Auden speaks of the poet and his craft as well as literary figures and their works and observations on life in general.

Stradling shows how New York's varied landscape and abundant natural resources have played a fundamental role in shaping the state's culture and economy.

In 1991, the collapse of the USSR seemed to signal the death of the Russian football industry, as the money, the players and the fans left. But now the oligarchs who profited from the post-Soviet turmoil are supporting the nation's football clubs and their dreams of glory, resulting in unprecedented success. Along this journey into the heart of Russian football, Marc Bennetts meets the managers, oligarchs, players, pundits and fans that define the Russian Premier league, now the fastest-growing and most intriguing football league in the world. From Andrei Arshavin and the national team's adventures at Euro 2008 to the symbolism of a club from war-torn Chechnya lifting the Russian FA Cup, Football Dynamo uncovers shocking revelations about corruption, hooliganism and racism, but also the true beauty of the game and the country.

In this intellectual and literary history of American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another.

In the wake of feminist and poststructuralist contributions to literary study, how can we read images of women in literature written by men? Is it possible to read anything other than appropriation or misrepresentation in these male portraits of women? Starting with these questions, Van Oostrum looks for openings in a debate that seems to be firmly locked into traditional gender roles. While contemporary literary theory works hard to dismantle oppressive binaries, questions about the representation of an other' often lead back to a dizzying number of rigid identities. Through an examination of Henry Adams's and Henry James's attempts to write about American women, Van Oostrum tries to have it both ways, at once holding on to gendered cultural identity and at the same time challenging a stable personality. Using the sentimental fiction written by women in the 1850s, James and Adams write about the new women' of the turn of the 20th century. Traversing multiple oceans, they increasingly entangle concepts of gender and nationality, othering' not only women but the culture of Europe and the South Seas as well. An analogous movement of a male translation of female American sentimental fiction intersected with national identities, the author argues, takes place in two Dutch novels of the late 19th century. By looking through a Dutch lens at American literature, this book on possible gender crossings shows cultural identities always to be on the move. Crossing from the male author to the female subject on such an international landscape, the author tries to navigate a place for women within and beyond literature written by men.

This examination of American novels from 1900 to 1940 traces the literary treatment of the technological sublime, a simultaneous awe and fear of technology. The American technological sublime is a construct that can be useful in understanding the often conflicted and ambivalent reactions of enthusiasm and anxiety, exaltation and depression, associated with the patterns of development experienced in the US in this transitory period. The first four decades of the 20th century saw the culmination of the technological sublime in America: the loss of the innocently one-sided enthusiasm and technological republicanism of the 19th century to a fragmented, often paranoiac, and largely pessimistic vision of technology that became dominant of the literature after World War II. After an evaluation of earlier scholarship on the American technological sublime, the study examines four important decades in the development of the American technological sublime and some of the literary responses to it

The influence of millenarian thinking upon Cromwell's England is well-known. The cultural and intellectual conceptions of the role of millenarian ideas in the `long' 18th century when, so the `official' story goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England effectively tarred such religious radicalism as `enthusiasm' has been less well examined. This volume endeavors to revise this `official' story and to trace the influence of millenarian ideas in the science, politics, and everyday life of England and America in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Shifting Gears is a richly illustrated exploration of the American era of gear-and-girder technology. From the 1890s to the 1920s machines and structures shaped by this technology emerged in many forms, from automobiles and harvesting machines to bridges and skyscrapers. The most casual onlooker to American life saw examples of the new technology on Main Street, on the local railway platform, and in the pages of popular magazines. A major consequence of this technology was its effect on the arts, in particular the literary arts. Three prominent American writers of the time -- Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams -- became designer-engineers of the word. Tichi reveals their use of prefabricated, manufactured components in poems and prose. As designers, they enacted in style and structure the new technological values. The writers, according to Tichi, thought of words themselves as objects for assembly into a design. Using materials from magazines, popular novels , movie reviews, the toy industry, and advertising, as well as the texts of the nation's major enduring writers, Tichi shows how turn-of-the-century technology pervaded every aspect of American culture and how this culture could be defined as a collaborative effort of the engineer, the architect, the fiction writer, and the poet. She demonstrates that a technological revolution is not a revolution only of science but of language as well. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Beyond the Image Machine is an eloquent and stimulating argument for an alternative history of scientific and technological imaging systems. Drawing on a range of hitherto and marginalised examples from the world of visual representation and the work of key theorists and thinkers, such as Latour, de Certeau, McLuhan and Barthes, David Tomas offers a disarticulated and deviant view of the relationship between archaic and new representations, imaging technologies and media induced experience. Rejecting the possibility of absolute forms of knowledge, Tomas shows how new media technologies have changed the nature of established disciplines. The book develops Tomas's own theory of transcultural space and makes several original contributions to current debates on the culture of advanced technology.