"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.
Setting / LocationFrance
Story Era1800s / Victorian
Protagonist / CoreMallarmé's children Lead Character
"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.
Les voyages d’Alvaro de Mendana y Neira et de Pedro Fernandez de Quiros dans la mer du Sud figurent parmi les plus grandes aventures maritimes de tous les temps et parmi les moins connues, en tous cas en France. Ils firent progresser les connaissances géographiques sur ce grand océan, la dernière partie encore inexplorée de notre planète, et considéré dès lors comme un « lac espagnol » ou comme le disait De Quiros comme un « paradis terrestre ».
"There are many Stevensons behind the initials RLS, but the one that has endeared him to so many readers for so long is surely the fighter, battling to stay alive. Jorge Luis Borges described Stevenson's brief life as courageous and heroic. In Philip Callow's new biography, one can see why.". "Doctors, called repeatedly to what should have been his deathbed, would find a scarecrow, twitching and alive. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny.". "He escaped his Scottish town, his family, his friends who had mapped out a literary career for him in London, and instead went chaotically across the Atlantic and overland to California in poverty and despair to reach his beloved, wherupon he escaped into marriage and committed himself to being a nomad. He sailed the Pacific and dreamed of being an explorer; his restlessness was Victorian. All the while he was composing some of the most treasured tales in the English language."--BOOK JACKET.
The Roads Taken is a big-hearted book, a thoughtful and wryly affectionate rendering of our national character as revealed to Fred Setterberg in his extensive readings and wanderings. At once a travelogue and memoir, a literary history and extended nature piece, The Roads Taken reconnects Americans to each other and to the land they live and work in - and often forsake. From Henry David Thoreau's Maine Woods to Jack London's San Francisco Bay, from Ernest Hemingway's Upper Peninsula to Zora Neale Hurston's French Quarter, Setterberg pilots readers across the well-traveled pages of our national literature and the well-read contours of the American landscape. He acquaints us anew with the books and ideas that, time after time, have pried us from our self-centered moorings and set us into physical and metaphysical motion. The Roads Taken begins, fittingly, with a discussion between Setterberg and his nineteen-year-old vagabond cousin, Wally, about Jack Kerouac, invoking the Beat writer's spirit as they swap stories about hitchhiking and one-night stands, Setterberg praises Kerouac as perhaps the best of our "bad influence" writers - an author whose stories make people quit their jobs and give away their possessions, whose books are among the first to be banned or burned while formulaic and forgettable best-sellers look on with impunity. Spurred on by Wally (whose next stop is Alaska), Setterberg takes to the road. In chapters inspired by and devoted to particular writers and locales, he visits Red Cloud, Nebraska, a prairie hamlet virtually unknown except as Willa Cather's hometown, and tours across Texas, a state known for all the wrong things until Larry McMurtry distilled a century of dimestore cowboy novels into his pure and beautiful literature of loneliness. He travels to Nevada, where the budding fabulist Mark Twain honed his truth-stretching skills as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and to New Orleans, where Zora Neale Hurston immersed herself in the voodoo rituals she later alluded to in her study of black folklore, Mules and Men. Exiting the paved roads, Setterberg searches for the solace that Nick Adams, Hemingway's internally scarred World War I veteran, might have found in the forests along Lake Superior. He also trails Thoreau deep into the mountains of central Maine for just one glimpse of the adroitly evasive moose. Setterberg's meandering narrative is fertile in unexpected associations, personal memories, and historical asides; redolent with vegetation, hot coffee, and automobile exhaust; and clamorous with strains of soul and country music, laughter, and argument. In its hints at the racism and apathy in this country, and its images of our adulterated skies and waterways, the book is also disturbing. Its accumulated details only suggest the natural and cultural treasures that Setterberg fears we could lose to the "blanding" of America - the rampaging, wide-scale forces of sameness that seem intent on smoothing out our rough edges and disarming the crankiness that characterizes our country at its most local levels. Caught up in Setterberg's Whitmanesque longing to roam widely and embrace whatever comes his way, readers will skip their lunches, unplug their televisions, and let their lawns grow shaggy while they finish The Roads Taken. Then, turning to a friend, or perhaps the stranger who read the book over their shoulder on a crosstown bus ride, they will delight in passing it on.
Mallarmé's children by Richard Cándida Smith | Literally Just Books
