Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism


Book Description

Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States, Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal. Pereira examines Dove's poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism closely and chronologically, charting her path through the racially charged culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. She demonstrates how Dove eventually transcended racial protocols that threaten to define her work and moves into a nomadic poetic articulation of her cosmopolitan identity. As Pereira addresses Rita Dove's cosmopolitanism, she also examines the thematic concerns that reoccur in Dove's work - themes, such as incest, miscegenation, nomadism, the blues, and patriarchal oppression.




The Yellow House on the Corner


Book Description

This Life -- The Bird Frau -- Robert Schumann, Or: Musical Genius Begins with Afflication -- Happenstance -- Small Town -- The Snow King -- Sightseeing -- Upon Meeting Don L. Lee In a Dream -- "Teach Us to Number Our Days"--Nigger Song: An Odyssey -- Five Elephants -- Geometry -- Champagne -- Night Watch -- The Secret Garden -- A Suite for Augustus -- 1963 -- D.C. -- Planning the Perfect Evening -- Augustus Observes the Sunset -- Wake -- Back -- Belinda's Petition -- The House Slave -- David Walker (1785-1830) -- The Abduction -- The Transport of Slaves From Maryland to Mississippi -- Pamela -- Someone's Blood -- Cholera -- The Slave's Critique of Pratical Reason -- Kentucky -- Adolescence-I -- Adolescence-II -- Adolescence-III -- The Boast -- The Kadvana Kumbis Devise a Way to Marry for Love -- Spy -- First Kiss -- Then Came Flowers -- Pearls -- Nexus -- Notes from a Tunisian Journal - The Sahara Bus Trip -- For Kazuko -- Beauty and the Beast -- His Shirt -- Great Uncle Beefheart -- The Son -- Corduroy Road -- O.




Thomas and Beulah


Book Description

Collects poems that tell a fictionalized version of the lives of the authors's maternal grandparents.




The Darker Face of the Earth


Book Description

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth is Rita Dove's first play. Set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, it has been performed to great critical acclaim.




Mother Love


Book Description

Gathers poems that recast the ancient Greek story of Demeter and Persephone in a variety of settings, from a patio in Arizona to the pyramids in Mexico, as they explore the complex mother-daughter bond




Racial Discourse and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-Century African American Writing


Book Description

This book engages the critical mode of cosmopolitanism through racial discourse in the work of several major twentieth-century African American authors, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes and Albert Murray.




Spoon River America


Book Description

From Main Street to Stranger Things, how poetry changed our idea of small town life A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River Anthology won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters's work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century. A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.




The End and the Beginning


Book Description

First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.




The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini


Book Description

Leading scholars re-evaluate the opposition between Beethoven and Rossini, the great symbolic duo of early nineteenth-century music.




Words in Revolution


Book Description

In her extensive Introduction, Lawton has highlighted the historical development of the movement and has related futurism both to the Russian national scene and to avant-garde movements worldwide.