Masks of Anarchy tells the extraordinary story of Percy Shelley’s poem “The Masqueof Anarchy,” from its conception in Italy and suppression in England to the moment it became acatalyst for protest among New York City workers a century later.Shelley penned the poem in 1819, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre, where British cavalrycharged peaceful political demonstrators near Manchester. His words would later inspire figuresas wide-ranging as ...

Collecting the work of international scholars of Finnish culture, this volume introduces the history of Finnish Romanticism to contemporary discussions of British, European, Nordic, Transatlantic, and Russian Romanticisms, in which Finnish achievements have too often been overlooked. Tying the notion of a national character to a spirit of independence was by no means unique to Finland, but the particular expressions of that connection, presented across Finland’s arts and literature of the ...

By staging human-animal encounters, Romantic literature and art repeatedly questioned how "human" animals could be and how "animal" humans in fact are. Romantic-era authors and artists often depicted perplexing animal intrusions upon humans. Sometimes the intruders were mystifying or terrifying, like Coleridge’s albatross or Poe’s raven; sometimes they were mundane, as in “The Swallow” by Smith or “To a Mouse” by Burns—regardless, encounters with animal-others occasioned Romantic musings. ...

Writing about Texas, Mexico, and Texan-Mexican relations for over four decades, Dick J. Reavis is one of the most poignant political voices of Texas—not as a politician, though his writings are infused with politics, but as a candid, unsentimental, probing, journalist. Reavis has worked as a reporter, features author, and staff writer (San Antonio Express-News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dallas Observer, San Antonio Light), as a Senior Editor of Texas Monthly

For most of the eighteenth century, automata were deemed a celebration of human ingenuity, feats of science and reason. Among the Romantics, however, they prompted a contradictory apprehension about mechanization and contrivance: such science and engineering threatened the spiritual nature of life, the source of compassion in human society. A deep dread of puppets and the machinery that propels them consequently surfaced in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature. Roman...

Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics—an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.For better or worse, Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music. Around 1900, the phenomenon known as Wagnerism s...

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, r...

With illustrations by award-winning comic artist Joe Sacco, Chris Hedges portrays a suffering nation on the cusp of widespread revolt and addresses Occupy Wall Street in his first book since the international protests began.In the tradition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Hedges and Sacco travel to the depressed pockets of the United States to report on recession-era America. What they find in Camden, New Jersey, the devastated coalmines of West Virginia, on the Lakota re...

A Pulitzer Prize Winner and landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born."Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsme...

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connec...

The first volume in Hunter S. Thompson’s bestselling Gonzo Papers offers brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, featuring a new introduction from award-winning author and editor John Jeremiah Sullivan.Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling “Gonzo Papers” is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, ...