A Political Biography of Sarah Fielding (Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies)

Literature & Fiction

Johnson, Christopher D.

History & Criticism

Routledge

This book offers a detailed, comparatist defense of hyperbole in the Baroque period. Focusing on Spanish and Mexican lyric (Góngora, Quevedo, and Sor Juana), English drama (King Lear and translations of Seneca), and French philosophy (Descartes and Pascal), Christopher Johnson reads Baroque hyperbole as a sophisticated, often sublime, frequently satiric means of making sense of worlds and selves in crisis and transformation. Grounding his readings of hyperbole in the history of rhetoric and literary imitation, Johnson traces how rhetorical excess acquires specific cultural, political, aesthetic, and epistemological value. Hyperboles also engages more recent critiques of hyperbolic thought (Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Cavell), as it argues that hyperbole is the primary engine of a poetics and metaphysics of immanence.

Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature)

Religion & Spirituality

Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity’s afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought.
While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg’s published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg’s cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West’s cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images (Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought)

Arts & Photography

Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library

How do two boys raised in the same house grow up to be such different men? Life’s been very good to Brooklyn Raines: he lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful girlfriend, works his dream job for a major magazine, and doesn’t have a care in the world. His older brother Derrick, on the other hand, has had to struggle with his small-town Florida life, where he has turned to selling drugs to support his live-in girlfriend and infant son. But everything breaks down when their parents die suddenly, and then Derrick’s life of crime finally catches up to him, resulting in his being sent to prison. Now Brooklyn must leave his life in L.A. and return home to pick up the shattered pieces of his family, starting with Derrick’s young son, Dimitri. Between Two Brothers is the story of an incredibly close fraternal bond that is eventually destroyed by poor choices and unfortunate circumstances. Will sacrifice and hard work enable them to get back what they’ve lost? Or is it really true that you can never go home again?

Between Two Brothers

Genre Fiction

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction is a collection of thirteen essays honoring Professor Jerry C. Beasley, who retired from the University of Delaware in 2005. The essays, written by friends, collaborators and former students, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Professor Beasley's career and point to new directions of critical inquiry. The initial essays, which discuss Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Samuel Richardson, suggest new directions in biographical writing, including the intriguing discourse of "life writing" explored by Paula Backscheider. Subsequent essays enrich understandings of eighteenth-century fiction by examining lesser-known works by Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, and Charlotte Lennox. Many of the essays, especially those that focus on Smollett, use political pamphlets, material artifacts, and urban legends to place familiar novels in new contexts. The collection's final essay demonstrates the vital importance of bibliographic study.

New Contexts for Eighteenth-Century British Fiction: 'Hearts Resolved and Hands Prepared'

History

University of Delaware Press

A Political Biography of Sarah Fielding provides the most complete discussion of Fielding’s works and career currently available. Tracing the development of Fielding’s artistic and instructive agendas from her earliest publications forward, Johnson presents a compelling portrait of a deeply read author who sought to claim a place within literary culture for women’s experiences. As a practical didacticist, Fielding sought to teach her readers to live happier, more fulfilling lives by appropriating and at times resisting the texts that defined their culture. While Fielding often retreats from the overtly political concerns that captured the attention of her contemporaries, her works are daring forays into the public sphere that both challenge and reinforce the foundations of British society. Giving voice to those who have been marginalized, Fielding’s creative productions are at once conservative and radical, revealing her ambiguous appreciation for tradition, her fears of modernity, and her abiding commitment to women who must live within forever imperfect worlds.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

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Books by Johnson, Christopher D.