The interest of Anglo-Irish literature is not only that its canon includes a high proportion of literary giants - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett - but also that it exemplifies the problematics of literature in a context of social and cultural tension. Irish literary history has often been studied under precisely that aspect: as the literature of a country in a marginal, colonial yet intra-European position; a country where a variety of cultural traditions (Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Presbyterian) have coexisted in an uneasy relationship; a country with intense social and economic divisions. These infrastructural tensions are not mere background or part of the context, but have been explicitly thematized in a substantial part of Ireland's literary output, so that an Irish author who does not address the matter of Ireland stands out as an anomaly, an exception to the general patterns. Therefore, the historical context of much Anglo-Irish scholarship is hardly surprising. Forging the Smithy: National Identity and Representation in Anglo-Irish Literary Historyaddresses three interrelated areas of interest: language, territory and politics; the role of historical consciousness in Irish authors and in their dissemination; and the representation of Irish affairs asa it gives rise to specific literary strategies.

The first reference work on one of the key subjects in American history, filling an important gap in the literature, with over 500 original essays.

Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

Writing in 1868, the Philadelphia publisher-cum-historian Henry Charles Lea informed a friend, “I am trying to collect the materials for a history of the Inquisition.” The collecting of these materials—books, manuscripts, and copies of thousands of pages of documents housed in musty European archives and libraries—would occupy Lea (1825–1909) for the remainder of his life. It also led to publication of A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1884–87) and his acknowledged masterpiece, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (1906–7). Regarded as classics, these path-breaking books inaugurated better understanding of the history of an institution whose aims and methods troubled Lea and remain subjects of heated debate. The first biography of Lea since 1931, The Inquisition’s Inquisitor offers the most comprehensive review to date of his writing on the history of the Catholic Church. Though Lea is generally regarded as a leading practitioner of “scientific” history, Richard L. Kagan examines the extent to which Lea’s religious convictions compromised the ostensibly objective character of his work. Lea’s extensive surviving correspondence also enables Kagan to examine other aspects of Lea’s long and productive career as one of Philadelphia’s most prominent citizens. Lea appears here a young literary critic; a businessman who skillfully transformed his family’s publishing firm into the country’s leading producer of medical books; a dogged political reformer; and a philanthropist whose largesse benefitted many of Philadelphia’s cultural institutions. Newly discovered sources also allow for insights into Lea’s private life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon, and the periodic breakdowns that required abandonment of his beloved “intellectual pursuits.” The Inquisition’s Inquisitor concludes with a survey of Lea’s legacy with respect to current understanding of the Inquisition and to Philadelphia, where reminders of his accomplishments include an eponymous library at the University of Pennsylvania and public elementary school in nearby West Philadelphia.

This book, first published in 1987, provides important information on reference publishing, including valuable guidelines on evaluating publications and sources. The articles contained here are all written by leading experts in the field.

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era: American Christianity and Religious Communication 1620-2000: An Annotated Bibliography contains over 2,400 annotations of books, book chapters, essays, periodical articles, and selected dissertations dealing with the various means and technologies of Christian communication used by clergy, churches, denominations, benevolent associations, printers, booksellers, publishing houses, and individuals and movements in their efforts to disseminate news, knowledge, and information about religious beliefs and life in the United States from colonial times to the present. Providing access to the critical and interpretive literature about religious communication is significant and plays a central role in the recent trend in American historiography toward cultural history, particularly as it relates to numerous collateral disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, speech, music, literary studies, art history, and technology. The book documents communication shifts, from oral history to print to electronic and visual media, and their adaptive uses in communication networks developed over the nation's history. This reference brings bibliographic control to a large and diverse literature not previously identified or indexed.