Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Amy Boesky and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of utopian writing in early modern England, Founding Fictions traces the development of the genre from the publication of Thomas More's Utopia (1516) through Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). Amy Boesky sees utopian literature rising alongside new social institutions that helped shape the modern English nation. While utopian fiction explicitly advocates a reorganization of human activity, which appears liberal or progressive, utopias represent reform in self-critical or qualitative ways. Early modern utopias, Boesky demonstrates, are less blueprints for reform than they are challenges to the very possibility of improvement. After an initial discussion of More's Utopia, Boesky devotes subsequent chapters to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, the Civil War Utopias of Gabriel Plattes, Samuel Gott, and Gerrard Winstanley, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing-world, and Henry Neville's Isle of Pines. Relating the English public school to More's Utopia, and early modern laboratories to Bacon's New Atlantis, Boesky shows how utopists explored the formation of cultural identity through new institutional models. Utopias of the 1640s and 1650s are read against new emphasis on work as the panacea for social ills; Cavendish's Blazing-world is seen as reproducing and reassessing restoration centers of authority in the court and theater; and finally, Neville's Isle of Pines and Behn's Oroonoko are read as interrogating the authorities of the English colony. Despite widely divergent backgrounds, says Boesky, these utopists shared a sense that national identity was shaped less by individuals than by institutions, which they praise for producing trained and trainable citizens instilled with the values of the modern state: obedience, discipline, and order. While the utopia tells its story partly to justify the goals of colonialism and to enforce differences in class, gender, and race, it also tells a concurrent and less stable story that criticizes these ventures and exposes their limitations.
Download or read book Founding Fictions written by Jennifer R. Mercieca and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extended analysis of how Americans imagined themselves as citizens between 1764 and 1845 Founding Fictions develops the concept of a “political fiction,” or a narrative that people tell about their own political theories, and analyzes how republican and democratic fictions positioned American citizens as either romantic heroes, tragic victims, or ironic partisans. By re-telling the stories that Americans have told themselves about citizenship, Mercieca highlights an important contradiction in American political theory and practice: that national stability and active citizen participation are perceived as fundamentally at odds.
Download or read book Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean written by and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cola Debrot's «My Black Sister» and Boeli van Leeuwen's A Stranger on Earth are two pivotal works from the early period of postcolonial Dutch-language fiction from the Dutch Caribbean. Each portrays different aspects of the predicament of postcolonial identity, gender, race, and politics in the vein best known as «tropic existentialism». Founding Fictions of the Dutch Caribbean is suitable for courses on Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature, and will be of great interest to readers of fiction in general.
Download or read book Cult Fictions written by Sonu Shamdasani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversial claims that C.G. Jung, founder of analytical psychology, was a charlatan and a self-appointed demi-god have recently brought his legacy under renewed scrutiny. The basis of the attack on Jung is a previously unknown text, said to be Jung's inaugural address at the founding of his 'cult', otherwise known as the Psychological Club, in Zurich in 1916. It is claimed that this cult is alive and well in Jungian psychology as it is practised today, in a movement which continues to masquerade as a genuine professional discipline, whilst selling false dreams of spiritual redemption. In Cult Fictions, leading Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani looks into the evidence for such claims and draws on previously unpublished documents to show that they are fallacious. This accurate and revealing account of the history of the Jungian movement, from the founding of the Psychological Club to the reformulation of Jung's approach by his followers, establishes a fresh agenda for the historical evaluation of analytical psychology today.
Download or read book Founding Myths written by Ray Raphael and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-07-04 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published ten years ago, award-winning historian Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths has since established itself as a landmark of historical myth-busting. With the author’s trademark wit and flair, Founding Myths exposes the errors and inventions in America’s most cherished tales, from Paul Revere’s famous ride to Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech. For the seventy thousand readers who have been captivated by Raphael’s eye-opening accounts, history has never been the same. In this revised tenth-anniversary edition, Raphael revisits the original myths and explores their further evolution over the past decade, uncovering new stories and peeling back additional layers of misinformation. This new edition also examines the highly politicized debates over America’s past, as well as how school textbooks and popular histories often reinforce rather than correct historical mistakes. A book that “explores the truth behind the stories of the making of our nation” (National Public Radio), this revised edition of Founding Myths will be a welcome resource for anyone seeking to separate historical fact from fiction.
Download or read book Founded in Fiction written by Thomas Koenigs and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This monograph presents a new history of early American literature that traces the diverse forms of fiction circulating in the early United States (1789-1861) and how they shaped the way Americans thought and argued about political and cultural issues of their age"--
Download or read book Questing Fictions written by Djelal Kadir and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available through select distribution partners.
Download or read book America and Other Fictions written by Ed Simon and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches.
Download or read book Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality 1570 1640 written by C. Relihan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical debates about the body, gender, desire, print culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia , Wroth's Urania , Lyly's Euphues ; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about the gendering of labour, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.
