Memories of his own life and of his friends, colleagues and enemies - from Roald Dahl and philosopher A.J. Ayer to Margaret Thatcher.

    Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare's achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

    82 b&w illustrations.

    The study of travel writing has, however, tended to remain either naively celebratory, or dismissive, treating texts as symptoms of imperial ideologies.Imperial Eyes explores European travel and exploration writing, in conjunction with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in the genre and a critique of an ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of travel accounts connected with particular sentimental historical travel writing. It examines the links with abolitionist rhetoric; discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840); and 18th-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.

    Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States.Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became white. Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation--race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration--are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race.Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

    How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public? According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover. Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.

    Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, "The Black Atlantic" also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

    As a novelist and icon, Rushdie has embraced both 'popular' and 'high' culture; reflecting this, the Guide brings together both academic criticism and journalism to investigate the passions and preoccupations of Rushdie's many critics, steering the reader through the inflamed debates and rhetoric surrounding this much admired but controversial author.

    His earlier publications have shown how dramatic British innovations in India, including revenue and legal systems, led to fundamental structural changes in Indian social relations. This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form a multifaceted exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian society contributed to colonial cultural hegemony and political control.Cohn argues that the British Orientalists' study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences--mostly law--in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of others. He shows how the very Orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.

    Translation of: Orphee noir, originally published 1948 as the preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue francaise, edited by Leopold Sedar Senghor.

    And much of the material presented here was used in that course. The title should serve well to convey the gist of these various pieces. For all of them are explicitly concerned with the attempt to define and track down the implications of the term "symbolic action," and to show how the marvels of literature and language look when considered form that point of view.

    Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture. Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.

    Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

    Having been trained in typewriting and shorthand, she obtains employment at a law office, only to find that she cannot bear to work with her unpleasant colleagues and employer. Juliet possesses some of the characteristics of the infamous "New Woman": she has attended Girton College, she smokes cigarettes, and she travels the countryside on her bicycle. After various adventures, Juliet finds a new opportunity as a type-writer girl for a publishing company. She falls in love with her employer, and he with her, but complications inevitably ensue. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Canadian-born Grant Allen was a prolific professional author of popular science texts on evolution as well as a fiction writer. The Type-Writer Girl (1897) is one of only two novels he wrote under a female pseudonym, possibly to lend credibility to his first-person female narrator. The Type-Writer Girl invokes tensions typical of the fin de siècle concerning evolution, technology, and the role of women. This Broadview edition provides a reliable text at a very reasonable price. It contains textual notes but no appendices.Excerpt: ... THE TYPEWRITER .GIRL, Chapter' i: INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE. I Was twenty-two, and without employment. I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy me. A swallow's back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even Lhere m London, where life is rarer, how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange barks--mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living stream is so marvelous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do they go?--innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars, phantoms that flash athwart .the, bribit of my life one second, and .then.vanish.-. But io themselves they are the: ceirCre of *a Wdrld--of the world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon. I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown, by the early 1 rains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin soot of the chimney-back--men with small black bags, bound for mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they may lend money, or buy shares, or...

    Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance. In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.