The call to "Remember the Alamo!" summoned up courage in the Americans struggling to win Texas's independence from Mexico. When the men at the Alamo came face-to-face with the 2,000 Mexican troops attacking the fort in 1836, they knew they couldn't win the fight. Nevertheless, they were ready to die rather than give up their claim to independence. The Alamo traces the American settlement of Texas and the series of events that led up to this momentous battle.
Performativity and Performance (Essays from the English Institute)
From the age of Aristotle to the age of AIDS, writers, thinkers, performers and activists have wresteled with what "performance" is all about. At the same moment, "performativity"--a new concept in language theory--has become a ubiquitous term in literary studies. This volume grapples with the nature of these two key terms whose traces can be found everywhere: in the theatre, in the streets, in philosophy, in questions of race and gender, and in the sentences we speak.
Added by: lucius5 | Karma: 1660.85 | Non-Fiction, Other | 1 April 2009
36
This work provides an analysis of the influence of the classic myth on the study and execution of artistic and scientific endeavours throughout the ages. The book summarizes all the myths and legends of the lesser Gods and heroes, and traces their origins in historical fact or religious myth. It also shows how myths have continued to evolve throughout the ages.
Nineteenth-century America was a sprawling new nation unmoored from precedent and the mainstays of European nationalism. In their search for nationality, Americans sought coherence in a feeling of belonging shared among diverse and scattered strangers. Reading seminal works by Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman, Peter Coviello traces these writers' enthusiasms and their ambivalences about the dream of an intimate nationality, revealing how race and sexuality were used as vehicles for an assumed national coherence.
Asking why the 19th-century British novel features heroines, and how and why it features "feminine heroism," Susan Morgan traces the relationship between fictional depictions of gender and Victorian ideas of history and progress. Morgan approaches gender in selected 19th-century British novels as an imaginative category, accessible to authors and characters of either sex. Arguing that conventional definitions of heroism offer a fixed and history-denying perspective on life, the book traces a literary tradition that represents social progress as a process of feminization.
