Ancient Greece
Kim Covert
"Describes ancient Greece, including its government structure, major achievements and inventions, and rise to power, as well as its lasting influences on the world"--Provided by publisher.
Read Time: ~4.9 hr
Narrative con/texts in Dubliners
by John Frow and Meaghan Morris (1993)
About this book
The harvest of a long and deep acquaintance with Joyce's fifteen enigmatic stories of Dublin life, Narrative Con/Texts in "Dubliners" creatively widens the definition of "context" to include networks of theme and symbol. By treating Dubliners as an expanding document of lives in the process of being lived and by paying attention to how the boundaries between stories break down, Benstock is able to notice how characters and situations come uncannily to resemble each other. There are several innovative approaches here (for example, the thorough inspection of the economic conditions of Joyce's Dublin, down to the halfpenny) as well as new twists on established ideas. Benstock attempts a global, integrated reading of the stories, substituting his more holistic "con/texts" for the current fashion of context-hunting. His is an old ambition (for full coverage) in a new, upbeat format.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreNarrative con/texts in Dubliners Lead Character
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In a group of five biographical and critical sketches that cover the period from 1810 to 1861, John M. Grammer explores the process by which "the South" was created as a concept in American culture. Three of the five Virginians Grammer examines were politicians with a literary bent - John Taylor, John Randolph, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. The other two, George Fitzhugh and Joseph Glover Baldwin, were fiction writers fascinated with politics. United in their desire to represent the South as a refuge of pastoral and republican order in an America where, as Emerson observed, "the ancient manners were giving way," all of these men aspired to speak for their region; and all of them, sooner or later, found that they had to begin by reinventing it. Grammer relates the debate over southern identity not only to the wish to defend slavery or agrarian life but to the larger search for order in the aftermath of an age of revolution. He also connects it to the long-standing American concern, born of the ideology of republicanism, over the mortality of American society. Southerners' search for a stable identity and their at times fierce defense of slavery were, according to Grammer, a response to what J. G. A. Pocock has called "the Machiavellian moment" in republican cultures - the moment when the republic is made to recognize its finitude in time. He maintains that we can best understand our antebellum southern writers by thinking of them not as the unwitting ancestors of Faulkner, but as the fully self-conscious contemporaries of Emerson and Whitman, the heirs of Jefferson and Hamilton - as citizens of a young republic facing what looked more and more like its imminent demise. With increasing mechanization and westward expansion transforming their formerly stable world, all antebellum Americans lived in a Machiavellian moment, and as Grammer deftly demonstrates, the long effort to mold the South into a symbol of order, like Whitman's search for a suitably symbolic America, must be understood in relation to that condition. A major, innovative contribution to the fields of both southern history and southern literary criticism, Pastoral and Politics in the Old South is a valuable volume for all students of the South.
The southern tradition
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In recent years American conservatism has found a new voice, a new way of picking up the political pieces left in the wake of liberal policies. But what seems innovative, Eugene Genovese shows us, may in fact have very old roots. Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to its sources in a rich southern tradition, his book introduces a revealing perspective on the politics of our day. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as one of history, The Southern Tradition is based on the intellectual journey of one of the most influential historians of the late twentieth century. To appreciate the tradition of southern conservatism, Genovese tells us, we must first understand the relation of southern thought to politics. Toward this end, he presents a historical overview that identifies the tenets, sensibilities, and attitudes of the southern-conservative world view. With these conditions in mind, he considers such political and constitutional issues as state rights, concurrent majority, and the nature and locus of political power in a constitutional republic. Of special interest are the southern-conservative critiques of equality and democracy, and of the Leviathan state in its liberal, socialist, and fascist forms. Genovese examines these critiques in light of the specific concept of property that has been central to southern social and political thought. . Not only does this book illuminate a political tradition grounded in the writings of John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, but it shows how this lineage has been augmented by powerful literary figures such as Allen Tate, Lewis Simpson, and Robert Penn Warren. Genovese here reconstitutes the historical canon, reenvisions the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens the spectrum of political debate for our time.