Portrayals of Americans on the world stage

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Peggy Thompson

"Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy"--

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Richard Seaford

This is an exciting and entirely new synthesis, combining anthropology, political and social history, and the close reading of central Greek texts, to account for two of the most significant features of Homeric epic and Athenian tragedy: the representation of ritual and of codes of reciprocity. Both genres are pervaded by these features, yet each treats them in very different ways. In this book, Dr Seaford shows that these differences cannot be accounted for in merely literary terms, but require a historical explanation. Homer is a product of the city state at an earlier historical stage than is tragedy. It is the growth of the city-state and its concomitant developments - in particular of law and of money, as well as in the practice of ritual - that provide a key to the crystallization of the Homeric narrative tradition, to the specificity of tragedy, and to certain features of the thought of the period. In the case of reciprocity, again whether the positive reciprocity associated with gift exchange or the hostile reciprocity of revenge - the systematic distinctions between Homer and tragedy can be explained only from a historical perspective. In its characteristic movement tragedy reflects and confirms the transition from one kind of society towards another: from a network of reciprocal relations, characteristic of societies where the state is weak or absent, to the organization of citizens around a single centre or series of centres - the institutions and cults of the city-state. Challenging, thoroughly lucid, and at times controversial, this lively, original yet accessible work is the first to attempt to understand the development of early Greek literature from the perspective of state formation. It should make enlivening and important reading for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the history or the literature of classical Greece. All Greek is translated.

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Manuela Gerlof

"Die Studie analysiert die Funktion des Hörspiels als kulturelles Gedächtnismedium anhand der Erinnerungen an den Holocaust im Rundfunk der DDR. Im Vergleich zur bereits vielfach untersuchten Darstellung des Holocaust in anderen Medien werden erstmals die spezifischen ästhetischen Mittel des Hörspiels und die Rolle des Rundfunks als politisches Machtinstrument in der deutsch-deutschen Auseinandersetzung fokussiert. Auszüge aus den analysierten Hörspielen finden sich auf der beigegebenen Audio-CD."--Page 4 of cover.

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Jeanne Rosier Smith

Writing Tricksters examines the remarkable resurgence of tricksters - ubiquitous shape-shifters who dwell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds - on the contemporary cultural and literary scene. Depicting a chaotic, multilingual world of colliding and overlapping cultures, many of America's most successful and important women writers are writing tricksters. Taking up works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, Jeanne Rosier Smith accessibly weaves together current critical discourses on marginality, ethnicity, feminism, and folklore, illuminating a "trickster aesthetic" central to non-Western storytelling traditions and powerfully informing American literature today. Publisher's description.