Louis

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Washington Irving

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer, navigator, colonizer, and citizen of the Republic of Genoa. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean..... Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and just eight months before his death (at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York), completed a five-volume biography of George Washington. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.

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Flora Lewis

The condition in the mid 1980's of twenty-five European countries: Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, West Germany, Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia.

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Richard Cándida Smith

"In a narrative combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme, the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. Through the lens of symbolism, Candida Smith focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarme's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result."--BOOK JACKET.

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John Wyatt

"After William Wordsworth reached his fiftieth year, his publications took new directions, which have been rejected or regarded as mysteries by later generations. This book examines the remarkable sets of poems arising from short journeys in Yorkshire, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, and from more substantial itineraries in Europe. These are a record of a middle-aged and, later, old man actively 'wayfaring', as he expressed it, gathering impressions of places and people and turning them with poetic skill into sequences which, when examined, turn out to be statements of a poet's duty and England's destiny."--BOOK JACKET.