Arts and Humanities Commons^™

[Introduction To] All Over The Map: Rethinking American Regions, Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, Peter S. Onuf

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Even as Americans keep moving "all over the map" in the late twentieth century, they cherish memories of the places they come from. But where do these places—these regions—come from? What makes them so real? In this groundbreaking book a distinguished group of historians explores the concept of region in America, traces changes the idea has undergone in our national experience, and examines its meaning for Americans today.

Far from diminishing in importance, the authors conclude, regional differences continue to play a significant role in Americans' self-image. Regional identity, in fact, has always been fed by the very forces that …

[Introduction To] Earthwards: Robert Smithson And Art After Babel, Gary Shapiro

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The death of Robert Smithson in 1973 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s anticipated contemporary concerns with environmentalism and the site-specific character of artistic production. His interrogation of authorship, the linear historiography of high modernism, and the limitations of the museum prefigures key themes in postmodern criticism while underscoring the uniqueness of Smithson's own work as an artist, filmmaker, and writer.

Gary Shapiro's elegant and incisive study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity. Ranging from Smithson's …

[Introduction To] From Civilization To Segregation: Social Ideals And Social Control In Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1934, Carol Summers

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This study examines the social changes that took place in Southern Rhodesia after the arrival of the British South Africa Company in the 1890s. Summer’s work focuses on interactions among settlers, the officials of the British South America Company and the administration, missionaries, humanitarian groups in Britain, and the most vocal or noticeable groups of Africans. Through this period of military conquest and physical coercion, to the later attempts at segregationist social engineering, the ideals and justifications of Southern Rhodesians changed drastically. Native Policy, Native Education policies, and, eventually, segregationist Native Development policies changed and evolved as the white and …

[Introduction To] Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction Of Arkady And Boris Strugatsky, Yvonne Howell

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The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky have been Russia's most popular science fiction writers since their first publication appeared in 1959. The enormous and consistent popularity of their works over three decades of fluctuating political and literary conditions is all the more interesting when one considers that their primary readership has been the Russian scientific-technical intelligentsia - a sector of society whose values and attitudes were instrumental in transforming the Soviet Union. This lively and original study of the Strugatskys' development as writers and as spokesmen for a generation of Russian scientists is as timely as it is unique. It …

[Introduction To] Politica Y Posmodernidad: Hacia Una Lectura De La Anti-Modernidad En Lationoamerica, Claudia Ferman

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Me propongo aquí bosquejar brevemente el recorrido argumental que dio sustancia al presente trabajo. Me gustaría empezar citando a Cortázar. La obra de Cortázar encarna de alguna manera un conjunto de debates que se produjeron en las décadas del 60 y 70 en gran parte del mundo, y de los que nosotros hemos querido dar cuenta desde la nueva perspectiva que abrieron los 80. Más adelante nos ocuparemos de eso, ahora vayamos a dar Ia vuelta a los mundos del 60.

[Introduction To] Heidegger And The Earth: Essays In Environmental Philosophy, Ladelle Mcwhorter

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Though each essayist presents his or her thinking as it has arisen out of the texts of Martin Heidegger, as this brief overview surely makes clear, the thoughts a reader will encounter here are diverse and perhaps at points conflicting. However, the essayists' differences in many cases actually grow out of a common sense, namely, a sense of urgency born of the knowledge that for many regions of the earth and for many of the beings within them time is running out. The book itself, including its conflicting assertions, is the embodiment of a kind of anxiety and a kind …

[Introduction To] New World Adams: Conversations With Contemporary West Indian Writers, Daryl Cumber Dance

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In these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable - by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman.

The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson …

[Introduction To] The Promise Of The New South: Life After Reconstruction, Edward L. Ayers

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At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century.

Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee …

[Introduction To] Writing The Woman Artist: Essays On Poetics, Politics, And Portraiture, Suzanne W. Jones

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The essays in this collection explore the many ways in which women writers have seen and dreamed the woman artist as a character in their works. In describing this character, her struggles and her visions, we as feminist critics run the risk of prescribing her, and yet failing to name her means failing to know her. We confront this difficulty not by defining the woman artist figure but by identifying many. Recognizing as Teresa De Lauretis has suggested that the social construction of gender is "a common denominator" among women, we examine the different representations of the woman artist figure …

[Introduction To] Alcyone: Nietzsche On Gifts, Noise, And Women, Gary Shapiro

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Shapiro explores an interrelated series of themes that contest and offer alternatives to some of the traditional concepts of metaphysics. The notion of gift giving and related ideas are seen to play fundamental roles in the economy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Shapiro articulates the relevance of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille for the thought of the gift and shows that Nietzsche's writing contains a conception of an archaic economy that is radically different from the order of property and exchange usually associated with Western metaphysics. This leads to a critique of Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche …

[Introduction To] The Edge Of The South: Life In Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Edward L. Ayers, John C. Willis

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The chapters in this volume explore diverse scenes of nineteenth-century Virginia: the big house and the slave quarters, small farms and battlefields, freed slaves in the country and freed slaves in the city, dark coal mines and brightly illuminated caverns, raucous political rallies and genteel meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Each essay offers a new perspective on a past which refuses to fit familiar ways of thinking about the nation and the South.

