Imagining Columbus is Stavans's contribution to the literature on Columbus. 'My purpose,' says Stavans, 'is to revisit, to investigate, to play with the asymmetrical geometries of the admiral's literary adventures in the human imagination.' Arguing that writers have portrayed Columbus in three ways-as prophet or messiah, as ambitious gold-seeker, and as a conventional, rather unremarkable man-Stavans examines numerous poems, novels, short stories, dramas, and other works on Columbus in this provocative book. In Part 1, 'Mapmaking,' Stavans explores the two opposing views of the celebration of the quincentennial, and discusses the most notable biographies of Columbus, including those by Washington Irving and Samuel Eliot Morison. In Part 2, 'Lives of a Literary Character,' Stavans takes up the geographic and historical development of Columbus as a narrative figure in literature, and devotes a chapter to each of the three literary views of the admiral. Stavans includes portrayals of other writers' views on Columbus like Walt Whitman, Alejo Carpentier, James Fenimore Cooper, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikos Kazantzakis, Rubén Darío, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, among others.

Embodied Texts: Symbolist Playwright-Dancer Collaborations explores the dynamic relationship between Symbolist theatre and early modern dance across Europe from the 1890s through the 1930s. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s projects with Ida Rubinstein; Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s pantomimes for Grete Wiesenthal; W. B. Yeats’s work with Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois; and Paul Claudel’s collaborations with Jean Börlin and the Ballets Suédois are studied in depth to shed new light on an evolving dance-theatre form within Symbolist culture. Buoyed by the era’s heightened interest in the expressive qualities of the body, these playwrights were highly invested in the authority of language, yet were drawn to the capacity of dance to evoke spiritual or psychological states which words could not completely capture. In its belief of fundamental correspondences among the arts, Symbolism encouraged experimentation across disciplines, and this study traces interconnections among many of its significant figures including Max Reinhardt, Claude Debussy, Gertrud Eysoldt, Edward Gordon Craig, Bronislava Nijinksa, Isadora Duncan, Jaques Dalcroze, Darius Milhaud, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Mariano Fortuny, Terence Gray, George Antheil, Eleonora Duse, and Michel Fokine.

In Brazil, where forest meets savanna, new towns, agribusiness and hydroelectricity plants form a patchwork with the indigenous territories. Here, agricultural work, fishing, songs, feasts and exchanges occupy the Enawenê-nawê for eight months of each year, during a season called Yankwa. Vital Diplomacy focuses on this major ceremonial cycle to shed new light on classic Amazonian themes such as kinship, gender, manioc cultivation and cuisine, relations with non-humans and foreigners, and the interplay of myth and practice, exploring how ritual contains and diverts the threat of violence by reconciling antagonistic spirits, coordinating social and gender divides, and channelling foreign relations and resources.

In the 1990s alone, more than 400 works on angels were published, adding to an already burgeoning genre. Throughout the centuries angels have been featured in, among others, theological works on scripture; studies in comparative religions; works on art, architecture and music; philological studies; philosophical, sociological, anthropological, archeological and psychological works; and even a psychoanalytical study of the implications that our understanding of angels has for our understanding of sexual differences. This bibliography lists 4,355 works alphabetically by author. Each entry contains a source for the reference, often a Library of Congress call number followed by the name of a university that holds the work. More than 750 of the entries are annotated. Extensive indexes to names, subjects and centuries provide further utility.

According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where int

The written word is one of the defining elements of Christian experience. As vigorous in the 1st century as it is in the 21st, Christian literature has had a significant function in history, and teachers and students need to be reminded of this powerful literary legacy. Covering 2,000 years, The Encyclopedia of Christian Literature is the first encyclopedia devoted to Christian writers and books. In addition to an overview of the Christian literature, this two-volume set also includes 40 essays on the principal genres of Christian literature and more than 400 bio-bibliographical essays describing the principal writers and their works. These essays examine the evolution of Christian thought as reflected in the literature of every age. The companion volume also features bibliographies, an index, a timeline of Christian Literature, and a list of the greatest Christian authors. The encyclopedia will appeal not only to scholars and Christian evangelicals, but students and teachers in seminaries and theological schools, as well as to the growing body of Christian readers and bibliophiles.

Reading on the Edge explores the notion of multiple cultural identity and exile in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and James Baldwin. Focusing on the cultural politics of modernism through the prism of cultural theory, the book reconceives each author's work while at the same time redrawing modernism's traditionally Eurocentric disciplinary boundaries. The book therefore has wide implications for our understanding of modernism and the modernist canon.

Claudel's most important work, Le Soulier de satin, has confused and puzzled readers since it first appeared. Joan S. Freilich's intensive examination of Claudel's imagery combined stylistic , structuralist, and psychoanalytic analyses. These are new methods that have been developed over the past two decades and are based on an examination of the text from the reader's point of view. This is a radical break with conventional literary studies which examine literature biographically or comparatively, i.e., focusing on the relationship of the text to other works written by the same or different authors, to the author's life and historical setting, or to various linguistic norms. Recent stylistic studies have as their point of departure the reader's perception of certain elements of style as unpredictable, and thus 'marked,' in an otherwise unmarked context; such studies seek to determine which of these 'stylistic devices' are present within a given text and what their effect is on the reader's response to the work. Structuralist analyses involve the identification and description of the basic system of concepts around which the literary text is constructed. This fundamental system, or structure, is the source of the reader's sense that the text is a coherent whole, but it is itself an abstraction and can be perceived only through one or more of the variants through which it is actualized in the text. Finally, the psychoanalytic interpretation of a literary work attempts to elucidate the most fundamental effective concepts conveyed through the text, concepts which evoke corresponding emotional responses in the reader and which, although often unrecognized, are thus responsible for much of his interest in, and appreciation of, the work. Stylistic and structuralist methods have been used together in recent years, but this study of the Soulier de satin represents the first time that psychoanalytic interpretation has been included as part of a stylistic and structuralist analysis in which the focus throughout is on the relationship of the text to the reader and the point of departure is the reader's response to the work. Furthermore, most Claudelian criticism has been vague and general in nature but this work is specific and represents an unusual and unique contribution.

Nakano Sigeharu (1902-1979), leading twentieth-century Japanese poet and social critic, transformed the revolutionary culture movement of the 1920s. Positioning Nakano's thought within the very history of Japanese Marxism, Miriam Silverberg applies textual analyses to his pre-war writings to form a new perspective on the history of the politics and culture of the Japanese left. Her book relates Nakano to the Western Marxist tradition, recognizes the existence of a Japanese Marxist theory of commodity culture, and uses this theory to illuminate the era. In particular, Silverberg addresses how Nakano, like his European contemporaries, worked toward a critique of mass culture, illustrating how Japanese thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s adoped Marxism as the dominant method of political and intellectual inquiry. This book draws on Marx's writings and those of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Bertolt Brecht, and Mikhail Bakhtin to present Nakano as a Marxist critic and poet. Close reading of Nakano's essays, poems (most of them appearing for the first time in English), fiction, and prison letters trace Nakano's "changing song" or consciousness through four stages--from his "discovery of history" in the mid-1920s to his refusal to be silenced during the late 1930s, when he produced a series of scthing attacks on intensifying state repression. Miriam Silverberg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.