A study of the theater's treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Memoir of an Australian woman writer and poet. Nancy Keesing collaborated with Douglas Stewart in compiling collection of bush songs and ballads.___

The late Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida).

Denying the future until government leaders end repression, revolutionary fetuses refusing to be born begin to argue amongst themselves and one by one choose to be born until only the son of Manuel Sendero is left

In London, before the First World War, where in society love and money predominate, Bertha and Nigel had been inseparable. But then Nigel felt he had to focus on the economics of life, and after all Bertha's family were quite modestly off. Whereas the heiress Mary, also interested in him but not anywhere near so charming, was very well set up. His decision was made. Though initially heartbroken, Bertha realises quickly that she has escaped from a delusion. Equanimity returns, and she finds in Percy Kellynch a devoted lover, though one a little more sober and less racy. They marry, as do Nigel and Mary, and over time the two become friends again, though now with wise awareness on Bertha's side. Nigel begins to see his error, as Mary's jealousy and her wish to supervise his life take their toll. He finds comfort in simply seeing Bertha initially, but inevitably begins to wish for more. Bertha is not interested, having moved on, but, if noticed, Nigel's attentions could be misconstrued... In the meantime, Bertha is also looking out for the future of a young friend, Madeline Irwin, who is smitten with Rupert Denison, a young man with rather too much of a penchant for patronising and "educating" young women. Madeline is impulsive, a little inexperienced and quite needy. Her headlong qualities precipitate problems very readily. As Bertha negotiates several crises arising from Nigel's reviving attachment, she also tries to assist Madeline in avoiding her own self-created disasters. Much depends on Bertha's talent for good management and wise counsel in the perils of both their lives. She is determined to win over adversity, but it will be a strong test of her skills.... Bird of Paradise, Leverson's fifth novel, as radiant with wit and wisdom as those which preceded it, was first published in 1914.

James Joyce left Dublin in 1904, bound for Trieste and a job teaching English at the Berlitz School. He was to live there for the next eleven years. Italo Svevo, born and bred in Trieste, worked there for his family's marine paint company. He had also written two novels, published privately and unsuccessfully. In 1907, wanting to improve his English to do business with the British Admiralty, Svevo went to Berlitz, where Joyce became his teacher. Svevo was then 46 and Joyce 25. Despite their different backgrounds, Irish Catholic and Triestene Jewish, they had, intellectually, much in common. They admired each other's writing. Joyce improved Svevo's English. Svevo helped Joyce stay solvent, and also became the inspiration for Leopold Bloom. In Ulysses, the near father-son relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Bloom in Dublin was very close to that of Svevo and Joyce in Trieste. The two writers lived through the great political and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century, and their story has a fascinating supporting cast - W.B. Yeats and G.B. Shaw, Proust and Hemingway, Freud and Jung, H.G. Wells and T.S. Eliot. Although often living in different cities - Zurich, Paris, London - their friendship survived. When Ulysses was finally published in Paris in 1922, its success enabled Joyce to help Svevo find a publisher for his great comic masterpiece The Confessions of Zeno. European literature owes a great deal to that meeting in Trieste.

"The book provides a deeper understanding of modern art in the Brazilian context, moving the focus away from the self-declared avant-gardes and towards a broad panorama of modernizing tendencies throughout the period, 1890 to 1945. The backdrop of sertão, favelas, carnival and samba - often left out of accounts that restrict readings of modernism to erudite arenas like literature, fine art or architecture - are foregrounded in an attempt to situate artistic discourses within the social and political struggles of the period. Race, class and ideological conflict are given priority as tools for deconstructing complex debates, too often taken at face value or misread as merely reflexive of European phenomena. The anthropophagic movement (Antropofagia) rates special attention in teasing out the meanings of primitivism in the Brazilian context. The book examines a range of visual cultural materials including paintings, periodicals, graphics and photographs, revealing a hidden archive that calls into question the very essence of how modernism is usually perceived in Brazil. The enduring presence of archaism and violence behind an appearance of modernity reveals itself to be not an anomaly, but rather a product of the tensions inherent to the enduring oligarchical structures of Brazilian culture and society"--

Professor Pinchas Polonsky has written an important study of the Religious Zionist thought of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. The book explores Rav Kook's religious revolution, the religious significance of the State of Israel, the national dialogue with God, contemporary problems in Judaism, the modernization of Judaism. Rav Kook was deeply steeped in rabbinic literature, including kabbala, and has offered unique insights into the current spiritual life of the Jewish people.

"This book provides a wide-ranging survey of a large number of Israeli novels and short stories written in the 1980s and 1990s and brings together a range of fresh critical perspectives that will benefit teachers and students of Hebrew literature and fans of literature in general.

Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French “return to Nietzsche” by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski’s original interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the “demon,” then deepened with provocative readings of Gide’s correspondence; Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody,” in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines—including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy—Klossowski’s critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities. --

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, MEMOIRS, LETTERS / POETRY

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphael's acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms , an unrivalled parade of the author's eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. "Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written," as Jeremy Lewis said in the Literary Review , these writings are as unguarded, sardonic and tactless as they are candid. This seventh volume relives Margaret Thatcher's first years in office. Raphael's wide acquaintance in the world of politics, literature, journalism and the movies gives him rare access to the character of those, in England and America, who dominated the times. The unintended result is a Proustian parade of people, famous and otherwise forgotten, and events momentous and strictly personal, presented by an unabashedly partisan, unblinking eye-witness. There is nothing else quite like this unfolding project in English or American literature. "I am not a camera, but--as these carnets prove--I am a pen. The moving finger writes differently from the clicking keys."

This book examines the staggering popularity of early-twentieth-century Russian detective serials. Traditionally maligned as Pinkertonovshchina, these appropriations of American and British detective stories featuring Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Ethel King, and scores of other sleuths swept the Russian reading market in successive waves between 1907 and 1917, and famously experienced a red resurgence in the 1920s under the aegis of Nikolai Bukharin. The book presents the first holistic view of Pinkertonovshchina as a phenomenon, and produces a working model of cross-cultural appropriation and reception. The red Pinkerton emerges as a vital missing link between pre- and post-Revolutionary popular literature, and marks the fitful start of a decades-long negotiation between the regime, the author, and the reading masses.

Central Europe, the venue of all these essays, is seen here as a region with blurred edges, comprising mainly Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia - a region notorious for its national conflicts, but where reluctantly acknowledged family likenesses may one day prevail. The essays, most of them written over the last 25 years and revised, concentrate (though not exclusively) on the era since 1900. They represent a mixed bag of episodes from the literature, politics and philosophy of the region. Some were written to remind the reader that the heart of Europe has also been, and could once again become, the heart of darkness. Some are devoted to heroes of the resistance, others to philosophical fellow-travellers of one kind and another; some show how the revolutions of 1989 in the wake of defunct ideologies followed the same agenda in all the countries concerned; others again examine the relationship between literature, ideology and politics in the writings of Robert Musil, Jaroslav Hasek, Vaclav Havel and others. Since the author has tried to let each topic determine its own approach, the theory behind these essays is that there is here no theory - either "Marxist" or "Aryan", "critical" or "Postmodern", or any other. Throughout, the author has kept a close look at the language of his texts and its functions in different contexts, but that is, or should be, too obvious a procedure to merit the name of theory.

"This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography"--