Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences" -- disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all.As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements.This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.

Students of Browning have long been puzzled by the discrepancies between the dramatic framework of Fifine and its symbolic development, but these difficulties are resolved in Southwell's explication by a biographical hypothesis. The powerful influence of the memory of his beloved wife, Elizabeth, involved Browning in a deep ambivalence, and Fifine at the Fair represents his effort to escape the effects of the profound inhibitions associated with her memory, while at the same time remaining loyal to it.The poem is itself a flawed quest for Eros. Browning's symbolic vision of sexuality as the central vitalizing force in human culture -- a supreme achievement of the poem -- is followed by a renunciation of the quest, but the validity of the vision is explicitly affirmed and its promise recognized.In Fifine at the Fair Browning's artistic powers are splendidly in evidence. Southwell's fresh examination of the tensions within the poem offers new understanding of its power.

In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies -- from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night -- he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse.Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the presentation of young people in love, and the exploitation of theatrical conventions that might provide a guaranteed response. Yet these matters were incidental to his main business in writing comedy: to examine the implications of an action in which human involvement in the process of living provides the kind of enlightenment that leads to renewal and the continuity of life.With rare foresight, Shakespeare presented a world in which women were as capable of enlightenment as the men who wooed them, and Bryant shows how the female characters frequently preceded their mates in perceiving the way of the world. In most of his comedies Shakespeare also managed to suggest the role of death in life's process; and in some -- even in plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest -- he gave hints of a larger process, one without beginning or end, that may well comprehend all our visions -- of comedy, tragedy, and history -- in a single movement.

Samuel Richardson, the founder of the modern English novel, gave shape to a previously unformed literary genre. Instrumental in the development of this new art form, Ira Konigsberg contends, is the influence of the drama. Although scholars have long suspected the influence of drama on Richardson's writing, this is the first study to examine it in detail. In such matters as material, technique, and structure, Konigsberg seeks to show that Richardson found his precedents in Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama and that it was his integration of these dramatic elements with fiction which caused the mutation in genre that is responsible for the subsequent course of the English novel.

Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan vividly describe the colorful life and times of one of the South's -- and America's -- most important businesses and provide insight into how luck, management practices, and personalities helped the company rise to international prominence.Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, the world's largest independent leaf tobacco dealer, is one of the major buying arms for tobacco manufacturers worldwide, selecting, purchasing, processing, and storing leaf tobacco. The story opens during the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners realized once again the worldwide potential of their native crop.The authors follow the company from its incorporation 1918 through one of the first hostile takeover attempts in American business, to its evolution in 1993 into Universal Corporation, a worldwide conglomerate with a number of products including tobacco.Based on scholarly research and over two hundred interviews with past and present Universal employees, this objective saga reveals much about American business and economic history.

The farm crisis of the 1980s quickly became a media event, with scenes depicted starkly in black and white on color TV. The embattled farmers, accompanied by their advocates, stood holding off bankers and sheriffs wielding foreclosure notices. In this new book, using findings from interviews and participant observation, agricultural historian Mark Friedberger peels away the emotion and rhetoric of the "save the family farm" movement to provide a realistic picture of what happened in on important farm state. Shake-out: Iowa Farm Families in the 1980s depicts the farm crisis of the 1980s in all its complexity, providing a useful corrective to popular accounts. Friedberger's approach and his focus on individuals present the problem in America's heartland at a truly grass roots level. Those seeking a better understanding of American agriculture in the 1980s and of rural life generally will find it invaluable.

Bipartisanship has become so associated with the conduct of foreign policy that partisanship has virtually been forgotten. In this persuasive study of senatorial politics, Malcolm E. Jewell reasserts the importance of partisanship, arguing that increased party responsibility is the best guarantee for the establishment of sound policy and for the continued support of policy once established. The author bases his conclusions on a study of the Senate during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

