Hunting Captain Ahab

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Cornelia D. J. Pearsall

"In the wake of the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a beloved friend and the subject of In Memoriam. Tennyson wrote a range of formally inventive and intricately connected poems, many of which feature pivotal scenes of rapture, or being carried away. Pearsall explores Tennyson's representation of rapture as a radical mechanism of transformation - theological, social, political, and personal - and as a figure for critical processes in his own poetics." "The book investigates the poet's previously unrecognized intimacy with theological movements in early Victorian Britain that propounded the innovative and highly influential belief in an oncoming rapture. Pearsall develops original readings of Tennyson's major classical poems by tracking his lifelong intellectual investment in philological scholarship and archaeological exploration, including Victorian debates over the historical verifiability of Homer's raptured Troy. Tennyson's attraction to processes of personal and social change is bound to his significant but generally overlooked Whig ideological commitments, which are illuminated by Hallam's writings, and a half-century of interaction with William Gladstone. Pearsall illustrates the comprehensive engagement of seemingly apolitical monologues with the rise of democracy over the course of Tennyson's long career."--Jacket.

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Terry Eagleton

"Terry Eagleton's book provides a novel account of Ireland's neglected 'national' intellectuals. This extraordinary group, including such figures as Oscar Wilde's father William Wilde, Charles Lever, Samuel Ferguson, Isaac Butt and Sheridan Le Fanu, was a kind of Irish version of 'Bloomsbury' (they were doctors, lawyers, economists, writers and amateurs, rather than academics). Their work, much of it published in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, was deeply caught up in networks of kinship, shared cultural interests, and intersecting biographies in the outsized village of nineteenth-century Dublin. Eagleton explores the preoccupations of this remarkable community, in all its fascinating ferment and diversity, through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's definitions of 'traditional' and 'organic' intellectuals, and maps the nature of its relation to the young Ireland movement, combining his account with some reflections on intellectual work in general and its place in political life."--Jacket.

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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.

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Yun Lee Too

The rhetoric of identity in Isocrates offers a sustained interpretation of the Isocratean corpus, showing that rhetoric is a language which the author uses to create a political identity for himself in fourth-century Athens. Dr Too examines how Isocrates' discourse addresses anxieties surrounding the written word in a democratic culture which values the spoken word as the privileged means of political expression. Isocrates makes written culture the basis for a revisionary Athenian politics and of a rhetoric of Athenian hegemony. In addition, Isocrates takes issue with the popular image of the professional teacher in the age of the sophist, combating the negative stereotype of the greedy sophist who corrupts the city's youth in his portrait of himself as a teacher of rhetoric. He daringly reinterprets the pedagogue as a figure who produces a discourse which articulates political authority. . This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to ancient rhetoric and should appeal to people with interests in the fields of classics, history, the history of political thought, literature, literary theory, philosophy and education. All passages in Greek and Latin have been translated to ensure accessibility to non-classicists.