Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Subjects & Themes - Historical Events

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have -made things happen- in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass,...

George Orwell's collected nonfiction, written in the clear-eyed and uncompromising style that earned him a critical following

One of the most thought-provoking and vivid essayists of the twentieth century, George Orwell fought the injustices of his time with singular vigor through pen and paper. In this selection of essays, he ranges from reflections on his boyhood schooling and the profession of writing to his views on the Spanish Civil War and British imperialism. The pieces collected here include the relatively unfamiliar and the more celebrated, making it an ideal...

According to Kirby Farrell, the concept of trauma has shaped some of the central narratives of the 1990s--from the war stories of Vietnam vets to the video farewells of Heaven's Gate cult members, from apocalyptic sci-fi movies to Ronald Reagan's memoir, Where's the Rest of Me? In Post-traumatic Culture, Farrell explores the surprising uses of trauma as both an enabling fiction and an explanatory tool during periods of overwhelming cultural change.

Farrell's investigation begins in late Victorian England, when physicians invented the clinical concept of -traumatic...

The half-blood -- half Indian, half white -- is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed "half Indian, half white, and half devil" -- or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American...

With The Tempest's Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype in the modern era depicting black men as slaves and savages who threaten civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into modern-day Calibans.

Coleman analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. He traces the Caliban legacy to...

Hermann Broch (1886 1951) gehort mit seinen Novellen, Dramen, Gedichten und vor allem mit seinen Romanen zu den bedeutendsten und innovativsten deutschsprachigen Autoren der ersten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein Gesamtwerk, zu dem auch Tausende von Briefen gehoren, umfasst nicht nur poetische Texte von Weltrang, sondern auch Schriften zur Literatur, zur Philosophie, zur Politik, zur Demokratie- und zur Massenwahntheorie. Das vorliegende Handbuch wurde in Kooperation mit einem internationalen Forscherteam realisiert. Es setzt sich zum Ziel, Brochs Biographie und sein gesamtes...

This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, emigres, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is...

At the rise of the Tudor age, England began to form a national identity. With that sense of self came the beginnings of the colonialist notion of the "other"" Ireland, however, proved a most difficult other because it was so closely linked, both culturally and geographically, to England. Ireland's colonial position was especially complex because of the political, religious, and ethnic heritage it shared with England. Andrew Murphy asserts that the Irish were seen not as absolute but as "proximate" others. As a result, English writing about Ireland was a problematic process, since standard...