Download or read book Demonic Males written by Richard W. Wrangham and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1996 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can be done about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, "Demonic Males" offers some startling new answers to these questions.
Download or read book Melville Unfolding written by John Bryant and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life was published in 1846 and was Melville's most popular work, offering Victorian readers startling and romantic glimpses of island people and practices. The Typee manuscript was discovered only in 1983, and is considered one of the most important literary manuscripts in nineteenth-century American studies. Melville Unfolding offers a new approach to literary analysis, focusing on how the "invisible text of revision" is made visible in the critical construction of the novel. This volume is linked to an electronic edition of Typee, providing a model for how critical analysis and textual editing work synergistically and how print and online technologies can complement one another. Melville Unfolding walks readers through the intriguing twists and turns of Melville's writing process, detailing the delights and frustrations of reading a writer in manuscript. In jargon-free prose, John Bryant introduces the scholarship of manuscript study, the use of the revision narrative, and the benefits of the fluid-text analysis---asking readers to consider what a text is, how it comes into being, how it evolves, and how the study of a fluid text enhances our understanding of writers, writing, and culture. John Bryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and Editor of the Melville Society. His books include The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen and the Modern Library editions of Melville's Tales, Poems, and Other Writings and The Confidence-Man.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville written by Kevin J. Hayes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-08 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its indifferent reception when it was first published in 1851, Moby Dick is now a central work in the American literary canon. This introduction offers readings of Melville's masterpiece, but it also sets out the key themes, contexts, and critical reception of his entire oeuvre. The first chapters cover Melville's life and the historical and cultural contexts. Melville's individual works each receive full attention in the third chapter, including Typee, Moby Dick, Billy Budd and the short stories. Elsewhere in the chapter different themes in Melville are explained with reference to several works: Melville's writing process, Melville as letter writer, Melville and the past, Melville and modernity, Melville's late writings. The final chapter analyses Melville scholarship from his day to ours. Kevin J. Hayes provides comprehensive information about Melville's life and works in an accessible and engaging book that will be essential for students beginning to read this important author.
Download or read book American Geographics written by Bruce A. Harvey and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive study of antebellum depictions of the non-European world. Harvey proposes that U.S. cultural history cannot be fully understood without considering how Americans regarded tropical America, the Holy Land, Polynesia, and Africa.
Download or read book The Colonizer Abroad written by Christopher McBride and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at a diverse series of authors--Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Jack London--"The Colonizer Abroad" claims that as the U.S. emerged as a colonial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the literature of the sea became a literature of imperialism. This book applies postcolonial theory to the travel writing of some of America's best-known authors, revealing the ways in which America's travel fiction and nonfiction have both reflected and shaped society.
Download or read book Bloom s how to Write about Herman Melville written by Laurie A. Sterling and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he spent much of his career in obscurity, Herman Melville, the author of classics such as ""Moby-Dick"", ""Billy Budd"", and ""Bartleby, the Scrivener,"" has since become known as one of America's greatest writers. ""How to Write about Herman Melville"" offers valuable paper-topic suggestions, clearly outlined strategies on how to write a strong essay, and an insightful introduction by Harold Bloom on writing about Melville. This new volume is designed to help students develop their analytical writing skills and critical comprehension of the author and his major works.
Download or read book Identifying Marks written by Jennifer Putzi and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we know of the marked body in nineteenth-century American literature and culture often begins with The Scarlet Letter's Hester Prynne and ends with Moby Dick's Queequeg. This study looks at the presence of marked men and women in a more challenging array of canonical and lesser-known works, including exploration narratives, romances, and frontier novels. Jennifer Putzi shows how tattoos, scars, and brands can function both as stigma and as emblem of healing and survival, thus blurring the borderline between the biological and social, the corporeal and spiritual. Examining such texts as Typee, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, The Morgesons, Iola Leroy, and Contending Forces, Putzi relates the representation of the marked body to significant events, beliefs, or cultural shifts, including tattooing and captivity, romantic love, the patriarchal family, and abolition and slavery. Her particular focus is on both men and women of color, as well as white women-in other words, bodies that did not signify personhood in the nineteenth century and thus by their very nature were grotesque. Complicating the discourse on agency, power, and identity, these texts reveal a surprisingly complex array of representations of and responses to the marked body--some that are a product of essentialist thinking about race and gender identities and some that complicate, critique, or even rebel against conventional thought.
