First published in 1947, Edmund Wilson's Europe without Baedeker returns to print with personal notes from the preeminent author-critic. This volume provides an informative and vivid account of postwar Europe in the countries of Italy, Greece, and England, as well as diary entries from Wilson's many travels. "The author--in measured, often seductive prose, makes a telling, thoughtful profile of the places visited, the people seen, and leaves in the mind a distressing picture to contemplate." - Kirkus Reviews
What has it meant to be an Americanist? What did it mean to be an Americanist through fascism, war, and occupation? Nightmare Envy and Other Stories is a study of Americanist writing and institutions in the 20th century. Four chapters trace four routes through the mid-twentieth century. The first chapter is the hidden history of American Studies in the United States, Europe and Japan. The second is the strange career of "national character" in anthropology. The third is a contest between military occupation and cultural diplomacy in Europe. The fourth is the emergence and fate of the "American Renaissance," as the scholar and literary critic F.O. Matthiessen carried a canon of radical literature across the Iron Curtain. Each chapter culminates in the postwar period, when the ruin of postwar Europe led writers and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic to understand America in new ways. Many of our modern myths of the United States and Europe were formed in this moment. Some saw the United States assume the mantle of cultural redeemer. Others saw a stereotypical America, rich in civilization but poor in culture, overtake a stereotypical Europe, rich in culture and equally rich in disaster. Drawing on American and European archives, the book weaves cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history, with portraits of Matthiessen, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, David Riesman, Alfred Kazin, and Ralph Ellison. It excavates the history of the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, where displaced persons, former Nazis, budding Communists, and glad-handing Americans met on the common ground of American culture. Others found keys to their own contexts in American books, reading Moby-Dick in the ruins. Nightmare Envy and Other Stories chronicles American encounters with European disaster, European encounters with American fiction, and the chasms over which culture had to reach.
So, you want to go to Europe? But how could you not? There's something awfully romantic about spending midnight in Paris, watching the lights shine on the famed La Seine. There's something special about hearing the growls and grunts of cars on the vias and around the piazzas of Rome. There's something magical about walking on the streets of London in front of Buckingham Palace as the roads close down for the iconic Changing of the Guard. Europe--rich with history, culture, art, and adventure-- is the ultimate destination for any backpacker from any background. For all the hullabaloo around this small piece of land attached to Asia, the fairytale-like legends that you hear from old men in the park, friends, and parents are, for most part, true stories. Well, maybe all except for that one time Uncle Marty claimed he found an old manuscript of Ulysses on a Dublin pub crawl. Pub crawls and pretentious reading material aside, Europe awaits you. Paraglide in the mountains of Gimmelwald, shimmy your way into the most exclusive clubs of Berlin, or scuba dive between two tectonic plates in Iceland. When in Dubrovnik, find love on Lokrum Island and, in Athens, find your Adonis or Aphrodite. Get blown away by the beat of the Pamplona's Running of the Bulls and cheer on European sports teams in Munich's beer gardens. Europe has been, and will continue to be, the starting point for the adventures of students all around the world. Join the company of your fellow wanderlust-stricken adventure seekers and set your trip apart from the rest. Ready, set, Let's Go!
Caesar attempts to historicize the sustaining interplay between romanticism and travel writing, but also emphasizes that his understanding of American travel writing has more to do with narrative form, epistemology, and cultural inheritance than particular historical shapings
This comprehensive biography of prolific critic, essayist, historian, and novelist Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) posits, quite successfully, that the subject lived a life as romantic and chaotic as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife (he was married four times, among them, Mary McCarthy); had affairs with numerous beautiful women, including Edna St. Vincent Millay; and was friend to literary giants such as John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabakov, and W.H. Auden.
During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.
The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.
This first volume of Bradbury's collected critical writings concentrates on British fiction since 1945. It is written from the center of the field it surveys: Bradbury is a writer who is also a critic, a critic who is also a writer. He often feels a conflict between the two roles, but writes in a personal, lucid, and amusing style, alert to modern critical theory yet at the same time deeply involved as a creative novelist.
