by Patrick J. Keane (1994)
Coleridge's Submerged Politics explores Coleridge's response to several crucial issues of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary age: the rise and suppression of English radicalism during the decade of the French Revolution and the tragic questions of slavery and the slave trade. The book consists of two distinct but intimately related sections. Starting with omissions in Coleridge's annotations on Robinson Crusoe, Part I traces his positions on race and slavery, connecting Defoe's novel and the slave-trading of its hero with the spectre-bark of The Ancient Mariner considered by several earlier critics as an abolitionist's allusion to the horrors of a slave ship. Keane discusses the numerous similarities that link these two haunting texts: their intertwined motifs of sea, sin, and existential solitude, of transgression, punishment, and at least partial redemption. More important, however, is Keane's treatment of the transfigured but recognizable domestic politics in and beneath the text of Coleridge's poem. Part II argues that imagery and plot developments in The Ancient Mariner reflect political events between November 1797 and March 1798, the months when Coleridge was writing and revising his poem and contributing anti-Pittite verses and essays to the widely read opposition newspaper the Morning Post. Keane steers a balanced course, insisting on the significance of the poem's sociopolitical context without reducing it to a token of its genesis. Though the book is part of the increasingly widespread movement to reinstate historical context as a ground of literary interpretation, Keane does not claim that The Ancient Mariner "says" one thing and "means" another - or is really about either Western guilt regarding the slave trade or Coleridge's own dangerous political voyaging during the months he was working on the poem. By treating The Ancient Mariner as a work of artistic transformation rather than political allegory or an "evasion" of politics, the author allows us to see the poem with an eye that is neither anti-historically "aesthetic" nor necessarily "ideological." As a result, The Ancient Mariner emerges with its interpretation-defeating mystery intact and as a poem to be read, re-created, and wondered about anew.
Jacques Pelletier
Production littéraire québécoise (oeuvres romanesques) et question nationale. Trois essais consacrés respectivement à Jacques Godbout, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu et André Major. Les analyses et les interprétations de l'auteur se situent dans la tradition marxienne de Lukacs et Goldmann. Les textes réunis ont été ébauchés au tournant des années 1980. Selon R. Saletti, l'oeuvre "n'échappe pas aux contraintes d'une vision déterministe de l'Histoire".
Onookome Okome
"This is a full-length study of Kenule Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni Minority and Human Rights activist who was judicially murdered on November 10, 1995. One remarkable feature of the essays selected for this volume is the intensity of each contributor's voice to the very controversial man whose judicial murder has come to signify the extent of misrule in Nigeria.". "Questions of nationhood, ethnic minority and power politics in Nigeria are discussed as each contributor examines the corpus of his literary and political ideas, pointing out the direction of his thought and the enduring contribution this writer and social critics have left behind on Nigeria's literary and political arenas."--BOOK JACKET.
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
This book combines a sweeping narrative history of the Civil War with a bold new look at the war's significance for American society. Professor Hummel sees the Civil War as America's turning point: simultaneously the culmination and repudiation of the American revolution. A unique feature of the book is the bibliographical essays which follow every chapter. Here the author surveys the literature and points out where his own interpretation fits into the continuing clash of viewpoints which informs historical debate on the Civil War.
Jesús M. Usunáriz, Edwin Williamson (eds
"Este libro examina las opiniones -críticas feroces y grotescas o alabanzas cortesanas- sobre la figura de los validos y favoritos; se analiza el profundo impacto que suscitaron las tesis de Maquiavelo en las obras de poetas y tratadistas. Calderón, Cervantes, Quevedo, Alemán, Lope de Vega, Guevara, Gracián, Ribadeneyra y un gran número de autores (teólogos, historiadores, arbitristas...) aparecen en estas páginas como hombres que conocían y participaban de los retos políticos y sociales de su época."--P. [4] of cover.