Kirjahaku

Robert Toombs of Georgia stands as one of the most fiery and influential politicians of the nineteenth century. Sarcastic, charming, egotistical, and gracious, he rose quickly from state office to congressman to senator in the decades before the Civil War. Though he sought sectional reconciliation throughout the 1840s and 1850s, he eventually became one of the South's most ardent secessionists. This thorough biography chronicles his days as a student and young lawyer in Georgia, his boisterous political career, his appointment as the Confederacy's first Secretary of State, his unsuccessful stint as a Confederate general, and his role as a proud, unreconstructed rebel after the war. An exploration of Toombs' career reveals the political forces and missteps that drove him--and people like him--to want to secede from the United States.

In Intricate Thicket: Some Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.

Prolific, popular and critically acclaimed, Michael Moorcock is the most important British fantasy author of his generation. His Elric of Melnibone is an iconic figure for millions of fans but Moorcock has also been a pioneer in science fiction and historical fiction. He was hailed as the central figure of the "New Wave" in science fiction, and has won numerous awards for his fantasy and SF, as well as his "mainstream" writing. This first full-length critical look at Moorcock's career, from the early 1960s to the present, explores the author's fictional multiverse: his fantasy tales of the "Eternal Champion"; his experimental Jerry Cornelius novels; the hilarious science-fiction satire of his "End of Time" books; and his complex meditations on 20th century history in Mother London and the Colonel Pyat tetralogy.

The poems of Red Arcadia present a jittery, spasmodic-often obscured-series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism.