The first four decades of the twentieth century saw male homosexuality appear in French literature with increasing frequency and boldness. Departing from earlier, more muted presentations, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Francis Carco, and a host of less-famous writers, all created overtly gay characters are gave them ......
Originally published in 1848, Eureka is Poe's book on how the universe was formed, how it functions, and what its future might be. Poe provides a physical, scientific explanation for the interconnectedness of all things--an idea at the heart of much of nineteenth-century romanticism and American Transcendentalism in particular. This user-friendly ......
Reacting to widespread Nazi collaboration--both voluntary and otherwise--French patriotism surged in the wake of World War II. Resistance fighters were honored as heros, collaborators were arrested, and the nation was bent on blurring its immediate past by expunging whatever was seen to have been pro-German. In this fevered context, a ''National ......
Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America
Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and ......
The Romantics lived through a turn of the century that, like our own, seemed to mark an end to history as it had long been understood. They faced accelerated change, including unprecedented state power, armies capable of mass destruction, a polyglot imperial system, and a market economy driven by speculation. In Romanticism at the End of History, ......
In Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels, Pam Morris traces a dramatic transformation of British public consciousness that occurred between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. This brief period saw a shift from a naturalized acceptance of social hierarchy to a general imagining of a modern mass culture. Central to this collective ......
Containing the complete and annotated texts of six pamphlets written between 1609 and 1620, ''Custome Is an Idiot'' makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on early modern British cultural history, specifically on competing opinions about the role of women in society.During the early seventeenth century a fierce debate raged in British ......
Avital Ronell asks why ''there is no culture without drug culture.'' She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities: Freud's cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum), and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted--an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself. It ......
Attempts by writers and intellectuals in former colonies to create unique national cultures are often thwarted by a context of global modernity, which discourages particularity and uniqueness. In describing unstable social and political cultures, such ''third-world intellectuals'' often find themselves torn between the competing literary ......