Download or read book Primitive America written by Paul Smith and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most confounding aspects of American society—the one that perhaps most frequently perplexes observers both domestic and foreign—is the vast contradiction between what anthropologists might term the “hot” and “cold” elements in the culture. The hot encompasses the dynamic and progressive aspects of a society dedicated to growth and productivity, marked by mobility, innovation, and optimism. In contrast, the cold embodies rigid social forms and archaic beliefs, fundamentalisms of all kinds, racism and xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, cultural atavism, and ignorance—in short, the primitive. For cultural critic Paul Smith, the tension between progressive and primitive is a constitutive condition of American history and culture. In Primitive America, Smith contemplates this primary contradiction as it has played out in the years since 9/11. Indeed, he writes, much of what has happened since—events that have seemed to many to be novel and egregious—can be explained by this foundational dialectic. More radically still, Primitive America attests that this underlying stress is driven by America's unquestioned devotion to the elemental propositions and processes of capitalism. This devotion, Smith argues, has become America's quintessential characteristic, and he begins this book by elaborating on the idea of the primitive in America—its specific history of capital accumulation, commodity fetishism, and cultural narcissism. Smith goes on to track the symptoms of the primitive that have arisen in the aftermath of 9/11 and the commencement of the “Long War” against “violent extremists”: the nature of American imperialism, the status of the U.S. Constitution, the militarization of America's economy and culture, and the Bush administration's disregard for human rights. An urgent and important engagement with current American policies and practices, Primitive America is, at the same time, an incisive critique of the ideology that fuels the ethos of America's capitalist culture. Paul Smith is professor of cultural studies at George Mason University and the author of numerous books, including Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minnesota, 1993).
Download or read book Travel and Travail written by Patricia Akhimie and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.
Download or read book Forefathers Founding Fathers written by Michael Gorton and published by BrownBooks.ORM. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel based on the forgotten historical figures who ensured the triumph of democracy in the country that would become America. A Global eBook Awards Gold Medal Winner In the early colonies, this country was on the precipice of becoming an autocratic theocracy. A century and a half before Jefferson and Adams, the battle for democracy, freedom, and equal rights was sparked by a few people who are now lost and forgotten pieces of history. Travel back to 1620s London, where hardworking and creative Samuel met Mary, a unique and highly educated woman. Their journey would lead them to the colonies, where they were ostracized and sentenced to death for introducing the fundamental principles modern Americans hold dear. This fast-paced historical fiction will make you question your understanding of the founding years of this free nation. These pioneers created the template our founding fathers used to build America. Forefathers & Founding Fathers is an adventure, a love story, and a tale of great persistence—a tale that every American should know and yet most do not. This expanded second edition explores even further into the lives of these impactful figures, giving a deeper perspective on their sacrifices and devotion to this country.
Download or read book Founding Gardeners written by Andrea Wulf and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.
Download or read book Melusine of Lusignan written by Donald Maddox and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of original essays is the first collection devoted to the monumental Roman de Melusine (1393) by Jean d'Arras. A masterwork of late fourteenth-century French prose fiction, Melusine tells of the powerful medieval dynasty of Lusignan from its founding as a city by the legendary Melusine, an enigmatic fairy-figure subject to periodic monstrous transformations, through its expansion in Europe and the Near East, to its ultimate evanescence. Melusine offers a singular blend of history and fiction as it upholds the proprietary claims to Lusignan of the work's illustrious patron, Jean, Duc de Berry. The great deeds of Melusine, her forebears, and her progeny unfold in a narrative that blends elements of myth, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, Crusade narrative, romance, and theological doctrine. Advancing a wealth of new material and fresh insight, the essays in this volume address the complex interplay of the conventions of medieval fictional, historical, and genealogical writing from a wide variety of critical perspectives. Together, they offer a new, more balanced and comprehensive understanding of one of the most significant literary works of late medieval European culture.
Download or read book Narratives of the Islamic Conquest from Medieval Spain written by Geraldine Hazbun and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring medieval literary representations of the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711, Hazbun discusses chronicles, epic and clerical poetry, and early historical novels. While material on the conquest of Spain is substantial, it is understudied and this book works to fill that gap.
Download or read book Women s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century written by Alessa Johns and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No human society has ever been perfect, a fact that has led thinkers as far back as Plato and St. Augustine to conceive of utopias both as a fanciful means of escape from an imperfect reality and as a useful tool with which to design improvements upon it. The most studied utopias have been proposed by men, but during the eighteenth century a group of reform-oriented female novelists put forth a series of work that expressed their views of, and their reservations about, ideal societies. In Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century, Alessa Johns examines the utopian communities envisaged by Mary Astell, Sarah Fielding, Mary Hamilton, Sarah Scott, and other writers from Britain and continental Europe, uncovering the ways in which they resembled--and departed from--traditional utopias. Johns demonstrates that while traditional visions tended to look back to absolutist models, women's utopias quickly incorporated emerging liberal ideas that allowed far more room for personal initiative and gave agency to groups that were not culturally dominant, such as the female writers themselves. Women's utopias, Johns argues, were reproductive in nature. They had the potential to reimagine and perpetuate themselves.
Download or read book Scandalmonger written by William Safire and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping & timely work of historical fiction, the author unveils the story behind the nation's first great political scandals.
