This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Catholic lore, American tales, and Sicilian superstition blend in this “clever, funny, heartbreaking, and heartwarming” novel (Publishers Weekly). Born with unruly red hair, a sharp tongue, and wine-colored marks all over her body—marks that oddly mimick a map of the world and make her subject to endless ridicule—Garnet Ferrari would hardly consider herself blessed. So when an emissary from the Vatican shows up at her door, convinced that her seeming ability to cure the skin ailments of others qualifies her for sainthood, she’s not quite convinced—or pleased. Garnet sets off on a quest to better understand who she is and where she and her unusual gifts came from. Tracing a twisted path that leads from Sicily to West Virginia, poverty to riches, romance to loss, reality to mythology, Garnet uncovers a truth far more powerful than any dermatological miracle: that the things of which we are most ashamed often become our greatest strengths. “A cleareyed, touching fable of a girl learning the hard truths about herself and others.” —Kirkus Reviews
Tag pointed his flashlight into the hole and peered inside. It was impossible. The inside was hollow, like an underwater cave. Something shiny lay near the opening and reflected the beam from his light. He reached inside and pulled it out. A pewter spoon. If he could have made a sound, he would have screamed with joy. He tucked the spoon in his vest pocket and reached into the hole again. A sharp stab of pain shot through his left hand. Something had hold of the tip of his thumb and was trying to yank him into the hole! Tag Jones knows that somewhere in the azure water and coral reef surrounding Bermuda lies a sunken ship full of treasure. El Patron sank in 1614, and Tag’s father died in a diving accident while looking for it. Tag won’t give up until he finds El Patron—and he’s not scared off by the local legend that says the ship is cursed. But when two tourists ask Tag and his friend Cowboy to retrieve some mysterious underwater parcels for them, the boys find themselves in dangerous water, way over their heads!
I'm eighty-eight, and I am awestruck that I have written a book (my first ever)! My wife Joyce died in 2015. For a time, grief and loneliness were my companions. I soon settled down, doing old-folks things like crossword puzzles, watching TV, etc. Some of my grandkids asked me what it was like being a kid during the Great Depression and World War II. Then one day, my friend Charlie gave me a packet of four one-hundred-page notebook pads. He said, "Maybe you can use these." Coincidence? So with pencil in hand, I started writing my story about my favorite subject""me! Many memories were rekindled, and suddenly, I had a new hobby. A word became a sentence, a sentence, a paragraph or a chapter. How far could I go with this? Night after night, the stories flowed through my mind. Quiet, tearful nights became commonplace. One night, I awoke with tears in my eyes and a word in my heart""redemption. That morning, I calculated how many days from my birth, January 2, 1930, to my rebirth, October 4, 1980. It was 18,533 days. Now my story had a working title""18,533 Days to Eternity. As I read my story, I realized that I was a normal, hardworking person with a vision, like you. However, unlike most of you, I was an impulsive, addicted, egotistical, train wreck. But God had a plan for my life. He wanted to lead me from my egocentric mind to the desire of his love, my heart. It was only eighteen inches. Hope! Never give up!
The National Endowment for the Arts is often accused of embodying a liberal agenda within the American government. In Federalizing the Muse, Donna Binkiewicz assesses the leadership and goals of Presidents Kennedy through Carter, as well as Congress and the National Council on the Arts, drawing a picture of the major players who created national arts policy. Using presidential papers, NEA and National Archives materials, and numerous interviews with policy makers, Binkiewicz refutes persisting beliefs in arts funding as part of a liberal agenda by arguing that the NEA's origins in the Cold War era colored arts policy with a distinctly moderate undertone. Binkiewicz's study of visual arts grants reveals that NEA officials promoted a modernist, abstract aesthetic specifically because they believed such a style would best showcase American achievement and freedom. This initially led them to neglect many contemporary art forms they feared could be perceived as politically problematic, such as pop, feminist, and ethnic arts. The agency was not able to balance its funding across a variety of art forms before facing serious budget cutbacks. Binkiewicz's analysis brings important historical perspective to the perennial debates about American art policy and sheds light on provocative political and cultural issues in postwar America.
This is a biography of Forbes Watson, art commentator for the New York Evening Post and New York World but probably best known as the editor of The Arts, an influential art magazine of the 1920s.
Patrons, Clients, and Empire challenges the stereotypes of despotic imperial power in Asian, African, and Pacific colonies by analysing the relationship between rulers and rulers on both sides of the imperial equation. It seeks an answer to the question: how were European officials able to govern so many societies for so long? Rejecting the usual explanations of 'collaboration' and indirect rule', this study looks to pre-imperial structures in the indigenous hierarchies which supplied patrimonial models of chieftaincy for territorial government. For nawabs, chiefs, emirs, sultans, and their officials and followers there were dynastic and economic advantages in accepting the terms of European over-rule, as well as the threat of deposition. For European officials, few in numbers and with limited military and financial resources, there were ready-made systems of local government that could be co-opted, reformed, or left relatively untouched. Both sides played politics as patrons and clients within a dual system of administration based on a mixture of force and self-interest. Surveying a wide variety of cases and employing a patron-client model, this study embraces pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial politics in new states. It covers the chronology of early European dependency on local rulers; the reasons for reversal of status among chiefs and administrators; the longer period of political bargaining over access to local resources in terms of land, labour, and taxes; and the ultimate fate of indigenous rulers in the period of party politics leading to independence.
A unique figure in medieval Jewish history, Isaac ibn Khalfun was a professional poet during the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in Spain. Like the Arabic poets of his day, Ibn Khalfun wandered throughout the Mediterranean east in search of wealthy patrons, writing panegyrics for those who complied, and witty, often pointed requests for payment from those who did not. His poems, which were not rediscovered until the twentieth century, are as fascinating for their literary quality as for the light which they shed on medieval Jewish society in the lands of Islam.
This book considers the boast of literary power to glorify or immortalize, a topos of enormous popularity. Focusing on representative figures of Renaissance humanism and the roots of the topos in antiquity, author Stephen Murphy elaborates a complex myth of poetic power. This myth, constructed with the help of such theorists as Ernst Cassirer, Giambattista Vico, Marcel Mauss, and Theodor Adorno, includes the elements of nostalgia for a primordial epoch of magical effectiveness and social centrality, the ideal of patronage as gift exchange, and the absorption of these extra-literary circumstances into literary convention.
