1922. The Australian author, Henry Handel Richardson's (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson), is best remembered for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony trilogy. Her novel, Maurice Guest, plays out the history of Maurice and Louise against the background of the musical life in Leipzig, of which she has intimate knowledge, having studied music there herself. The other figures in the drama, Madeleine, Krafft, Ephie, Schwarz's wife, landladies and musical students, are inevitably pieces in the principal game, and yet are never deliberately so placed there by the author in order to assist the final catastrophe. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A collection of raucous stories that offer a “vibrant and true mosaic” (The New York Times) of New Orleans, from the critically acclaimed author of We Cast a Shadow SHORTLISTED FOR THE ERNEST J. GAINES AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Garden & Gun, Electric Lit • “Every sentence is both something that makes you want to laugh in a gut-wrenching way and threatens to break your heart in a way that you did not anticipate.”—Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets, in The Wall Street Journal Maurice Carlos Ruffin has an uncanny ability to reveal the hidden corners of a place we thought we knew. These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture. In “Beg Borrow Steal,” a boy relishes time spent helping his father find work after coming home from prison; in “Ghetto University,” a couple struggling financially turns to crime after hitting rock bottom; in “Before I Let Go,” a woman who’s been in NOLA for generations fights to keep her home; in “Fast Hands, Fast Feet,” an army vet and a runaway teen find companionship while sleeping under a bridge; in “Mercury Forges,” a flash fiction piece among several in the collection, a group of men hurriedly make their way to an elderly gentleman’s home, trying to reach him before the water from Hurricane Katrina does; and in the title story, a young man works the street corners of the French Quarter, trying to achieve a freedom not meant for him. These stories are intimate invitations to hear, witness, and imagine lives at once regional but largely universal, and undeniably New Orleanian, written by a lifelong resident of New Orleans and one of our finest new writers.
Lizzie is lonely. Her parents have gone and her brother, who believes he's a woman, is missing. Most of all though, Lizzie is preoccupied by Sally, her former lover who has gone off with a man with a fat neck. She starts to stalk Sally, collecting things that prove that somewhere life is taking place without her.
Evelyn Rutherford, a New York society beauty, decides to visits her aunt, who lives in the country, for the summer. When her aunt falls ill, Evelyn becomes the unwilling guest of a neighbouring family. What Evelyn thought will be a boring summer turned up to be a spiritual journey where she discovered the truth about herself and God.
Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia is the first book to explore the notion of literary community or literary sociability in relation to Australian literature.
