Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen

Dissolute Characters: Irish Literary History Through Balzac, Sheridan Le Fanu, Yeats and Bowen Review

Irish literature in English commands world-wide respect, but it is rarely discussed in a comparative light. This study of the making and unmaking of character commences with Balzac's impact on nineteenth-century Irish fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu links Balzac and Swedenborg to Yeats, and anticipates Elizabeth Bowen's deployment of ghost story conventions in the 1940s.
 
Through painterly imagery, biblical quotation and the distortion of proper names, Le Fanu shows character to be a self-consuming project. Yeats' Parnell emerges as a modernist gothic hero of the 1930s. Bowen's The heat of the day anatomizes the problems of identity, bequeathed by Yeats.
 
Radically revising the idea of a gothic tradition and traversing two centuries of Irish literary history, Dissolute Characters gives a fluent and detailed account of the emerging relation between Irish culture, modernism and politics.

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Studies in the Legal History of the South)

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Studies in the Legal History of the South) Review

This groundbreaking study of the law and culture of slavery in the antebellum Deep South takes readers into local courtrooms where people settled their civil disputes over property. Buyers sued sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who whipped or neglected slaves under their care.

How, asks Ariela J. Gross, did communities reconcile the dilemmas such trials raised concerning the character of slaves and masters? Although slaves could not testify in court, their character was unavoidably at issue--and so their moral agency intruded into the courtroom. In addition, says Gross, "wherever the argument that black character depended on management by a white man appeared, that white man's good character depended on the demonstration that bad black character had other sources."

This led, for example, to physicians testifying that pathologies, not any shortcomings of their master, drove slaves to became runaways. Gross teases out other threads of complexity woven into these trials: the ways that legal disputes were also affairs of honor between white men; how witnesses and litigants based their views of slaves' character on narratives available in the culture at large; and how law reflected and shaped racial ideology. Combining methods of cultural anthropology, quantitative social history, and critical race theory, Double Character brings to life the law as a dramatic ritual in people's daily lives, and advances critical historical debates about law, honor, and commerce in the American South.

Symbols, Art, and Language from the Land of the Dragon: The Cultural History of 100 Chinese Characters

Symbols, Art, and Language from the Land of the Dragon: The Cultural History of 100 Chinese Characters Review

Chinese characters captivate as much with their artistic expressiveness as with their fascinating layers of meaning: they are written reflections of a unique and beguiling culture. Drawing upon the latest scholarship, this book gathers 100 of the most significant sinographs, placing them within their historical, artistic, and cultural contexts.  Each word is traced through the ages, from picture drawings to multifaceted modern characters, and every entry explores the characters’ significance in Chinese culture, from words such as dragon, phoenix, mountain, and heaven to abstract concepts of love, truth, wisdom, and luck. Superb calligraphy accompanies the text–often shown full-page for impact—along with lavish reproductions of Chinese brush paintings, scrolls, ceramics, and textiles.

 

Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character Since Colonial Times (Reflective History Series)

Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character Since Colonial Times (Reflective History Series) Review

A history of moral education in American schools. The author traces American traditions of moral education from the colonial era to the present, illuminating both debates about the subject and actual practices in public and private schools, colleges, and universities.