[Introduction To] After The Future: Postmodern Times And Places, Gary Shapiro

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This book brings together diverse aspects of postmodernism by philosophers, literary critics, historians of architecture, and sociologists. It addresses the nature of postmodernism in painting, architecture, and the performing arts, and explores the social and political implications of postmodern theories of culture.

The book raises the question of whether postmodernism is to be seen as one more epoch or period within a succession of eras, or as a challenge to the modernist practice of periodization itself.

The nature of the subject and of subjectivity is explored in order to resituate and contextualize the autonomous subject of the modern literary traditions. …

[Introduction To] Redeeming Politics, Peter Iver Kaufman

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Peter Iver Kaufman explores how various Christian leaders throughout history have used forms of "political theology" to merge the romance of conquest and empire with hopes for political and religious redemption. His discussion covers such figures as Constantine, Augustine, Charlemagne, Pope Gregory VII, Dante, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cromwell.

[Introduction To] Folklore From Contemporary Jamaicans, Daryl Cumber Dance

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There is not now available, nor has there ever been, a general and comprehensive introductory collection of the rich folklore of Jamaica. Yet, despite this widespread enthrallment with the better-known aspects of Jamaican folk life and culture, the fact remains that no extensive general collection of the vast range of Jamaican folklore has been assembled.

Dr. Dance spent six months in Jamaica from June through November 1978 researching and compiling stories and folklore for this book.

[Introduction To] Nietzschean Narratives, Gary Shapiro

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Taking issue with a widely held view that Nietzsche's writings are essentially fragmentary or aphoristic, Gary Shapiro focuses on the narrative mode that Nietzsche adopted in many of his works. Such themes as eternal recurrence, the question of origins, and the problematics of self-knowledge are reinterpreted in the context of the narratives in which Nietzsche develops or employs them.

[Introduction To] Achim Von Arnim's Novellensammlung 1812: Balance And Mediation, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

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Working within the context of current Arnim studies, Bonfiglio demonstrates how Novellensammlung 1812 is a coherent opus that allegorically represents a cosmology structured by Arnim's early work in physics along with his reception of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. These influences laid the foundation for an electromagnetic cosmology that informs Arnim's historiography, aesthetics, and poetics. Bonfiglio focuses his study on how Arnim's Romantic science determines his use of tropes, his Romantic idealism, and his own idiom of Romantic irony.

[Introduction To] Long Gone: The Mecklenburg Six And The Theme Of Escape In Black Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

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Magnitude of the Death Row escape on May 31, 1984 of six condemned men (Linwood Briley, James Briley, Earl Clanton, Jr., Willie Leroy Jones, Derick Lynn Peterson, and Lem Tuggle) incarcerated in the Mecklenburg Correction Center in Boydton, Virginia is chronicled.

The terror it inspired in Virginia and up and down the East Coast, and even into Canada, evoked memories of the numerous exploits of fugitives and out-laws on the run in Black folktales, Black toasts, Black music, and Black literature.

[Introduction To] Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical And Critical Sourcebook, Daryl Cumber Dance

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The beginnings of Caribbean literature lie hidden In the folklore of the plantation era and in the prim, condescending travelogues, the exotic novels, and the apparently naive slave narratives - often authored by Whites - that began to appear as early as the eighteenth century. Francis Williams, the classically educated Black poet of 18th century Jamaica, used conventional Augustan poetics to protest racism and assert the common humanity of mankind. The vision draws from Caribbean life. By the 19th century some black poets began to write of their own concerns and experiences, some writing in the local vernacular.

The essays …

[Introduction To] Hermeneutics: Questions And Prospects, Gary Shapiro, Alan Sica

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The essays in this collection are meant to be representative both of the current work on the nature of interpretation and of the necessity for such work to go beyond narrow disciplinary interests. Several individuals and institutions aided in bringing the essays together. Since a 1981 conference, many of these papers have been revised to take into account the exchange of views that took place. The other essays in the book are intended to reflect the broad range of hermeneutical alternatives that are now being actively explored.

[Introduction To] Vengeance And Justice: Crime And Punishment In The 19th Century American South, Edward L. Ayers

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Exploring the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race, Edward L. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime.

[Introduction To] Shuckin' And Jivin': Folklore From Contemporary Black Americans, Daryl Cumber Dance

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An exciting new collection of Black American folklore, running the gamut from anecdotes concerning life among the slaves to obviously contemporary jokes. In their frank expression of racial attitudes and unexpurgated wit, these tales represent a radical departure from earlier collections.