Download or read book From Gift to Commodity written by Hildegard Hoeller and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2012 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this rich interdisciplinary study, Hildegard Hoeller argues that nineteenth-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period's fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture.
Download or read book Melville and Repose written by John Bryant and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-10-28 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of the comic and repose in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Bryant argues that Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale in order to create his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose." Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.
Download or read book Literary Culture and U S Imperialism From the Revolution to World War II written by John Carlos Rowe Professor of English University of California at Irvine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000-06-12 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.
Download or read book Literary Culture and U S Imperialism written by John Carlos Rowe and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herman Melville written by John Bryant and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 1392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive exploration of Melville’s formative years, providing a new biographical foundation for today’s generations of Melville readers Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2, follows Herman Melville’s life from early childhood to his astonishing emergence as a bestselling novelist with the publication of Typee in 1846. These volumes comprise the first half of a comprehensive biography on Melville, grounded in archival research, new scholarship, and incisive critical readings. Author John Bryant, a distinguished Melville scholar, editor, critic, and educator, traces the events and experiences that shaped the many-stranded consciousness of one of literature’s greatest writers. This in-depth and innovative biography covers Melville’s family history and literary friendships, his father-longing, god-hunger, and search for the hidden nature of Being, the genesis of his liberal politics, his empathy for African Americans, Native Americans, Polynesians, South Americans, and immigrants. Original perspectives on Melville’s earliest identities—orphaned son, sibling, farmer, teacher, debater, lover, actor, sailor—provide the context for Melville’s evolution as a writer. The biography presents new information regarding Melville’s reading, his early orations and acting experience, his life at sea and on the road, and the unsettling death of his older, rival brother from mercury poisoning. It provides insights on experiences such as Melville’s trauma at the loss of his father, his learning to write amidst a coterie siblings, his struggles to find work during economic depression, his journey West, his life in whaling and in the navy, and his vagabondage in the South Pacific during the moment of American and European imperial incursions. A significant addition to Melville scholarship, this important biographical work: Explores the nature and development of Melville’s creative consciousness, through the lens of his revisions in manuscript and print Assesses Melville’s sexual growth and exploration of the spectrum of his masculinities Highlights Melville’s relevance in contemporary democratic society Discusses Melville’s blending of dark humor and tragedy in his unique version of the picturesque Examines the ‘replaying’ of Melville’s life traumas throughout his entire works, from Typee, Omoo, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man to his shorter works, including “Bartleby,” his epic Clarel, his poetry, and his last novella Billy Budd Covers such cultural and historical events as the American revolution of his grandparents, the whaling industry, New York slavery, street life and theater in Manhattan, the transatlantic slave trade, the Jacksonian economy, Indian removal, Pacific colonialism, and westward expansion Written in an engaging style for scholars and general readers alike, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life, Volumes 1 and 2 is an indispensable new source of information and insights for those interested in Melville, 19th-century and modern literature and culture, and readers of general American history and literary culture.
Download or read book Freakery written by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1996-10 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking anthology that probes the disposition towards the visually different Giants. Midgets. Tribal non-Westerners. The very fat. The very thin. Hermaphrodites. Conjoined twins. The disabled. The very hirsute. In American history, all have shared the platform equally, as freaks, human oddities, their only commonality their assigned role of anomalous other to the gathered throngs. For the price of a ticket, freak shows offered spectators an icon of bodily otherness whose difference from them secured their own membership in a common American identity--by comparison ordinary, tractable, normal. Rosemarie Thomson's groundbreaking anthology probes America's disposition toward the visually different. The book's essays fall into four main categories: historical explorations of American freak shows in the era of P.T. Barnum; the articulation of the freak in literary and textual discourses; contemporary relocations of freak shows; and theoretical analyses of freak culture. Essays address such diverse topics as American colonialism and public presentations of natives; laughing gas demonstrations in the 1840's; Shirley Temple and Tom Thumb; Todd Browning's landmark movie Freaks; bodybuilders as postmodern freaks; freaks in Star Trek; Michael Jackson's identification with the Elephant Man; and the modern talk show as a reconfiguration of the freak show. In her introduction, Thomson traces the freak show from antiquity to the modern period and explores the constitutive, political, and textual properties of such exhibits. Freakery is a fresh, insightful exploration of a heretofore neglected aspect of American mass culture.
