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The American cultural historian, literary and social critic and college professor Paul Fussell (1924-2012) is primarily noted for his famous work The Great War and Modern Memory, but he also wrote and edited 21 books on a wide variety of topics, ranging from 18th century British literature to works on World War II and sardonic critiques of American society and culture. This book offers a thorough introduction to his writings and thought, and argues for Fussell's importance and relevancy. Covering Fussell's traumatic experience in World War II and the important influence it had on his life and outlook, this intellectual biography puts in context Fussell's perspectives on ethics, the human experience, war, and literature as an evaluative and critical endeavor.
In The Rhetorical Short Story, Purcell examines over ninety short stories as rhetorical artifacts of nearly a century of American history. The words of over seventy-five authors present a pastiche of American voices, from the early days of the Great War to the ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each of the stories features a type of rhetorical depiction that enables its audience to connect vicariously with the experience presented by the author. This account sees the transformation of the American perspective from an insular one, which emphasizes the purpose driven actions of strong individual agents, to ones in which individuals are caught up in the inevitable consequences of an all-determining stream of events.
In Espionage's Most Wanted™, readers will learn that America’s first spymasters included Benjamin Franklin and John Jay. Otto von Bismarck’s chief spy, Wilhelm Stieber, posed as an itinerant peddler and sold religious artifacts and pornography to enemy troops as a cover for collecting intelligence. During the cultural competition of the Cold War, the CIA helped popularize abstract expressionism by spending millions to promote the careers of artists such as Jackson Pollock. The East Germans once traded two captured West German agents for one dead East German agent. CIA officer E. Howard Hunt cleverly disrupted an intimate dinner meeting between Mexican Communists and a Soviet delegation by distributing party invitations to the general public. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the CIA employed psychics to “remotely view” places of interest in the Soviet Union. Espionage's Most Wanted™, chronicles 500 of the most daring spies, ingenious plots, bungled operations, and surprising facts about the history of espionage and intelligence from around the world. Its fifty lists include the top-ten intelligence agencies, master spies, traitors, spy gadgets, code-breaking coups, covert operations blunders, and colorful dirty tricks. History buffs and espionage enthusiasts will enjoy this irreverent but illuminating look at the world of spies and intelligence.
Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world. Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world. Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.
In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing. When "I" Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women's roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When "I" Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women's studies, and autobiography in a global context. Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.
A comprehensive reference guide to the published writings of Graham Greene, this book surveys not only Greene's literary work - including his fiction, poetry and drama - but also his other published writings. Accessibly organised over five central sections, the book provides the most up-to-date listing available of Greene's journalism, his published letters and major interviews. The Writings of Graham Greene also includes a bibliography of major secondary writings on Greene and a substantial and fully cross-referenced index to aid scholars and researchers working in the field of 20th Century literature.
This volume contains a selection of articles originally presented at the Tenth Interdisciplinary Conference on Netherlandic Studies. These revised contributions, relating to the common theme of Janus and the perspective of time, examine Dutch language and culture from the U.S., Belgium, and the Netherlands.
This lively, intimate, sometimes disrespectful, but always knowledgeable history of the Bollingen Foundation confirms its pervasive influence on American intellectual life. Conceived by Paul and Mary Mellon as a means of publishing in English the collected works of C. G. Jung, the Foundation broadened to encompass scholarship and publication in a remarkable number of fields. Here are wonderful portraits of the central figures, including the Mellons, Jung himself, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, D. T. Suzuki, Natacha Rambova, Vladimir Nabokov, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, and Kurt and Helen Wolff.
