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Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2013-10-24
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 0007481071
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A witty, personal and entertaining reflection on the history and meaning of paper during the (passing) era of its universal importance.
Author: Ian Sansom
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-05-14
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 0062295616
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the author of The Bad Book Affair comes a witty, personal, and entertaining meditation on the history and significance of paper—an international cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of this essential product. Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost. Paper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business cards, fireworks and flypaper, photographs and playing cards, tickets and tea bags. We are paper people. But the age of paper is coming to an end. E-books regularly outsell physical books. E-tickets replace the paper variety. Archives are digitized. The world we know was made from paper, and yet everywhere we look, paper is beginning to disappear. As we enter a world beyond paper, Ian Sansom explores the paradoxes of the greatest of man-made materials and shows how some kinds of paper, and the ghosts and shadows of paper, will always be with us. Paper: An Elegy is a history of paper in all its forms and functions. Both a cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of paper, this book is a timely meditation on the very paper it is printed on.
Author: Jeffrey Simpson
Publisher:
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780822957270
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This work is a portrait of America, a way of life, and a familiy that are vanishing even while coming to life on the pages. The author is the final descendent of pioneers who braved death to settle a dangerous frontier to found the Western Pennsylvania town of Parnassus.
Author: John D. Rosenberg
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2005-02-15
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1843313758
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This rich and elegant work describes how the unsettled cultural climate provided fertile soil for the flourishing of elegy. John Rosenberg shows how the phenomenon of elegy pervaded the writing of the period, tracing it through the voices of individuals from Carlyle, Tennyson, Darwin and Ruskin, to Swinburne, Pater, Dickens and Hopkins. Finally, he turns from particular elegists to a common experience that touched them all - the displacement of the older idea of the earthly city as a New Jerusalem by the rise of a new image of the Victorian city as an industrial Inferno, a wasteland of sprawling towns and of rivers so polluted they caught on fire.
Author: J. D. Vance
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-01
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 0062872257
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER IS NOW A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD AND STARRING AMY ADAMS, GLENN CLOSE, AND GABRIEL BASSO "You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Author: Emma Scioli
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Published: 2015-06-29
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0299303845
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The elegists, ancient Rome's most introspective poets, filled their works with vivid, first-person accounts of dreams. Emma Scioli examines these varied and visually striking textual dreamscapes, arguing that the poets exploited dynamics of visual representation to share with readers the intensely personal experience of dreaming.
Author: Melissa F. Zeiger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-05-31
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13: 1501711334
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Using as her starting point the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Melissa F. Zeiger examines modern transformations of poetic elegy, particularly as they reflect historical changes in the politics of gender and sexuality. Although her focus is primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry, the scope of her investigation is grand: from John Milton's "Lycidas" to very recently written AIDS and breast cancer elegies. Milton epitomized the traditional use of the Orpheus myth as an illustration of the female threat to masculine poetic prowess, focused on the beleaguered Orpheus. Zeiger documents the gradual inclusion of Eurydice, from the elegies of Algernon Charles Swinburne through the work of Thomas Hardy and John Berryman, re-examining the role of Eurydice, and the feminine more generally, in poetic production. Zeiger then considers women poets who challenge the assumptions of elegies written by men, sometimes identifying themselves with Eurydice. Among these poets are H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, and Elizabeth Bishop. Zeiger concludes with a discussion of elegies for victims of current plagues, explaining how poets mourning those lost to AIDS and breast cancer rewrite elegy in ways less repressive, sacrificial, or punitive than those of the Orphean tradition. Among the poets discussed are Essex Hemphill, Thom Gunn, Mark Doty, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Marilyn Hacker.
Author: Cassie Chambers
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2021-01-12
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 1984818937
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “Poverty is enmeshed with pride in these stories of survival.”—Associated Press Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie Chambers grew up in these hollers and, through the women who raised her, she traces her own path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Despite her poverty, she wouldn’t hesitate to give the last bite of pie or vegetables from her garden to a struggling neighbor. Her two daughters took very different paths: strong-willed Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while spirited Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school, then moved an hour away for college. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish school. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated her from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County, both while Wilma was in college and after. With her “hill women” values guiding her, Cassie went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her knowledge and opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved back home to help her fellow rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues that are all too common: domestic violence, the opioid crisis, a world that seems more divided by the day. But they are also community leaders, keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers uses these women’s stories paired with her own journey to break down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminate a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
Author: Max Cavitch
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published:
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 1452909180
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Author: Kara Dorris
Publisher: SIU Press
Published: 2023-05-16
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 0809339072
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.
