This book explores the multiple portrayals of the actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, king of the dunces, professional fop, defacer of Shakespeare and the cruel and unforgiving father of Charlotte Charke. But these portraits of Cibber are doubly partial, exposing even as they paper over gaps and biases in the archive while reflecting back modern desires and methodologies. The Colley Cibber ‘everybody knows’ has been variously constructed through the rise of English literature as both a cultural enterprise and an academic discipline, a process which made Shakespeare the ‘nation’s poet’ and canonised Cibber’s enemies Pope and Fielding; theatre history’s narrative of the birth of naturalism; and the reclamation and celebration of Charlotte Charke by women’s literary history. Each of these stories requires a Colley Cibber to be its butt, antithesis, and/or bête noir. This monograph challenges these partial histories and returns the theatre manager, playwright, poet laureate and bon viveur to the centre of eighteenth-century culture and cultural studies.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/HEMINGWAY PRIZE FOR DEBUT FICTION In Jennifer duBois’s mesmerizing and exquisitely rendered debut novel, a long-lost letter links two disparate characters, each searching for meaning against seemingly insurmountable odds. With uncommon perception and wit, duBois explores the power of memory, the depths of human courage, and the endurance of love. NAMED BY THE NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION AS A 5 UNDER 35 AUTHOR • WINNER OF THE CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD GOLD MEDAL FOR FIRST FICTION • WINNER OF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Astonishingly beautiful and brainy . . . [a] stunning novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “I can’t remember reading another novel—at least not recently—that’s both incredibly intelligent and also emotionally engaging.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR In St. Petersburg, Russia, world chess champion Aleksandr Bezetov begins a quixotic quest: He launches a dissident presidential campaign against Vladimir Putin. He knows he will not win—and that he is risking his life in the process—but a deeper conviction propels him forward. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, thirty-year-old English lecturer Irina Ellison struggles for a sense of purpose. Irina is certain she has inherited Huntington’s disease—the same cruel illness that ended her father’s life. When Irina finds an old, photocopied letter her father wrote to the young Aleksandr Bezetov, she makes a fateful decision. Her father asked the chess prodigy a profound question—How does one proceed in a lost cause?—but never received an adequate reply. Leaving everything behind, Irina travels to Russia to find Bezetov and get an answer for her father, and for herself. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Salon • BookPage Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for A Partial History of Lost Causes “A thrilling debut . . . [Jennifer] DuBois writes with haunting richness and fierce intelligence. . . . Full of bravado, insight, and clarity.”—Elle “DuBois is precise and unsentimental. . . . She moves with a magician’s control between points of view, continents, histories, and sympathies.”—The New Yorker “A real page-turner . . . a psychological thriller of great nuance and complexity.”—The Dallas Morning News “Terrific . . . In urgent fashion, duBois deftly evokes Russia’s political and social metamorphosis over the past thirty years through the prism of this particular and moving relationship.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Hilarious and heartbreaking and a triumph of the imagination.”—Gary Shteyngart
Tiré du site Internet de Book Works: "Since 1984 Book Works has aimed to make and question contexts for books in a variety of ways ; "Book Works: a partial history and sourcebook" is a record of all its activities up to 1996. It is also an introduction to artists' books and their points of contact with the larger cultures of contemporary visual arts and of the written word. The book includes illuminating essays from a variety of perspectives - practical, theoretical and irreverent. Many of Book Works' projects and publications are illustrated and described with detailed critical commentary. In addition, the book contains valuable information about self-publishing and details of libraries that hold collections of artists' books."
"Partial Stories takes readers to Malawi, where roughly one in twenty women can expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication, despite decades of safe-motherhood programs. The stories of these mothers are told in hospitals and villages, by chiefs and doctors, herbalists and nurses, epidemiologists and healers, and competing explanations proliferate. The mothers' stories are used by elders for technical education and moral instruction at a coming-of-age-ritual, a district hospital's mortality review, and in the reflected glow of a computer screen at an international conference. After orienting readers to urban Malawi's context of therapeutic pluralism and material scarcity, Claire Wendland discusses the ways various experts account for maternal death, showing how their diverse explanations reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. She looks to a series of pregnancy-related deaths in order to consider bodies as biosocial phenomena, shaped from before birth by history and social inequality. Wendland reveals an uneven therapeutic landscape that pushes experts to improvise, clinically and ethically. Their creative, essential, and sometimes deadly improvisations ask us to reconsider the "best practice" dogmas of global health and transnational research, as well as the nature of medical authority and expertise. Wendland demonstrates how strategies of legitimation render care more dangerous and knowledge more partial than it might otherwise be"--
