"Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduring melodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films. Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese -- anxious to forget their troubles -- could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide." --

What happens when bad criticism happens to good people? Annoying the Victorians sets the tradition of critical discourse and literary criticism on its ear, as well as a few other areas. James Kincaid brings his witty, erudite and thoroughly cynical self to the Victorians, and they will never read (or be read) quite the same. In a series of essays covering the "hit parade" of the Victorians--Tennyson, Dickens, Meredith, Hardy and the erotic poetry of The Pearl --Kincaid creates a sharp, insicive parody of the methods of good criticism (and sometimes the practicioners,) all the while raising questions about what "good criticism" is, and how these rules serve to maintain the status quo. Annoying the Victorians mocks those conventions held dear, and examines the sacredness of "the text," the employment of evidence, the construction of sound arguments, and the solemn tone in which the discipline is practiced, showing them all for smoke and mirrors, exposing the Wizard behind the curtain of critical practice. Throughout, James Kincaid amuses, prods, provokes and enlightens the reader with a machete-like directness couched in satire. The essays will surely annoy both Victorians and Victorianists alike, as well as those worshipping at the church of Literary Criticism.

This interpretation of the way female sexuality was viewed by the nineteenth-century European medical profession characterizes an attitude based on massive ignorance and prejudice

The Staplehurst rail crash of June 9th, 1865 which claimed ten lives, might have passed relatively unnoticed but for the presence of a celebrity passenger among the survivors. Charles Dickens, returning from France on the ill-fated boat train from Folkestone to London, was to be profoundly affected by the experience. In a fascinating exploration of the circumstances surrounding the disaster and probing insight into Dickens' personal life, the writer's great-great-grandson, Gerald Dickens, examines his secret relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan and professional motivation in the years either side of the accident. Questions concerning the conduct of the inquest into the crash and apportioning of blame are raised that remain unresolved even today. Striking parallels are drawn with more recent disasters and the signs of wrestling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are evident in the account of Dickens' final years, powerfully reflected in the stirring ghost story The Signalman.

Lewald (1811-1889), the best-selling German woman writer in the nineteenth century, proved a keen and perceptive observer of the social, artistic, and political life of her times, of which these Recollections offer an excellent example. Written from a woman's perspective, this firsthand account of the revolutions in both Germany and France must be considered a unique document. It is further enhanced by her detailed description of the Frankfurt Parliament and her relationships with many of the prominent politicians and thinkers of that eventful period.

This is a study of the transmission of political ideas across languages and cultures, and in particular of a notably fruitful encounter between two distinct branches of eighteenth-century political discourse: the reception of Scottish civic ideas, developed most powerfully in the works of theEdinburgh historian-philosopher Adam Ferguson, by Geman intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.Fania Oz-Salzberger's detailed and challenging analysis places Ferguson in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, and explores the impact of his theories on German Enlightenment thinkers. She traces the passage of Ferguson's civic humanism across linguistic and cultural borders, and highlightsthe linguistic stumbling-blocks and conceptual tensions that resulted. Dr Oz-Salzberger argues that there resulted a complex and largely unintentional shift of Scottish civic concepts into a German vocabulary of spiritual perfection and inner life, and that the misreading of Ferguson and otherScottish thinkers contributed much to the richness of German intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Surveyor, fur-trader and explorer, David Thompson was the first European to descend the Columbia River from its source to its mouth. A partner in the North West Company, Thompson explored western Canada exhaustively, and the maps he produced became the basis for many future maps of the region. Thompson first came to Canada in 1784 as a clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company. He spent several years gaining knowledge of the fur trade, making extensive expeditions and learning the ways of the aboriginal peoples. After learning the use of sextant, chronometer, telescope, compass and nautical almanac, surveying became his primary interest. He explored new territory whenever possible, keeping detailed journals of his bearings and weather conditions, and charted all of his journeys.

"The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy." "This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine." --Book Jacket.

In an age of upheaval and challenged faith, traditional heroes are hard to come by, and harder still to love, with their bloodstained hands and backs unbowed by the consequences of their actions. Through penetrating readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero—the antihero—has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Büchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hašek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

The Universal Jew analyzes literary images of the Jewish nation and the Jewish national subject at Zionism’s formative moment. In a series of original readings of late nineteenth-century texts—from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland to the bildungsromane of Russian Hebrew and Yiddish writers—Mikhal Dekel demonstrates the aesthetic and political function of literary works in the making of early Zionist consciousness. More than half a century before the foundation of the State of Israel and prior to the establishment of the Zionist political movement, Zionism emerges as an imaginary concept in literary texts that create, facilitate, and naturalize the transition from Jewish-minority to Jewish-majority culture. The transition occurs, Dekel argues, mainly through the invention of male literary characters and narrators who come to represent "exemplary" persons or "man in general" for the emergent, still unformed national community. Such prototypical characters transform the symbol of the Jew from a racially or religiously defined minority subject to a "post-Jewish," particularuniversal, and fundamentally liberal majority subject. The Universal Jew situates the "Zionist moment" horizontally, within the various intellectual currents that make up the turn of the twentieth century: the discourse on modernity, the crisis in liberalism, Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, early feminism, and fin de siècle interrogation of sexual identities. The book examines the symbolic roles that Jews are assigned within these discourses and traces the ways in which Jewish literary citizens are shaped, both out of and in response to them. Beginning with an analysis of George Eliot’s construction of the character Deronda and its reception in Zionist circles, the Universal Jew ends with the self-fashioning of male citizens in fin de siècle and post-statehood Hebrew works, through the aesthetics oftragedy. Throughout her readings, Dekel analyzes the political meaning of these nascent images of citizens, uncovering in particular the gendered arrangements out of which they are born.

