Journals and Letters


Book Description

Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of Queen Charlotte and her years interned in France with her husband Alexandre d'Arblay during the Napoleonic Wars, she captured the changing times around her, creating brilliantly comic and candid portraits of those she encountered - including the 'mad' King George, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and a charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. She also describes, in her most moving piece, undergoing a mastectomy at fifty-nine without anaesthetic. Whether a carefree young girl or a mature woman, Fanny Burney's forthright, intimate and wickedly perceptive voice brings her world powerfully to life.




A Faithful Heart


Book Description

Emmala Reed's journals from 1865 and 1866 present a detailed account of life in western South Carolina as war turned to reconstruction. Reed's postwar writings are particularly important given their rarity - many Civil War diarists stopped writing at war's end. Also unlike many diarists of the period, Reed lived in a small town rather than on a plantation or in an urban center.




Fear in North Carolina


Book Description

Cornelia Henrys three journals, written between 1860 and 1868, offer an excellent source for daily information on western North Carolina during the Civil War period.




"So Late Into the Night"


Book Description

In the fifth installment of this marvelous serial story, we read about Byron's separation from his wife. Besides his pleading letters to Annabella asking her to reconsider, there are level-headed letters to Murray and Hobhouse and Hunt and Rogers--all written during the tempestuous time before his final departure from England.




Byron's Letters and Journals


Book Description

Alongside Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron possesses a star-quality unlike other classic British authors. His life as poet, philanderer, homosexual, and freedom fighter is legendary, and this new selection from his powerful letters and journals tells the story from the inside, in Byron's own racy and passionate style. Though Byron is chiefly known as a poet, his letters and journals are one of the glories of English prose literature, and one of the greatest British acts of autobiography, alongside Pepys' Diary and Boswell's Journal. This new selection, taken from the authoritative and unbowdlerized edition prepared by Leslie Marchand in the 1970s, not only provides the cream of his informal prose; it amounts to a biography in Byron's own words. No other English writer lived so remarkable an existence, from rented rooms in Aberdeen to a Nottinghamshire peerage, from European fame to English infamy, and notorious Italian exile to a glorious death in the Greek War of Independence.The letters and journals are selected, introduced, and annotated to provide a running narrative of the life and career of his remarkable man in his own unmistakable words.




Making Broadway Dance


Book Description

"Musical theatre dance is an ever-changing, evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists and requiring dramaturgical understanding, character analysis, knowledge of history, art, design and most importantly an extensive knowledge of dance both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis: derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theatre and dance, belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music and lyric. The standard adage, "when you can't speak anymore sing, when you can't sing anymore dance" expresses its importance in musical theatre as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway's most influential dance-makers including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theatre and dance scholars, students, practitioners and Broadway fans"--




Where's the Truth?


Book Description

Where's the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical writings, drawn from his diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientist's life—his joys and sorrows, his hopes and insecurities—and chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy." A student of Freud's and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism, and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Where's the Truth? begins in January 1948, shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. He had already faced persecution by the U.S. government, having been mistaken by the State Department and the FBI for both a Communist and a Nazi. Starting in 1947, Reich was hounded by the FDA, which, in 1954, obtained an injunction by default against him that enabled it to burn six tons of his published books and research journals, and to ban the use of one of his most important experimental research tools—the orgone energy accumulator. Challenging the right of a court to judge basic scientific research, Reich was imprisoned in March 1957 and died in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, eight months later. The text gathered here shows Reich's steadfast determination to protect his work. "Where's the truth?" he asked a lawyer, and that question animates this volume and rounds out our understanding of a unique, irrepressible modern figure.




Nicholas Biddle in Greece


Book Description

Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844) was a noted politician and financier in early nineteenth-century America. At eighteen, he went to Europe as the secretary of the American minister to France. He also made the acquaintance of James Monroe when Monroe was the American ambassador to London. He was later elected to the state legislature and senate of Pennsylvania. Ultimately he became a director and then the president of the Bank of the United States. In the course of a sojourn to Europe, Biddle sailed to Greece, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. Half of the journal he kept on the trip has only recently been discovered, and the other half is known to only a few people because it is still in private hands. Taken together, these two journals (plus the four extant letters that Biddle wrote to his family in Philadelphia) are a mine of information about the formative influences on his career, about the politics and personalities of Napoleon's Europe, about the condition of Greece and its ancient monuments under the Turkocratia, and even about the American naval war against the Barbary pirates. Despite being written by a twenty-year old, these journals are remarkable for their literary quality and their general liveliness. Perhaps because they were not written to be published, they have a freshness and honesty lacking in more formal works of travel. McNeal's extensive introduction illuminates the early nineteenth-century background of Biddle's journals.




Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals


Book Description

Recognized today as one of the great modernist painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer, and her large body of letters and journals represent the story of her life. This volume presents the journals and every extant letter, each carefully annotated.




Cinesonidos


Book Description

During Mexico's silent (1896-1930) and early sound (1931-52) periods, cinema saw the development of five significant genres: the prostitute melodrama (including the cabaretera subgenre), the indigenista film (on indigenous themes or topics), the cine de añoranza porfiriana (films of Porfirian nostalgia), the Revolution film, and the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy). In this book, author Jacqueline Avila looks at examples from all genres, exploring the ways that the popular, regional, and orchestral music in these films contributed to the creation of tropes and archetypes now central to Mexican cultural nationalism. Integrating primary source material--including newspaper articles, advertisements, films--with film music studies, sound studies, and Mexican film and cultural history, Avila examines how these tropes and archetypes mirrored changing perceptions of mexicanidad manufactured by the State and popular and transnational culture. As she shows, several social and political agencies were heavily invested in creating a unified national identity in an attempt to merge the previously fragmented populace as a result of the Revolution. The commercial medium of film became an important tool to acquaint a diverse urban audience with the nuances of Mexican national identity, and music played an essential and persuasive role in the process. In this heterogeneous environment, cinema and its music continuously reshaped the contested, fluctuating space of Mexican identity, functioning both as a sign and symptom of social and political change.