During the 16th century, Portugal endeavored to locate the mythical kingdom of Prester John--a Christian nation rumored to be somewhere in the Orient, amidst the pagans and Muslims. This study chronicles Portugal's final attempt, a six-year odyssey in Ethiopia that resulted in a tragicomic collision with a proud but isolated Christian kingdom. After summarizing the Prester John myth and the many efforts it spawned, the work focuses on the Ethiopian mission's chronicler, Father Francisco Alvares, who fell in love with the country and its people, became a friend of its king, hid the Abyssinians' heresies from his superiors, and set in motion events that saved Ethiopia from imminent destruction. Unique in the annals of Europeans' initial contacts with African peoples, the Portuguese mission is a portrait of hopeful preconceptions buffeted and eventually transformed by encounters with a fascinating, utterly unexpected reality.

Prisoners of Prester John: The Portuguese Mission to Ethiopia in Search of the Mythical King, 1520-1526

History

Baldridge, Cates

Africa

McFarland Company

Plowswords: Literature and the Agricultural Trap from Shakespeare to Coetzee

A critical examination of the 'agricultural trap' in literature For thousands of years, agriculture and civilization were essentially synonymous. The superiority of farming over the unsettled, itinerant life of hunting and gathering appeared, to many, self-evident. Only recently has the field of anthropology challenged this assumption by positing that foragers were, and are, actually happier and healthier than people living in agro-cultures. Plowswords is the first work to consider the refiguring of the agricultural revolution into the agricultural trap through a literary lens. Reading texts that depict farmers in conflict with foragers, Cates Baldridge argues that agricultural ideology justified the tedium and toil of farming by enlisting a rhetorical foil: the "savage" and "backward" hunter-gatherer. Texts such as The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Heart of Darkness, and the novels of J. M. Coetzee use this figure either to exalt farming's triumph over foraging or to mourn the consequences of the agricultural turn, anxiously championing or stridently challenging the received wisdom of humanity's supposed progress.

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

University of Virginia Press

The first critical evaluation of Greene's novels since his death in 1991, Graham Greene's Fictions: The Virtues of Extremity is a reconsideration of the author's major literary achievements, as well as a recasting of his overall worldview. Hitherto, most criticism of Greene's fiction has forced him into the constricting category of the "Catholic novelist," consequently flattening the peaks and valleys of his uncompromising vision of life. Graham Greene's Fictions is Cates Baldridge's response to this critical disservice—an exploration that ignores the conventional preconceptions about Greene's fiction and reveals him to be one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century.
More than a general assessment, Graham Greene's Fictions offers a fresh interpretation of familiar texts and attempts to discover within Greene's work a structure of thought that has not yet been seen with sufficient clarity. Each chapter focuses on a major aspect of Greene's vision as expressed through his novels. Greene's caustic attitude toward middle-class orthodoxies and his critiques of the three reigning ideologies of his time--Christianity, Marxism, and liberalism—are just two of the areas that Baldridge explores. Although five of Greene's novels are singled out for extensive evaluation—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians, and The Honorary Consul—what Baldridge attempts is nothing less than a comprehensive re-imagination of "Greeneland's" fictional topography.
Written for both the scholar and the general audience, this innovative study successfully captures the attention of all readers whether it is the first or the fifty-first work of Greene criticism one has read.

Graham Greene's Fictions: The Virtues of Extremity (Volume 1)

History & Criticism

University of Missouri

The Dialogics of Dissent in the English Novel

Middlebury College

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