Joel Porte offers a timely reassessment of nineteenth century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation, self-display, self-projection, and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the "text" in nineteenth-century American writing, the relationship of "rhetorical" reading to historical context, and the nature of "Romanticism" in an American setting. Porte then concentrates on the great authors of the period through a series of thematically linked but critically discrete essays on Brown, Irving, Parkman, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Frederick Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Throughout his important new study, Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar texts while at the same time casting an illuminating critical eye on less well-known territory. Readers of this book will come away with increased respect for the achievement of American Romantic writers.

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg's work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg's earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking. In the first section, "Poetics and Polemics," Rothenberg's essays address a range of issues with which he's become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream. In "A Gallery of Poets" is Rothenberg's lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in "Dialogues and Interviews" are Rothenberg's unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls "the life of poetry" outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human.

"Brian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. Leiter presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology"

At a time when many repentant leftists are proclaiming Marxism incapable of explaining the new phenomena of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Ernest Mandel reminds us that Marxism drew from its very inception on the advances of all the social sciences and emancipation movements of its time.In a survey of the multiple sources of Marx and Engels' theory, Mandel identifies the specific contribution of the two friends in the various disciplines to which they applied themselves: philosophy, political economy, social history, revolutionary organization, self-organization of the working class, emancipation movements, and internationalism. Concluding that Marxism "constantly learns from perpetually changing reality" and that it is the conscious expression of the real movement of workers toward self-emancipation, Mandel proposes a formula which provides for a dialectical interaction between innovation and the verification of established tenets.

This is a selection of essays written during the first decade of the twenty-first century, by a figure widely acknowledged as the conscience of European liberalism. In Walter Laqueur's lifetime, there have been more acutely dangerous situations, such as the coming of a world war or the seemingly unstoppable march to victory of totalitarian regimes, than in any other previous epoch. Such immediate dangers may not exist at the present time. But long-term trends are equally or even more threatening, as we now see in the ability of small groups of people, unprecedented in history, to inflict enormous damage. This is the underlying essence of Laqueur's thinking, as expressed in this new volume. As Laqueur observes, one learns from long experience that the worst does not always happen, and if it does, probably not in one's lifetime. Ideas and intellectual fashions emerging from the groves of academe, particularly in America can seem wrongheaded and often out of touch with the real world. This growing isolation causes growing bitterness, alienation, and a feeling of impotence on the part of intellectuals, which turns into greater radicalization and farfetched thinking. Laqueur fortunately does not fall into this trap. The articles and essays selected for this volume deal with a variety of topics. They do not entirely reflect Laqueur's interests, which during this period were more in the cultural field than in politics. However, politics intrude irrespective of the author's predilections. Laqueur deals with unpleasant truths in concrete geopolitical settings, but poignantly takes his stand with the men and women who strive to overcome self-censorship in the search for accurate judgment.

"Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the United States in the 1830s, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s imagines how individuals at the time experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, this book follows painters, poets, enslaved individuals, farmers, and artisans through various settings. Some, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nat Turner, Thomas Cole, and Edgar Allan Poe, are well-known; others are not. All are creators of private and grand designs, and makers of the worlds they inhabited. The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each is an episode revealing a lost world of intricate relations: human beings going their own ways or crossing paths, in a place that is known to history, or is remote and unknown. For Alex Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, as he writes, "the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate life to lead." Nemerov's art history is at its center an experiment in writing, in how to write differently about visual culture. The Forest examines the history of the United States on a human scale, displaying the patterns of life alongside examples of paintings, prints, photographs and objects"--

A group of distinguished historians makes the first systematic attempt to compare the experiences of French and German Jews in the modern era. The cases of France and Germany have often been depicted as the dominant paradigms for understanding the processes of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Western and Central Europe. In the French case, emancipation was achieved during the French Revolution, and it remained in place until 1940, when the Vichy regime came to power. In Germany, emancipation was a far more gradual and piecemeal process, and even after it was achieved in 1871, popular and governmental antisemitism persisted. The essays in this volume, while buttressing many traditional assumptions regarding these two paths of emancipation, simultaneously challenge many others, and thus force us to reconsider the larger processes of Jewish integration and acculturation.

William Whewell was one of the more prolific and influential writers of early Victorian England. This study reconstructs the historical origins of his two major works and evaluates their philosophical claims, and critically appraises Whewell's mature philosophical position.

Describes the life of Jewish middle-class women in Wilhelmine Germany. Pp. 148-152, "Anti-Semitism in the University, " state that until about 1905 women students, discriminated against because of their sex, tended to show solidarity by forming organizations open to all, in contrast to the segregated male students' organizations. Russian Jewish women were especially despised, even by German Jewish male students. Pp. 182-185 describe discrimination against Jewish teachers, noting that their chances of employment were highly limited. See also the index under "Anti-Semitism."