European Literature - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

Bleak Houses

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Bleak Houses (2005)
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction

By Lisa Surridge

The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat "private" family violence? Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction traces novelists' engagement with the wife-assault debates in the public press between 1828 and the turn of the century.

Lisa Surridge examines the early works of Charles Dickens and reads Dombey and Son and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the context of the intense debates on wife assault and manliness in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Surridge explores George Eliot's Janet's Repentance in light of the parliamentary debates on the 1857 Divorce Act. Marital cruelty trials provide the structure for both Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right.

Locating the New Woman fiction of Mona Caird and the reassuring detective investigations of Sherlock Holmes in the context of late-Victorian feminism and the great marriage debate in the Daily Telegraph, Surridge illustrates how fin-de-siècle fiction brought male sexual violence and the viability of marriage itself under public scrutiny. Bleak Houses thus demonstrates how Victorian fiction was concerned about the wife-assault debates of the nineteenth century, debates which both constructed and invaded the privacy of the middle-class home.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Bleak+Houses.
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Switzerland

Tue, 29 Jun 2004

Switzerland (2004)
A Village History

By David Birmingham

Switzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses. Over ten centuries the village, like the rest of Switzerland, went through the traumas of religious reformation and political revolution. A single currency, a unified postal service, and eventually an integrated army brought improved stability and prosperity to the union of two dozen small republics.

Yet Switzerland's enduring foundation remains the three thousand boroughs to which the Swiss people feel they truly belong. In Switzerland: A Village History, distinguished scholar David Birmingham tells the story of his childhood village-Château-d'Oex-where records of cheesemaking date to 1328. The evolution of this ancient grazing and forest economy included the rise of the legal profession to keep track of complex deeds, grazing allotments, and animal rights-of-way. Switzerland's eventual privatization of communal grazing land drove many highlanders to emigrate to the European plains and overseas to the Americas. The twentieth century brought wealth from foreign tourism to Switzerland, punctuated by austerities imposed by Europe's wars. Alpine peasants were integrated into Swiss union society and began at last to share in some of the prosperity flowing from urban industry.

Switzerland: A Village History replaces the mythology and patriotic propaganda that too often have passed for Swiss history with a rigorous, insightful, and charming account of the daily life, small-scale rivalries, and local loyalties that actually make up Swiss history.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Switzerland.
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Between Sea and Sahara

Sat, 15 Jan 2000

Between Sea and Sahara (2000)
An Algerian Journal

Edited by Blake Robinson

Between Sea and Sahara gives us Algeria in the third decade of colonization. Written in the 1850s by the gifted painter and extraordinary writer Eugene Fromentin, the many-faceted work is travelogue, fiction, stylized memoir, and essay on art. Fromentin paints a compelling word picture of Algeria and its people, questioning France’s—and his own—role there. He shows French dynamism tending to arrogance, tinged with malaise, as well as the complexity of the Algerians and their canny survival tactics. In his efforts to capture the non-Western world on paper as well as on canvas, Fromentin reveals much about the roots of a colonial relationship that continues to affect the Algeria of today. He also reveals his own development as painter, writer—and human being.

Now available for the first time in English, Between Sea and Sahara appeals to today’s reader on many levels—as a story of color, romance, and dramatic tension; as an eywitness account of the colonial experience in Algeria; as a study in trans-genre text, foreshadowing Fromentin’s psychological masterpiece, the novel Dominique. And, as Valérie Orlando points out in her introduction, Fromentin opens a window on the ethos informing the fashion of Orientalism that flourished with colonialism.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Between+Sea+and+Sahara.
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Battle of Kosovo

Thu, 15 Apr 1999

Battle of Kosovo (1999)

By John Matthias and Vladeta Vuckovic

The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karasdzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Brimm, Adam Mickiewicz, and Alexander Pushkin. Although translations into English have been attempted before, few of them, as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive until now. Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations to the “variable foot” effect of William Carlos Williams’s later poetry, and argues that John Matthias “grasps the poetic strategies of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese poetry.”

First published in 1987, the translation of the Battle of Kosovo is now reprinted both because of its intrinsic merits and because the recent crisis in Kosovo itself compels the entire world to understand the nature of the ancient conflicts and passions that fuel it. Although Matthias and Simic have elected to retain their original preface and introduction, Christopher Merrill, a scholar of the region and author of Only the Nails Remain, has contributed a brief afterword explaining the importance of this poetry in the context of NATO’s first military action ever against a sovereign nation.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Battle+of+Kosovo.
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God’s Torment

Sat, 01 Oct 1994

God’s Torment (1994)
Poems By Alain Bosquet

By Alain Bosquet

Ohio University Press published a first volume of Alain Bosquet’s work, Selected Poems, in 1973. Since then, the avant-garde and metaphysical poetry of Bosquet has become widely available to an international audience. Such eminent poets as Paul Celan, Vasko Popa, Octavio Paz, and Ismail Kadare have translated his work into German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Albanian. Writers who have translated his poetry into English include Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Denise Levertov, Louis Zukowski, Denis Devlin and Wallace Fowlie. This current collection, God’s Torment, has appeared in Italian, Swedish, Portuguese, Dutch, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian and Catalan.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/God%E2%80%99s+Torment.
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Isak Dinesen

Thu, 01 Jul 1993

Isak Dinesen (1993)
Critical Views

Edited by Olga Anastasia Pelensky

This historical overview of criticism of the famous Danish writer is the first such collection available in English. Composed of selections from major critics and scholars both here and abroad (including Aage Henriksen, Eudora Welty, Curtis Cate, Abdul JanMohamed, and Lionel Trilling, among others) Isak Dinesen would have suited the self-absorbed artist, who so delighted in being continually appropriated and invented within different forms of critical discourse that it became a source of amusement and distraction for her. For us, it is a reminder that literary works and their authors must yield gracefully to critical shaping for a literary reputation to take on a life of its own. To watch the unfolding of reputation under such continual reinvention becomes high literary spectacle. Readers of this collection will witness a major twentieth-century writer emerge from the judgments imposed by various critical schools in vogue from the early 1950s.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0821410555.
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Brothers Grimm and Their Critics

Wed, 01 Jul 1992

Brothers Grimm and Their Critics (1992)
Folktales and the Quest for Meaning

By Christa Kamenetsky

Critics of the Grimms' folktales have often imposed narrow patriotic, religious, moralistic, social, and pragmatic meanings of their stories, sometimes banning them altogether from nurseries and schoolrooms. In this study, Kamenetsky uses the methodology of the folklorist to place the folktale research of the Grimms within the broader context of their scholarly work in comparative linguistics and literature.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Brothers+Grimm+and+Their+Critics.
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Isak Dinesen

Tue, 30 Apr 1991

Isak Dinesen (1991)
The Life and Imagination of a Seducer

By Olga Anastasia Pelensky

Born into a Victorian Danish family, Karen Christentze Dinesen married her second cousin, a high-spirited and philandering baron, and moved to Kenya where she ran a coffee plantation, painted, and wrote. She later returned to Denmark, lived through the German occupation during World War II, and became a pivotal figure in Heretica, a major literary movement that flourished in Denmark after the war. By the time of her death, Dinesen was an international figure. Truman Capote would later call Out of Africa one of the most beautiful books of the century.

Despite the popularity of her writing, little is known about her life. For this provocative biography, Pelensky has uncovered hundreds of papers in libraries and private collections, and discovered new interview sources in Africa, Denmark, and England to help put the pieces of Dinesen’s life together. Her father’s outspoken sympathy for the plight of the American Indians, his suicide and the effects of his personal anguish as a failed adventurer are illuminated as major forces on Dinesen’s imagination. The Danish history of romance and masquerade and the tradition of pantomime in Denmark are also explored as themes that recur in Dinesen’s work.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0821410083.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Early Poems

Tue, 01 Jan 1991

Early Poems (1991)
1947–1959

By Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy is probably the most prominent figure in the generation of French poets who came into public view following World War II. Dedicated to poetry more as a means of spiritual illumination than as a technique for creating artistic monuments, he uses what he conceives to be the brokenness and poverty of language to enable us to glimpse a wholeness lacking in our contemporary world. This excellent translation of Bonnefoy’s early poems represents an enormous contribution to contemporary poetry, serving as an introduction to the work of Bonnefoy for those unfamiliar with his poetry as well as further evidence of his mastery for those who know his work well.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Early+Poems.
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The Poetry of Resistance

Fri, 15 Jun 1990

The Poetry of Resistance (1990)
Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition

By Sidney Burris

Does the artist have a responsibility to mirror the conflicts and problems of society in his or her work? Perhaps more than most, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has been faced with this question. Living in Belfast since 1957, Heaney decided to leave Northern Ireland altogether in 1972, his residency there spanning fifteen years of social upheaval and violence. "I am fatigued," Heaney wrote in 1971, "by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail or race and resentment, at another by the more acceptable feelings of pity and terror" (from Preoccupations, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980). Several years later in the final poem of North (1975), Heaney would describe himself ensconced in Wicklow as a Gaelic outlaw "escaped from the massacre," one who bides his time and weighs his "responsible tristia."

While obvious difficulties attend any study that would attempt a comprehensive reading of a living poet, the rapid and various developments of Heaney's poetic technique have been accompanied by a singularly concentrated sense of subject matter, and it is this concentration that permits an extensive critical treatment of Heaney's existing corpus. Derived from the complex milieu of Northern Ireland, Heaney's subject matters have been typically labeled "political," and as often happens in such discussions, his poetry suffers from the constricted perspective.

Burris' study demonstrates how Heaney handles the dilemma of an artist in a tumultuous society: pastoral poetry, in Heaney's hands, has been essentially modernized, refurbishing its traditional capacity to proffer trenchant social and cultural criticism while honoring the aesthetic demands of the art.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Poetry+of+Resistance.
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