97 results for "History"

The Western canon: the books and school of the ages

Bloom, Harold
Includes criticism and interpretation of William Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Persuasion, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens and Bleak House, George Eliot and Middlemarch, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, James Joyce and Ulysses, Virginia Woolf and Orlando, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Fernando Pessoa.
Mariner Books 2025-09-02 592 pages

Shakespeare's sisters: feminist essays on women poets

Sandra M. Gilbert,Susan Gubar
"... the best collection of feminist essays on women poets now available." —Spokeswoman Review "[The essays] form a satisfying whole, stunningly enlightening, important for literature and women’s studies.... " —Library Journal The essays in this landmark volume highlight the achievements of "Shakespeare’s sisters," including Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and others.
Indiana University Press 1979-06-01 337 pages

The correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940

Benjamin, Walter
The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as on of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem’s emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin’s death in 1940.
Schocken Books 1989-09-09 276 pages

Minds wide shut: how the new fundamentalisms divide us

Morson, Gary Saul,Schapiro, Morton Owen
A timely exploration of intellectual dogmatism in politics, economics, religion, and literature—and what can be done to fight it Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.” In Minds Wide Shut , Morson and Schapiro examine how rigid adherence to ideological thinking has altered politics, economics, religion, and literature in ways that are mutually reinforcing and antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. In response, they propose alternatives that would again make serious dialogue possible. Fundamentalist thinking, Morson and Schapiro argue, is not limited to any one camp. It flourishes across the political spectrum, giving rise to dueling monologues of shouting and abuse between those who are certain that they can’t be wrong, that truth and justice are all on their side, and that there is nothing to learn from their opponents, who must be evil or deluded. But things don’t have to be this way. Drawing on thinkers and writers from across the humanities and social sciences, Morson and Schapiro show how we might begin to return to meaningful dialogue through case-based reasoning, objective analyses, lessons drawn from literature, and more. The result is a powerful invitation to leave behind simplification, rigidity, and extremism—and to move toward a future of greater open-mindedness, moderation, and, perhaps, even wisdom.
Princeton University Press 2023-01-31 307 pages

Multidirectional memory: remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization

Rothberg, Michael
Rejects the model of competitive memory, i.e. the conception that collective memories of different groups, especially memories of victimization, confront one another in the public sphere, and eventually one group history blocks other group histories. Proposes a model of multidirectional memory, according to which various group memories interact productively and borrow from one another. In the post-World War II West, a process of coming to terms with the Nazi Holocaust of Jews went on side by side with a process of decolonization and coming to terms with Europe's and America's colonial and slavery past. In this process, the attitude that the Holocaust is unique as a historical phenomenon proved to be harmful and has been increasingly rejected. Discusses a number of artworks, literary works, and films, mainly by French artists and authors (e.g. Taslitzky, Fougeron, Césaire, Schwarz-Bart, Delbo, Rouch and Morin) as well as by some non-French ones (e.g. Arendt, W.E.B. DuBois, Caryl Phillips, Haneke), in which racism and events of the colonial past have been juxtaposed with the Holocaust.
Stanford University Press 2009-06-15 379 pages

Hold everything dear: dispatches on survival and resistance

Berger, John
A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice From the ‘War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.
Verso 2025-03-25 160 pages

Ancient Egyptian literature: a book of readings

Lichtheim, Miriam
First published in 1973 – and followed by Volume II in 1976 and Volume III in 1980 – this anthology has assumed classic status in the field of Egyptology and portrays the remarkable evolution of the literary forms of one of the world’s earliest civilizations. Volume I outlines the early and gradual evolution of Egyptian literary genres, including biographical and historical inscriptions carved on stone, the various classes of literary works written with pen on papyrus, and the mortuary literature that focuses on life after death. Introduced with a new foreword by Antonio Loprieno. Volume II shows the culmination of these literary genres within the single period known as the New Kingdom (1550-1080 B.C.). With a new foreword by Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert. Volume III spans the last millennium of Pharaonic civilization, from the tenth century B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era. With a new foreword by Joseph G. Manning.
University of California Press 2006-04-03 264 pages

The irresistible fairy tale: the cultural and social history of a genre

Zipes, Jack
"If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread--or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold--and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved--and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives."--Jacket.
Princeton University Press 2013-10-06 235 pages