Minerva and the Muse


Book Description

Biography of feminist journalist, Margaret Fuller.




Building the Intentional University


Book Description

How to rebuild higher education from the ground up for the twenty-first century. Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world's students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.




Minervas Gothics


Book Description

This project has several distinctive features. The first is statistical analysis of publishing records for all British novels (Minerva and otherwise) published between 1780 and 1829 (data are compiled from James Raven’s and Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770-1829: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles). This analysis confirms that Minerva novelists are more prolific than most female novelists in the period. It is rarely noted that Minerva novelists also often publish on occasion with other presses, something to which the data calls attention. The book’s scope and content challenges an anachronism that still permeates studies of the Romantic era. Minerva’s Gothics restores a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet.




The Real Minerva


Book Description

A “memorable [and] entertaining” novel of three strong women in 1920s small-town Minnesota by the author of Revelations (The Washington Post Book World). Winner of the Willa Literary Award Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award In a Midwestern farming community in 1923, as book-loving Penny enters adolescence, her mother, Barbara, pulls her out of school to send her to work. Destined to become a cleaning woman like her mother, Penny sees no escape from her bleak existence—until a scandalous figure arrives in the town of Minerva, Minnesota: Cora, very pregnant, very headstrong, and very alone, has come to make a home on her grandfather’s farm. Intrigued by this curious new resident, Penny sets out to work for Cora, setting into motion events that will change multiple lives. Drawing on her mother’s and grandmother’s stories of Minnesota farm life in the early twentieth century, acclaimed author Mary Sharratt has created a suspenseful and moving novel about the strength of women and the unexpected friendships that form between them. “A paean to the bond between mothers and daughters . . . engrossing.” —Booklist “Wonderful.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times-bestselling author of With or Without You




Cultivating the Muse


Book Description

Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.




The World of Roman Song


Book Description

Winner of the Classics and Ancient History award in the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards given by the Association of American Publishers In this bold work, Thomas Habinek offers an entirely new theoretical perspective on Roman cultural history. Although English words such as "literature" and "religion" have their origins in Latin, the Romans had no such specific concepts. Rather, much of the sense of these words was captured in the Latin word carmen, usually translated into English as "song." Habinek argues that for the Romans, "song" encompassed a wide range of ritualized speech, including elements of poetry, storytelling, and even the casting of spells. Habinek begins with the fraternal societies, or sodalitates, which predated the Republic and endured into the Imperial era, and whose rites, although adapted over time to different deities and cults, were from the beginning centered on song (perhaps most notably in the ancient Carmen Saliare). He goes on to show how this early use of song became a paradigm for cultural reproduction throughout Roman history. Ritual mastery of the chaos of everyday life, embodied and enacted in song, produced and transmitted the beliefs on which Roman culture was founded and by which Roman communities were sustained. By the emergence of the Empire, "song," in all of its senses, served in particular to reproduce the power of the state, organizing relations of power at every level of society. The World of Roman Song presents a systematic and comprehensive approach to Roman cultural history. Informed and imaginative, this book challenges classicists, social theorists, and literary scholars to engage in a provocative discussion of the power of song.




Ovid before Exile


Book Description

The epic Metamorphoses, Ovid’s most renowned work, has regained its stature among the masterpieces of great poets such as Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus. Yet its irreverent tone and bold defiance of generic boundaries set the Metamorphoses apart from its contemporaries. Ovid before Exile provides a compelling new reading of the epic, examining the text in light of circumstances surrounding the final years of Augustus’ reign, a time when a culture of poets and patrons was in sharp decline, discouraging and even endangering artistic freedom of expression. Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art—specifically poetry—changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid’s final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses, responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.




Muse No More


Book Description

Muse No More is a paranormal fantasy women’s fiction novel and is a women’s action and adventure tale from USA Today Bestselling Author Donna McDonald. Was it necessary for an entire task of the prophecy to be about me making amends? With four tasks of the Doomsday Prophecy solved and five more to go, I need time some time off to rest and recharge before tackling task five. My goddess power is dwindling daily. Signs of mortal aging are warning me that my goddess days may be nearing their Mortal Realm end. Should I admit failure to the Fates and beg for help from them? That’s never happening. Or at least it’s not happening until I’ve run out of other options. I’m not sure what other goddesses would do in my situation, but I’m taking my dragon champion and heading to Rome for a break. Who knows? Maybe I’m just tired. So what if I can’t make a portal and have to ask a magical friend to do it for me? A visit to my secret treasure vault in Rome will hopefully be worth swallowing that much of my pride. My mortal sins are few. My goddess sins are many. Maybe a walk down memory lane is long overdue. AUTHOR NOTE: This story is paranormal fantasy (think Dark Fairies, Demons, Pegasi, and Dragons) and a women’s action and adventure novel. Some romantic elements are also included. This is the third book in the Nine Heirs and a Spare series which has its roots in Greek mythology. You can count on the good guys (or rather good women) winning some of their battles, but that’s the only promise I can make. As with all my work, there will be some good laughs along the way. Topics: mythology, Greek mythology, goddess, series starter, first in series, fantasy series, paranormal action and adventure, women's fiction, fantasy fiction, paranormal romance, shifter romance, romance ebook, romance series, fantasy romance, paranormal elements, contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy, HEA, strong heroine, alpha hero, romance fiction, romance books, USA Today Bestseller, paranormal romance shifters series




Latin Erotic Elegy and the Shaping of Sixteenth-Century English Love Poetry


Book Description

Interdisciplinary in approach and methodologically sophisticated, this book explores the dynamic reception of Latin erotic elegy in Renaissance love poetry.




The Figure of Minerva in Medieval Literature


Book Description

First major study of the representation of Minerva in the Middle Ages, giving insights into classical reception. Images of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, appear frequently in medieval literature, derived from antique culture and literature; redemptress, mistress of the liberal arts, patroness of princes, idol, and Venus' ally. Throughout the high to late Middle Ages, Peter Abelard, Guido delle Colonne, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan, among others, drew on and developed these images, but they are particularly prevalent in a number of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English and Scots allegorical and dream-vision poems, including John Lydgate's Reson and Sensuallyte and Temple of Glas, the anonymous Court of Sapience and Assembly of Gods, James I's Kingis Quair, Charles d'Orleans' Fortunes Stabilnes, and William Dunbar's Golden Targe. This book offers the first full-length examination of these depictions, bringing out the receptionof classical culture. Via close readings of the various poets, it enables us to understand how her figure was used, and also, and most importantly, to interpret and transform the poetic and cultural traditions from which she springs. WILLIAM F. HODAPP is Professor of English and Coordinator of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota.