Bøger udgivet af University of Virginia Press

"e;Christian philosophy"e; is commonly regarded as an oxymoron, philosophy being thought incompatible with the assumptions and conclusions required by religious faith. According to this way of thinking, philosophy and theology must forever remain distinct.In From Theology to Theological Thinking, Jean-Yves Lacoste takes a different approach. Stepping back from contemporary philosophical concerns, Lacoste-a leading figure in the philosophy of religion-looks at the relationship between philosophy and theology from the standpoint of the history of ideas. He notes in particular that theology and philosophy were not considered separate realms until the high Middle Ages, this distinction being a hallmark of the modern era that is coming to an end. Lacoste argues that the intellectual task before us now is to work in the frontier region between or beyond these domains, work he identifies as "e;the task of thinking."e; With this argument, Lacoste resets our understanding of Western Christian thought, contending that a new way of thinking that is at once philosophical and theological will be the lasting discourse of Christianity.

Washington was rarely isolated from the world during his eventful life. His diary for 1751-52 relates a voyage to Barbados when he was nineteen. The next two accounts concern the early phases of the French and Indian War, in which Washington commanded a Virginia regiment. By the 1760s when Washington's diaries resume, he considered himself retired from public life, but George III was on the British throne and in the American colonies the process of unrest was beginning that would ultimately place Washington in command of a revolutionary army.Even as he traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 to chair the Constitutional Convention, however, and later as president, Washington's first love remained his plantation, Mount Vernon. In his diary, he religiously recorded the changing methods of farming he employed there and the pleasures of riding and hunting. Rich in material from this private sphere, The Diaries of George Washington offer historians and anyone interested in Washington a closer view of the first president in this bicentennial year of his death.

Washington was rarely isolated from the world during his eventful life. His diary for 1751-52 relates a voyage to Barbados when he was nineteen. The next two accounts concern the early phases of the French and Indian War, in which Washington commanded a Virginia regiment. By the 1760s when Washington's diaries resume, he considered himself retired from public life, but George III was on the British throne and in the American colonies the process of unrest was beginning that would ultimately place Washington in command of a revolutionary army.Even as he traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 to chair the Constitutional Convention, however, and later as president, Washington's first love remained his plantation, Mount Vernon. In his diary, he religiously recorded the changing methods of farming he employed there and the pleasures of riding and hunting. Rich in material from this private sphere, The Diaries of George Washington offer historians and anyone interested in Washington a closer view of the first president in this bicentennial year of his death.

Moreland Perkins's Reshaping the Sexes in "Sense and Sensibility" is an accessible yet sophisticated exploration of Jane Austen's revision and reversal of sexual stereotypes. He argues that Austen's first published novel embodies her most sustained effort at correcting dominant concepts of gender in her era. Through an engaging, often witty analysis of the text, he demonstrates how the novel's protagonists deviate from ruling ideas of their sexes and reveal Austen's own feminist tendencies.Perkins shows that this underestimated novel offers important insights into Austen's notion of what a woman can be and a man should be, and into the deeply social conception of felt emotion that drives and structures her fiction. Gracefully written and deftly argued, this book makes a persuasive case for taking a fresh look at Austen.

You can drive out of Charlottesville, Virginia, in any direction and within ten minutes find yourself in third-world rural poverty. In 1988, University of Virginia academics began pondering how the institution's vast resources could be used to improve the lives of these rural poor. The result was the Rural Elder Outreach Project, an innovative experiment that for five years evaluated and provided in-home nursing care for rural elder poor in five Virginia counties.As volunteer and observer, Susan Garrett traveled with the project's nurses, doctors, and social workers. Based on her research and experiences, Miles to Go deftly weaves larger issues of aging in rural America into a series of up-close encounters with individuals and families.Gracefully written, the book takes a practical look at the problems inherent in any community-based effort, yet manages to maintain a very personal touch.

In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses--Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart--engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.

Focusing on the representations of spiritual crisis in twentieth-century African American fiction and autobiography, Qiana J. Whitted asks how some of the most distinguished writers of this tradition wrestle with the inexplicable nature of God and the experience of unmerited natural and moral sufferings such as racial oppression. Although this spiritual and existential dilemma of "the problem of evil" is not unique to African Americans, writers such as Countée Cullen, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison offer paradigmatic examples of it in black life and culture after World War I. Whitted argues that these spiritual struggles so often articulated through the cry for divine justice are central to an understanding of modern black literary engagements with religion. Chapters explore the discourse of religious doubt and questioning through the crucified black Christ and the mourner's bench tropes, womanist spiritual infidelity, and the humanist improvisations of blues narratives.For too long, the author contends, literary critics have explained this suffering through platitudes of endurance and communal redemption, valorizing problematic notions of unquestioned faith and self-sacrifice. By questioning what is at stake for African Americans who call for divine justice, Whitted challenges the assumptions about African American religiosity by revealing an alternative tradition of narrative dissent and philosophical engagement. In doing so, she broadens the horizons of critical inquiry in black literary and cultural studies.

Tracing the development of a new genre in contemporary American literature that was engendered in the civil rights, feminist, and ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, Bridges to Memory shows how these movements authorized African American and ethnic American women writers to reimagine the traumatic histories that form their ancestral inheritance and define their contemporary identities. Drawing on the concept of postmemory-a paradigm developed to describe the relationship that children of Holocaust survivors have to their parents' traumatic experiences-Maria Bellamy examines narrative representations of this inherited form of trauma in the work of contemporary African American and ethnic American women writers. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata, Cristina Garca's Dreaming in Cuban, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, and Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Bellamy shows how cultural context determines the ways in which traumatic history is remembered and transmitted to future generations. Taken together, these narratives of postmemory manifest the haunting presence of the past in the present and constitute an archive of textual witness and global relevance that builds cross-cultural understanding and ethical engagement with the suffering of others.

THIS VOLUME in the United States Capitol Historical Society's Perspectives on the American Revolution series explores how the architecture of the Capitol is imbued with the political culture of its time. Editor Donald R. Kennon writes, "Just as the constitutional framework for the new nation adapted and reformulated classical theories of republicanism, so too would the creation of its capital. The classical past would serve as models, but as models to be worked out in the context of the new American experiment in republicanism." These essays emanated from the syposium held by the Society in 1993 to commemorate the bicentennial of the laying of the cornerstone of the United States Capitol.

Danger Sound Klaxon! reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology.By charting the meteoric rise and eventual fall of the Klaxon, Matthew Jordan highlights how perceptions of sound-producing technologies are guided by, manipulated, and transformed through advertising strategies, public debate, consumer reactions, and governmental regulations. Jordan demonstrates in this fascinating history how consumers are led toward technological solutions for problems themselves created by technology.

The process of naming is a transformative act that inherently imparts meaning, whether it be through the conscious use of a familiar historical or allegorical appellation or through the creation of a new word. Critics have often noted the importance of names and naming in African-American literature, but Debra Walker King's Deep Talk is the first methodological discussion of the process. In this original study, the author seeks out the discourses existing beneath the primary narratives of these literary texts by interpreting the significance of certain character names.King explores what she calls the "metatext" of names, an interpretive realm where these chosen words offer up symbolic, metaphoric, and other meanings, often simultaneously. Literary names can thus revise and comment upon the surface action of a novel by giving voice to unspoken themes and events, a process known as "deep talk." Drawing on the work of Kristeva, Bakhtin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the author explains the interpretive guidelines necessary to read "deep talk" in African-American texts. She applies these guidelines to texts by Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, among others.Perhaps most important, King reveals how the process of naming became a form of empowerment for African Americans, a way of both reclaiming black identity and resisting conventions of white society. Black men and women whose ancestors were stripped of their identity through the Middle Passage and during slavery embraced the incantatory power of names and have long used this power to defend themselves from the effects of racism, sexism, and classism.

Shaman of Oberstdorf tells the fascinating story of a sixteenth-century mountain village caught in a panic of its own making. Four hundred years ago the Bavarian alpine town of Oberstdorf, surrounded by the towering peaks of the Vorarlberg, was awash in legends and rumors of prophets and healers, of spirits and specters, of witches and soothsayers. The book focuses on the life of a horse wrangler named Chonrad Stoeckhlin [1549-1587], whose extraordinary visions of the afterlife and enthusiastic practice of the occult eventually led to his death--and to the death of a number of village women--for crimes of witchcraft.In addition to recounting Stoeckhlin's tale, this book examines the larger world of alpine myths concerning ghosts and other spirits of the night, documenting how these myths have been abused by German political movements over the years. As an introduction to modern German witchcraft research, as a study of the local impact of the Counter Reformation, and as a historical investigation into popular culture, Behringer's book has the advantage of telling a compelling individual story amidst larger discussions of peasant raptures, magical healing, and unfamiliar alpine notions such as the "furious army," the "wild hunt," popular bonfire festivals, and eerie echoes of pagan Wotan.Wolfgang Behringer is one of the premier historians of German witchcraft, not only because of his mastery of the subject at the regional level, but because he also writes movingly, forcefully, and with an eye for the telling anecdote. Reminiscent of such classics as The Cheese and the Worms and The Return of Martin Guerre, Shaman of Oberstdorf is an unforgettable look at early modern German folklore and culture.

The University Press of Virginia edition of The Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil Y. Lang, represents the most comprehensive and assiduously annotated collection of Arnold's correspondence available. When complete in six volumes, this edition will include close to four thousand letters, nearly five times the number in G.W.E. Russell's two-volume compilation of 1895. The letters, at once meaty and delightful, appear with a consecutiveness rare in such editions, and they contain a great deal of new information, both personal (sometimes intimate) and professional. Two new diaries are included, a handful of letters to Matthew Arnold, and many of his own that will appear in their entirety here for the first time. Renowned as a poet and critic, Arnold will be celebrated now as a letter writer. Nowhere else is Arnold's appreciation of life and literature so extravagantly evident as in his correspondence. His letters amplify the dark vision of his own verse, as well as the moral background of his criticism. As Cecil Lang writes, the letters "may well be the finest portrait of an age and of a person, representing the main movements of mind and of events of nearly half a century and at the same time revealing the intimate life of the participant-observer, in any collection of letters in the nineteenth century, possibly in existence."In this penultimate volume of the Virginia edition of Matthew Arnold's letters, we see Arnold at his best. This period saw publication of Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Discourses in America as well as of several essays gathered later in Essays in Criticism, Second Series. The Poems of Wordsworth and The Poetry of Byron appeared, as did the controversial essay "The Study of Poetry," with its notorious and very readable touchstone theory.The emotional and moral center of the volume, however, is the extraordinary series of letters written during Arnold's first American visit, during which he ranged from New York and New England to Madison, Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec. Like most visiting British luminaries, he meets everyone everywhere, including the president and former president, the Delanos, the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, and, especially, Andrew Carnegie. But the visit--a lecture tour undertaken to pay off his son's debts--had other and far more significant repercussions, for Arnold was accompanied by his wife and by his elder daughter, who met the man she was to marry--the direct cause of a second American visit and, in due course, of a flourishing branch of Arnold descendants in the United States.

A wide-ranging work that explores two centuries of Caribbean literature from a comparative perspective. While haunted by the need to establish cultural difference and authenticity, Caribbean thought is inherently modernist in its recognition of the interplay between cultures, brought about by centuries of contact, domination, and consent.

Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic is the first book-length analysis of early American literature through the lens of postcolonial theory. Although the United States represented a colonizing presence that displaced indigenous peoples and exported imperial culture, American colonists also found themselves exiled, often exploited and abused by the distant metropolitan center. In this innovative book, Edward Watts demonstrates how American post-Revolutionary literature exhibits characteristics of a post-colonial society.

From reviews of Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays: "A literary legacy forgotten until recently, McCord's work should be assured with this exemplary volume -- and with a ... companion volume of her memoirs, correspondence, poetry, and drama -- an honored place in the pantheon of a brilliant, if doomed, circle of antebellum Dixie reactionary thinkers". -- Choice"We sorely need an edition of the writings of Louisa S. McCord, and this one is as comprehensive as Miss Louisa's most devoted admirers could hope for". -- Elizabeth Fox-GenoveseLouisa Susanna Cheves McCord (1810-1879) was one of the most remarkable intellectual figures in antebellum America. She broke the confines of southern gender roles through her outspoken conservative writings on subjects such as political economy, abolitionism, and the role of women in southern society. In Louisa S. McCord: Selected Writings. Richard C. Lounsbury has compiled some of her best-known and most significant pieces from his editions of Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays and Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters in an accessible, single-volume paperback. This abridged selection of McCord's writings -- ranging from periodical contributions to poetry and personal correspondence to her tragedy Caius Gracchus -- provides a nuanced picture of an at-times-iconoclastic woman writer whose defense of slavery and attacks on abolitionism by no means exhaust her significance for contemporary students of southern culture.

In To Live in the Center of the Moment, Barbara Frey Waxman examines the emergence of the evocative literature of aging and demonstrates how these autobiographies challenge negative cultural associations of old age. Waxman has selected narratives that focus not on the broad sweep of a person's life but on the period when aging becomes central to the subject's definition of self. The author shows how assessing these literary autobiographies has changed her perceptions and helped her come to terms with impending old age.

W.H. Auden established his literary reputation in a decade framed by economic depression and global war. He emerged as the defining literary voice of the 1930s while the documentary genre emerged as the decade's principal discourse of social reality. In Auden and Documentary in the 1930s, Marsha Bryant examines this cultural convergence to challenge standard assumptions about socially engaged art. Restoring to Auden's canon the commentaries he wrote for documentary films and the photographs he published in his documentary travelogues, she considers the decade's interplay of visual and literary texts.The 1930s continue to provide our dominant models of socially engaged art, especially through the documentary genre. In Auden's alternative documentary texts, Bryant reveals, the 1930s can also suggest new models of representation. This multilayered study should appeal to scholars of film studies, modernism, cultural studies, and gay studies, as well as to Auden's legions of fans.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun is renowned as a provocative feminist critic of the culture and (as Amanda Cross) a writer of witty detective novels. In Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position, Susan Kress provides a compelling intellectual biography, tracing the evolution of Heilbrun's thought and career in the context of the major debates and transformations of the contemporary women's movement. Kress tells the story of a woman determined to expand the boundaries of female selfhood, weighs the risks of the life Heilbrun staked out for herself, and evaluates her pioneering contributions to the ongoing feminist conversation.Drawing on extensive interviews with Carolyn Heilbrun, her colleagues, and her friends, Kress illuminates her subject's various public identities: as Columbia student and professor struggling against the influence of Lionel Trilling, as author of such widely read books as Writing a Woman's Life and Death in a Tenured Position, as president of the Modern Language Association, as biographer of Gloria Steinem, and as one of the most controversial and influential of late-twentieth-century feminists.The new epilogue, written especially for this paperback edition, focuses on the last phase of Carolyn Heilbrun's intellectual journey. Uncovering clues buried in Heilbrun's work, Kress offers startling insights into Heilbrun's suicide, revealing an even more complex, more poignant portrait of Carolyn Heilbrun.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorists such as Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx built their intellectual edifices on what they thought would be the remains or ruins of religion in the wake of modernization. But today the decline and disappearance of religion can no longer be simply assumed. In the face of contemporary entanglements of religion and violence, the establishment of meaning and morality remains troubling; the experience of loss and change remains, paradoxically, constant; and new theoretical perspectives--feminism, race studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, postmodernism--have emerged, challenging the works that mourned religion and created meaning in earlier periods. The effects of this ongoing experience of mourning and symbolic loss on culture, on subjectivity, and on the academic disciplines of religious studies, though immense, are poorly understood and underinterpreted.In order to correct this lacuna in scholarly thought, this volume brings together a notable group of scholars who examine the ways in which recent cultural transformations inform the place of religion in the modern world. Methodologically, they represent the intersection of religious studies and the social scientific study of religion, bringing the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and anthropology into this dialogue.

The opening of this vital new book centers on a series of graves memorializing baboons killed near Amboseli National Park in Kenya in 2009--a stark image that emphasizes both the close emotional connection between primate researchers and their subjects and the intensely human qualities of the animals. Primates in the Real World goes on to trace primatology's shift from short-term expeditions designed to help overcome centuries-old myths to the field's arrival as a recognized science sustained by a complex web of international collaborations. Considering a series of pivotal episodes spanning the twentieth century, Georgina Montgomery shows how individuals both within and outside of the scientific community gradually liberated themselves from primate folklore to create primate science. Achieved largely through a movement from the lab to the field as the primary site of observation, this development reflected an urgent and ultimately extremely productive reassessment of what constitutes "natural" behavior for primates.An important contribution to the history of science and of women's roles in science, as well as to animal studies and the exploration of the animal-human boundary, Montgomery's engagingly written narrative provides the general reader with the most accessible overview to date of this enduringly fascinating field of study.

In this masterly work of synthesis and reinterpretation, Timothy Keegan looks anew at the relatively neglected period of South African history before the mineral age- in particular the years of British rule up to the 1850s- and decisively establishes its importance in the shaping of South African society. For whereas a previous generation of historians saw the twentieth-century racial state emerging from forces unleashed by the mineral revolution, Keegan argues that its roots lie in an earlier period, when the cape was first integrated into the British empire of free trade of the early nineteenth century.

In his probing new study, Francis Cogliano focuses on Thomas Jefferson's relation to history, both as the context in which he lived, and as something he made considerable, and conscious, efforts to influence. He was acutely aware that he would be judged by posterity, and he believed that the fate of the republican experiment depended to a large extent on how it was rendered by historians.The first half of the book situates Jefferson's ideas about history within the context of eighteenth-century historical thought. It then considers the efforts Jefferson made to shape the way the history of his life and times would be written: through the careful preservation of most of his personal and public papers, and through the institutions he left behind, including his home, Monticello, and the University of Virginia. The second half of the book considers the results of Jefferson's efforts to shape historical writings about himself and his period, which have issued forth in an unbroken stream from his day to our own. Although Jefferson seemed to have achieved apotheosis in the years following World War II, his rise above controversy was short-lived. Earlier political questions were replaced by arguments over race, class, and gender, and recent scholarship has criticized Jefferson's attitudes and actions with regard to civil liberties, Native Americans, slaves, and women, not least in the context of debates surrounding his relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. Our complex feelings about Jefferson's relation to these issues are a reflection of the man who helped engineer their place in our historical discourse.

Examining novels written in nineteenth-century England and throughout most of the West, as well as philosophical essays on the conception of fictional form, Felicia Bonaparte sees the novel in this period not as the continuation of eighteenth-century "realism," as has commonly been assumed, but as a genre unto itself. Determined to address the crises in religion and philosophy that had shattered the foundations by which the past had been sustained, novelists of the nineteenth century felt they had no real alternative but to make the world anew. Finding in the new ideas of the early German Romantics a theory precisely designed for the remaking of the world, these novelists accepted Friedrich Schlegel's challenge to create a form that would render such a remaking possible. They spoke of their theory as poesis, etymologically "a making," to distinguish it from the mimesis associated with "realism." Its purpose, however, was not only to embody, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, "the idealistic in the real," giving as faithful an account of the real as observation can yield, but also to embody in that conception of the real a discussion of ideas that are its "symbolic signification," as Edward Bulwer-Lytton described it in one of his essays. It was to carry this double meaning that the nineteenth-century novelist created, Bonaparte concludes, the language of mythical symbolism that came to be the norm for this form, and she argues that it is in this doubled language that nineteenth-century fiction must be read.