While the influence of Shakespeare on Sir Walter Scott has long been recognized, the importance of medieval literature in shaping his creative imagination has never before been examined in depth. Jerome Mitchell's new book fills this significant gap through a wide-ranging study of Scott's indebtedness to Chaucer and to medieval romance, especially the Middle English romances, for story-patterns, motifs, character types, style and structure, and detail.Mitchell establishes more completely and accurately than any previous critic the extent of Scott's knowledge of medieval literature. His examination of Scott's poetry, especially the long narrative poems, demonstrates their debt to Chaucer and medieval romance. The heart of the book is a detailed analysis of the Waverley Novels.Scott's debt to medieval literature, Mitchell shows, was vast, profound, and elemental; it is the single most important source area for the Waverley Novels, their warp and woof. Moreover, it is probably the key to Scott's immense appeal -- the very dimension which enabled him to cast an everlasting spell on his contemporaries, even on such great men as Byron and Goethe, and which has charmed generations of readers to the present day.This pioneering book, based on extensive research in Scotland, including Sir Walter Scott's personal library, sheds new light on the narrative substance and texture of Scott's poems and novels. Both the general reader and the serious student will derive from it a more informed appreciation of Scott's impressive achievement.

Early in 1733 Augustus II, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, died in Warsaw from complications of a gangrenous foot. The elective throne of Poland thus fell vacant, and the states of Europe began cautious maneuvers designed to secure for each some national advantage in the choice of a successor. Before the year was out, diplomacy had given way to military force. Yet the Age of Reason fostered a relationship between diplomacy and warfare that limited the violence of military action.The War of Polish Succession might have produced widespread carnage. It was a major struggle among the great powers of Europe with actions in Poland, the Rhineland, and Italy. Many illustrious commanders took part -- Marshal Villars and Prince Eugene, Maurice de Saxe and Count Daun. Behind them stood the powerful figures of Cardinal Fleury, anxious to uphold the honor of King Louis even as he guarded against escalation of the war, and Emperor Charles VI, obsessed with his desire to keep the Holy Roman Empire in Hapsburg hands. After three years of wary military action the war ended as it had begun, in a series of secret diplomatic maneuvers. No nation was annihilated, no prince unthroned, and once again Europe's precarious balance of power had been restored.John L. Sutton's engrossing account, the first in any major European language to bring together the evidence from the great diplomatic and military archives of Europe, reveals the very essence of eighteenth-century warfare, with its grand campaigns as formal as minuets, its sieges as gentlemanly as court receptions. On another level, the plight of the mercenaries who did much of the fighting yet had no stake in the conflict beyond day-to-day survival is portrayed just as vividly in this clear-eyed examination of a dynastic war and its setting.

Renewed arguments over the definition of Romanticism warrant a new look at the narrative poetry of Sir Walter Scott. Nancy Moore Goslee's study, the first full treatment of Scott's poems in many years, will do for his poetry what Judith Wilt's book has done for his novels. Already a subtle reader of the high Romantics and their celebrations of the visionary imagination, Goslee draws upon several recent critical developments for this study of Scott: a growing tendency among critics of his novels to see romance as a positive strength, the broader development of narrative theory, and feminist theory. Like Thomas the Rhymer, the half-historical, half- mythic minstrel who rides off with the elfin queen, Scott's poems repeatedly accept the world of romance and yet challenge it, often wittily, with an array of hermeneutic perspectives upon its function. The perspectives Goslee considers most fully are the development of poetry from a communal, oral performance to a written, published document; the larger, more violent development of Scottish and British history from feudal to modern cultures; and the repeated contrast, in that succession of cultures, between the limited, passive role of most actual women and their active, powerful role as elfin queen or enchantress in the romance.As if drawn toward yet simultaneously repelled by such women, Scott alternates between poems in which enchantresses seem to control their worlds and those in which women are only pawns, desirable for the land they inherit. The poems of the latter group are more realistically historical in plot, turning upon major battles; those of the former are more romantic and magical. Yet both follow similar narrative patterns derived from medieval and especially Renaissance romance. Both, too, show a wandering in more primitive, violent societies which delays the rational, gradual progress seen as cultural salvation by Enlightenment historians.

Schools for All provides the first in-depth study of black education in Southern public schools and universities during the twelve-year Reconstruction period which followed the Civil War. In the antebellum South, the teaching of African Americans was sporadic and usually in contravention to state laws. During the war, Northern religious and philanthropic organizations initiated efforts to educate slaves. The army, and later the Freedmen's Bureau, became actively involved in freed-men's education. By 1870, however, a shortage of funds for the work forced the bureau to cease its work, at which time the states took over control of the African American schools.In an extensive study of records from the period, William Preston Vaughn traces the development -- the successes as well as the failures -- of the early attempts of the states to promote education for African Americans and in some instances to establish integration. While public schools in the South were not an innovation of Reconstruction, their revitalization and provision to both races were among the most important achievements of the period, despite the pressure from whites in most areas which forced the establishment of segregated education.Despite the ultimate failure to establish an integrated public school system anywhere in the South, many positive achievements were attained. Although the idealism of the political Reconstructionists fell short of its immediate goals in the realm of public education, precedents were established for integrated schools, and the constitutional revisions achieved through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments laid the groundwork for subsequent successful assaults on segregated education.

