For with each Revolution that passed—1789, 1830, 1848—French poets themselves felt increasingly marginalised. This study addresses the first part of this story and focuses on the role and function of the poet during the so-called Romantic Period. Beginning with an account of the literary climate in pre-revolutionary France it then maps the changes in that climate wrought by the events of the 1789 Revolution. It describes the new politico-literary agendas set by Chateaubriand and others on the monarchist Right, and by Staël and others on the liberal Left. Against this background it then analyses in detail the poetic output and public exploits of the three major French poets of the period: Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny. The Romantic figure of the poet as prophet and magus is habitually dismissed as a cliché. But by focusing on the role of the poet as lawgiver this book reveals the rich and complex terms in which the public function of poetry was debated in post-revolutionary France - and how amidst the centenary celebrations of 1889, as Romanticism gave way to Symbolism, the poet as lawgiver continued to play a central part in that debate.
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
by Christopher HitchensA celebration of writers and their encounters with politics and public life from one of our greatest critics.Unacknowledged Legislation is a celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. In over thirty magnificent essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie, and with his trademark wit, rigour and flair, master critic Christopher Hitchens dispels the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature. Instead, Hitchens argues that when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens that created the space for a true moral argument.I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, and inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens. - Gore Vidal
Unaccustomed as I am...: The Wedding Speech Made Easy
by Michael ParkerAll wedding types will be catered for: big, small, religious, second marriage, atheist, straight, same-sex, church, field... All speakers will be addressed: bride, groom, father, mother, best woman and literally everyone in between... All eventualities will be planned for: mic failures, drunk guests, missing brides, smashed glasses, weeping FOBs, forgotten words... All of which will be delightfully and wittily illustrated, with a mix of little-known wedding facts and a whole host of inspirational (or not) quotations.