For nearly a decade Marc Aronson ran an imprint dedicated to international and multicultural literature for teens. He was known in the industry for publishing "edgy" books, and for his commitment to bringing the experiences of non-dominant authors and illustrators to the world. Yet in the summer of 2001 he wrote an essay that argued against awards, such as the Pure Belpre and Coretta Scott King prizes, for which you must be a member of a given ethnic group to win. Not surprisingly, his article was very controversial; and the author and publisher Andrea Davis Pinkney who had created an imprint specifically designed to be of, by, and for African Americans, published a thoughtful reply. Here, in Beyond the Pale , Aronson explains the passionate convictions that led him to write his essay, and outlines objections made by others; then reprints the original alongside Pinkney's response. As Aronson prepared a formal response to his critics, the attacks of September 11th took place. This tragedy simultaneously made a squabble among authors seem petty, and the issues around art, society, and cultural diversity all the more important. Throughout 2001 and 2002, Aronson wrote essays in which he weighed out how art, history, and books for younger readers could respond to the altered world. As in his previous collection, Exploding the Myths, the Truth About Teenagers and Reading , he exposes the mythologies and false beliefs that distort our understanding of books and their readers. Provocative and informative, this collection of essays will challenge those who know children's literature well to think in new ways, while linking the debates within that industry to the wider intellectual currents of our time.

Journey to heaven invites readers to rediscover some of the basic tenets of Jewish belief concerning the hereafter: resurrection, immortality, judgment, messianism, and the World to Come. Starting with the Bible's references to Sheol and allusions to resurrection, this comprehensive survey explores immortality and bodily resurrection in Second Temple literature; the Mishnah's discussions of olam ha-ba, the World to Come, and how to merit entertering it; and the Talmud's depictions of Gan Eden (paradise), Gehinnom (hell), and the soul's journey through these metaphysical landscapes. Bronner also explores the views of medieval scholars such as Maimonides and Nahmanides, Jewish mystical teachings about reincarnation, and modern views of faith and belief. A separate chapter is devoted to views of the Messiah over the course of Jewish history. Bronner demonstrates that the afterlife is indeed a vital part of Judaism, as she reveals how generations of Jews, from biblical times to the present, have grappled with its core ideas and beliefs about the hereafter

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.

Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

Rabbinic texts are often cited in New Testament and Old Testament studies, but hitherto there has been no easy way for a student to grasp the scope and variety of the relevant rabbinic writings. This book introduces the student to the full range of the early rabbinic writings, with a thorough introduction and notes, so that both a bird's eye view of the literature as well as close aquaintance with typical and important texts can be obtained. This will enable the reader to embark on further study with a clearer orientation. The book also aims to correct many mistaken views about rabbinic Judaism arising from outdated conceptions of the relation between Christianity and Judaism.

Reimagining the Bible collects a dozen essays by Howard Schwartz. Together the essays present a coherent theory of the way in which each successive phase of Jewish literature has drawn upon and reimagined the previous ones. The book is organized into four sections: The Ancient Models; The Folk Tradition; Mythic Echoes; Modern Jewish Literature and the Ancient Models. Within these divisions, each of the essays focuses on a specific genre, ranging from Torah and Aggadah to Kabbalah, fairy tales, and the modern Yiddish stories of S.Y. Agnon and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Arguing the important thesis that there is a continuity in Jewish literature which extends from the Biblical era to our own times, over a period of more than 3,000 years, this collection also serves as a guide to the history of that literature, and to the genres it comprises.

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.

Erich Heller is probably the finest critic of German literature now writing. As evidence one need only mention The Disinherited Mind and Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. These are works which illuminate the literary consciousness at many levels, combining scholarly precision with highly adventurous forays into the psychology and artistic development of their subjects, and which manage, as so many learned studies do not, to capture a particular sensibility and its relevance to culture in general. Alive, original, acute, Heller's judgments have moreover a wide philosophical range, a talent eminently displayed in the seven superb essays under discussion here. Two of them tackle the thorny area of Romanticism and Realism and show the interlocking paradoxical nature of each. Three of them consider the meaning of Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein especially as reflected through the dilemma of human inwardness, whether in Hamlet, Rilke's Elegies, or in religious, historical, philological questions of salvation and ethics. The first essay elaborates on the various versions of the Faust legend as encountered in Marlowe, Goethe and Mann, and the second achieves the extraordinary feat of making Schiller's poetic dramas and ""Beautiful Soul"" ideal a fascinating and moving experience. The whole collection is one of imposing dimensions, profound, gracefully written, thorough. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re... Contents: Faust's damnation: the morality of knowledge.-- In two minds about Schiller.-- The romantic expectation.-- The realistic fallacy.-- The artist's journey into the interior: a Hegelian prophecy and its fulfillment.-- The importance of Nietzsche.-- Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.

David Flusser was a very prolific scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and his contributions to Scrolls research, apocalypticism, and apocalyptic literature are inestimable. With this English translation of many of his essays, Flusser's insights are now available to a wider audience than ever before. Here Flusser examines the influence of apocalypticism on various Jewish sects. He states that the teachings of Jesus, while reflecting first and foremost the views of the sages, were also influenced by Jewish apocalypticism. Examining the Essenes, their effect on Hebrew language, the split of sects, and much more, Flusser's collected essays offer an important source of study for any Dead Sea Scrolls scholar. - Publisher.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of" Fierce Attachments "and "The End of the Novel of Love"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question "The Situation and the Story" asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

In this book of new and collected critical essays, Vivian Gornick turns the searching intelligence and honesty of insight that mark her memoirs on the work - and the lives - of writers she admires, among them Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Christina Stead, and George Meredith. In doing so, she examines a century of novels of love-in-the-Western-world and comes to see that, for most writers, it is the drama of our angry and frightened selves in the presence of love that is our modern preoccupation.

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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.

A collection of lectures delivered in May 2002 under the auspices of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Analyzes autobiographical works of seven Jews from antiquity to the 20th century. Two of these reflect despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II. Ch. 4 (pp. 103-138), "Autobiography as Farewell I: Stefan Zweig, " discusses the Austrian Jewish writer, who committed suicide in 1942, as a non-Zionist universalist even in the face of Nazism. Pp. 131-136 deal with the persecution of the Jews. Ch. 5 (pp. 139-174), "Autobiography as Farewell II: Sarah Kofman, " discusses the life and works of Kofman, who committed suicide in 1994. Focuses on her "Rue Ordoner, Rue Labat" and her Holocaust experiences as a child in Paris. Her father was killed in Auschwitz, and Kofman was looked after by a Christian woman to whom she felt closer than her mother. Deals with the conflicts in Kofman's sexual and religious identities.

"In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women's Community Correctional Center, the only women's prison in the state of Hawai'i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women's participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project served as a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performer and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai'i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex"-- Provided by publisher.

This is a collection of articles, reviews, interviews and essays by the 1990 Cartier Diamond Dagger award winner - critic and writer, Julian Symons. Following an introduction entitled The Crime Story Yesterday, Today, Tommorrow, this book offers a collection of Symons's writing on crime fiction from Britain, the United States and elsewhere, plus a section on real life stories, such as The Hiss Affair and the Yorkshire Ripper.

Essays on American Writing. In stock

Available in paperback for the first time, Jenny Strauss Clay's landmark study of the Odyssey argues that Athena's wrath is central to both the structure and the theme of the epic poem. Clay demonstrates that an appreciation of the thematic role of Athena's anger elucidates the poem's complex narrative organization and its conception of the hierarchical relations between gods and men. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.