This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticsm or the familiar patterns of anthropological study. Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers -- which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

Three friends go to the library one day and check out a book titled Good vs. Evil. They start reading the book, but soon they find themselves in the story. Find out about the adventures they endure to get out of the book and back into their own world.

Things Come On is a broken and sutured hybrid of forms, combining poetry, prose narration, primary documents, dramatic dialogue, and pictures. The narrative is woven around the almost exact concurrence of the Watergate scandal and the dates of the poet's mother's illness and death from breast cancer, and weaves together private and public tragedies-showing how the language of illness and of political cover-up powerfully resonate with one another. The resulting "amneoir" (a blend of "memoir" and "amnesia") explores a time for which the author must rely largely on testimony and documentary evidence-not unlike the Congress and the nation did during the same period. Absences, amnesia, and silences count for at least as much as words. As the double tragedy unfolds, it refuses to become part of an overarching system, metaphor, or metanarrative, but rather raises questions of memory and evidence, gender and genre, personal and political, and expert vs. lay language. This haunting experimental biography challenges our assumptions about the distance between individual experience and history. A reader's companion is available at http://thingscomeonreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

In this translation based on the original Arabic text, Averroes defends the compatibility of philosophical investigation and Islam.

Address draws us into visible and invisible architectures, into acts of intimate and public address. These poems are concentrated, polyvocal, and sharply attentive to acts of representation; they take personally their politics and in the process reveal something about the way civic structures inhabit the imagination. Poisonous plants, witches, anthems, bees-beneath their surface, we glimpse the fragility of our founding, republican aspirations and witness a disintegrating landscape artfully transformed. If a poem can serve as a kind of astrolabe, measuring distances both cosmic and immediate, temporal and physical, it does so by imaginative, nonlinear means. Here, past and present engage in acts of mutual interrogation and critique, and within this dynamic Willis's poetry is at once complexly authoritative and searching: "so begins our legislation." Check for the online reader's companion at http://address.site.wesleyan.edu.

Everyone would agree that urban development, especially when involving the building of residential areas, should be accompanied by sufficient and good public infrastructure and facilities. We all want neighbourhoods with the necessary roads, green areas, social facilities, affordable housing and public spaces of high quality. At the same time, nowadays, governments are facing severe cuts in public expenditure. So who is going to pay for all that quality? In the Netherlands and in many other countries, achieving these public goals has become a problem, especially in the regeneration of deteriorated inner-city sites. This book offers insight in how the economic value increase that arises from urban development can serve to finance the quality we want, without the need for public subsidies. The findings and recommendations made in this book focus on Western Europe, mainly on successful and alternatively less successful recent experiences in Spain, England and the Netherlands. Public bodies can use the recommendations to create the necessary conditions to improve the involvement of property developers and landowners in the financing of infrastructure and facilities. Property developers and landowners can find formulas for private-public partnership that can lead to lower development costs and risks, allowing them to pay for good infrastructure and facilities while maintaining profitability. Scholars will find here the theoretical backgrounds for this relevant topic. The author has both an academic and a professional background in the practice of urban development.

Wesleyan University Press is pleased to present a special miniature edition of this best-selling volume of poetry by Robert Bly. Originally published in 1962, Silence in the Snowy Fields was Bly's first book, and one of the first volumes of poetry published by Wesleyan. Silence in the Snowy Fields disarmed readers and critics with its clear-sighted intelligence and apparent simplicity. Unlike much of the academically based American poetry of its time, this poetry aimed at a kind of Eastern balance in which human beings participate in but do not dominate nature. Many still find this one of Bly's most healing books. The entire book is reproduced in this irresistable small format.

In 1939, Halifax quickly became the country's centre of war activity when Canada declared war on Germany. With its vital naval base and its key role in getting supplies to Great Britain, the city was on a wartime footing for seven long years. Blackouts, enemy ships just offshore, and worries about raids and attacks were part of daily life. So were thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and merchant seamen who passed through on their way to or from Europe.Wartime Halifax is a visual history of this period. William Naftel has found a treasure trove of archival photos showing the bustling shipyards, construction, convoys and cadets, and never before seen images of parades, platoons and personnel. The photos show the dramatic impact of the war on city life -- long lineups at movie theatres, crammed dance halls, and crowded restaurants. Visuals and text convey a unique portrait of a wartime city -- not in cosmopolitan Europe but on Canada's east coast.This is a book for anyone with an interest in the history of the Canadians who participated in the Second World War. It is a companion to William Naftel's double award-winning book Halifax at War published in 2008.About the Author William D. Naftel was a historian and regional manager with Parks Canada for thirty years, in Ottawa and Nova Scotia. He is the author of Halifax at War, winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for non-fiction and the Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing. He lives in Halifax.

World Tree is in many respects, David Wojahn’s most ambitious collection to date; especially notable is a 25-poem sequence of ekphrastic poems, “Ochre,” which is accompanied by a haunting series of drawings and photographs of Neolithic Art and anonymous turn of the last century snapshots.Wojahn continues to explore the themes and approaches which he is known for, among them the junctures between the personal and political, a giddy mixing of high and pop culture references, and a deep emotional engagement with whatever material he is writing about. Winner of the 2012 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets

As the world undergoes daily transformations through the application of technoscience to every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. However much science fiction texts vary in artistic quality and intellectual sophistication, they share in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. At this moment, a strikingly high proportion of films, commercial art, popular music, video and computer games, and non-genre fiction have become what Csicsery-Ronay calls science fictional, stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the "seven beauties" of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technsocience's development into a global regime.

“Among other things, Shepherd has always been an elemental poet. His work abounds with the imagery and motifs of water and fire, and while those elements are important here, it is air and earth that are the more dominant elements in this collection. .

The works of Walt Whitman have been described as masculine, feminine, postcolonial, homoerotic, urban, organic, unique, and democratic, yet arguments about the extent to which Whitman could or should be considered a political poet have yet to be fully confronted. Some scholars disregard Whitman's understanding of democracy, insisting on separating his personal works from his political works.A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is the first full-length exploration of Whitman's works through the lens of political theory. Editor John E. Seery and a collection of prominent theorists and philosophers uncover the political awareness of Whitman's poetry and prose, analyzing his faith in the potential of individuals, his call for a revolution in literature and political culture, and his belief in the possibility of combining heroic individualism with democratic justice. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman reaches beyond literature into political theory, revealing the ideology behind Whitman's call for the emergence of American poets of democracy.

Bringing the Shovel Down maps the long and arduous process of being inculcated with the mythologies of state and power, the ramifications of that inculcation (largely, the loss of our humanity in the service of maintaining those mythologies), and finally, what it might mean, what it might provide us, if we were to transform those myths. The book, finally, has one underlying question: How might we better love one another?

The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeThe Physics of Imaginary Objects, in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.

This book presents a look at the effects of the Aramaic language as it appears in Lebanon and Syria.