Download or read book Critical Companion to Herman Melville written by Carl Edmund Rollyson and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Companion to Herman Melville examines the life and work of a writer who spent much of his career in obscurity.
Download or read book September Starlings written by Ruth Hamilton and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-07-31 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This moving and captivating novel will keep you glued to the page and invested from the off. From the SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, Ruth Hamilton, perfect for fans of Catherine Cookson, Dilly Court and Josephine Cox. 'Very much the successor to Catherine Cookson. Her books are plot driven, they just rip along; laughs, weeps, love, they've got the lot, and they're quality writing as well' - SARAH BROADHURST, RADIO FOUR 'This book breaks your heart, it is rare to find a book which stirs so many emotions.' - ***** Reader Review 'I couldn't bear to turn off my Kindle... Another great read from Ruth.' - ***** Reader Review 'Great story. Found myself not wanting to stop reading.' - ***** Reader Review **************************************************** ONE WOMAN'S FIGHT TO FORGE HER OWN FUTURE... Laura Starling, now wealthy and successful, has survived a bitter past. She fled from a tyrannical mother into the clutches of a sadistic man. She endured poverty, fear and pain. Then along came Ben Starling, older, wiser, who smoothed her path and gave her love and security. But now Ben has become a stranger who has slipped beyond her reach. As her stability threatens to disintegrate once more, a thin, waif-like girl from Liverpool thrusts her way into Laura's life - a girl who is to prove a link with the past. But no one can help Laura make the decisions that will alter the course of her existence. As the September starlings gather, Laura realises she must take courage and forge her own future...
Download or read book My Brother Gun written by James B. Clifton and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950s Western Australia, relations are tense between whites and Aborigines. But for little Jimmy and his brother, Gun, it is a simple time to create their own fun, find trouble, and then wriggle their way out of it. Gun is slick, popular, and seemingly indestructible. Jimmy is a skinny kid who cannot run as fast as Gun. But when their mum suddenly abandons the family one day, everything changes. After his father puts Gun in charge of caring for his siblings, Jimmy is left to wander the neighborhood. When fate leads him to an aboriginal girl, Jimmy is thrilled he has finally made a friend who likes him back. As Poppy teaches him aboriginal secrets like how to disappear, recognize an animal track, and uncover feed from a bush, her tribe takes Jimmy in like he is one of their own. But as the two cultures intertwine and the boys create strong friendships, Gun makes a decision that leads to valuable lessons and unthinkable new events as life changes once again. In this action adventure tale, two brothers growing up amid 1950s Australia create a bond with aboriginals while on a unique journey of self-discovery enhanced by tribal folklore and magic.
Download or read book Representing the South Pacific written by Rod Edmond and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-11-20 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the South Pacific was represented by explorers, missionaries, travellers, writers, and artists between 1767 and 1914 by drawing on history, literature, art history, and anthropology. Edmond engages with colonial texts and postcolonial theory, criticising both for their failure to acknowledge the historical specificity of colonial discourses and cultural encounters, and for continuing to see indigenous cultures in essentially passive or reactive terms. The book offers a detailed and grounded 'reading back' of these colonial discourses into the metropolitan centres which gave rise to them, while resisting the idea that all representations of other cultures are merely self-representations. Among its themes are the persistent myth-making around the figure of Cook, the western obsession with Polynesian sexuality, tattooing, cannibalism, and leprosy, and the Pacific as a theatre for adventure and as a setting for Europe's displaced fears of its own cultural extinction.