The Sibundoy valley of southwestern Colombia is the home of a unique Indian culture -- one that blends Incan elements with those of the aboriginal natives. Moreover, Sibundoy bridges two domains, the Andean highlands and the Amazonian basin, and inter-mixed with all of these elements are European influences, particularly folk and orthodox Catholicism. From this cultural enclave, John McDowell presents here a body of oral material collected from the Santiago Ingano community. This corpus of material is made up of some 200 "sayings of the ancestors," proverb-like statements, many concerned with dreams and the forecasting of future events. From an analysis of these sayings emerges a cosmological view of the Sibundoy Indians, a glimpse of their spiritual world. It is a world where spirits constantly impinge on the activities of everyday life. It is a world where the sayings can both warn of spiritual sickness and offer the way to spiritual health. For the Sibundoy the sayings go back to the first people, the "ancestors," who established for all time the models for a proper life. The study of the sayings is rounded out with references to the parallel fields of mythology and folk medicine as these contribute to a clearer understanding of their roles and functions in Sibundoy life.Sayings of the Ancestors provides a fascinating body of original folkloric and ethnographic material from a unique cultural locus. It is also an engrossing demonstration that what seems a miscellaneous group of small beliefs can be seen as the components of a larger world-order. The book and its interpretive findings will be a valuable resource for folklorists, anthropologists, and many Latin Americanists.

The reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II was a transitional period in German history when the traditions of the nineteenth century were coming into conflict with the emerging cultural, social, and political patterns of the twentieth century. The resulting tensions were clearly reflected in the period's leading satirical journals, Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus.Both journals appealed to a diverse middle-class readership and attracted widespread attention through their flamboyant and sometimes scurrilous attacks on authority. Their satire, expressed through cartoons, anecdotes, verse, and fiction, ranged across nearly every aspect of German life and employed the talents of some of the period's most important writers and artists. That their purpose was essentially serious was shown by the frequent seizures of offending issues and the jail sentences meted out to satirists whose jabs struck too near home.Kladderadatsch, founded in Berlin in 1848, was liberal politically but generally mild in its social satire. It remained for Simplicissimus, founded in Munich in 1896, to launch a more radical critique of bourgeois culture. The primary target of both journals was the absurdities of an essentially weak monarchy personified in a Kaiser who seemed always to be "on stage." Simplicissimus, in addition, delighted in ridiculing a military establishment dominated by class, a repressive educational system, and a hypocritical religious hierarchy. Even the family came in for satirical treatment.Through the history of these two periodicals, Ann Taylor Allen demonstrates the uses of humor in a society that offered few effective outlets for dissent. She also provides important new insights into the role of popular journalism in this critical period.

The great, pre-Civil War attempt of Protestant missionaries to Christianize Native Americans is found by Robert F. Berkofer, Jr. to be a significant point of contact with enduring lessons for American thought. The irony displayed by this relationship, he says, did not really lie in the disparity between Anglo-Saxon ideals and the actual treatment of first peoples but in the failure of all, including the missions, to see that both sides had ultimately behaved according to their cultural values.Using the records of missions to sixteen tribes in various regions of the United States, Berkofer has carefully followed the hopeful efforts of sixty-five years. The ultimate outcome, when the Civil War brought most of the missions to an end, was only a nominal conversion of Native Americans, despite the unflagging optimism of missionaries struggling against cultural barriers.

In this eminently readable book, G. Douglas Atkins continues the efforts undertaken in Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading to open eighteenth-century texts to the insights of recent critical theory. Through close readings of most of Pope's major poems, Atkins demonstrates how the powerful theoretical movement known as deconstruction enriches, challenges, and significantly modifies our understanding of the work of the greatest poet of the eighteenth century. The first full-scale deconstructive study of Augustan poetry, Quests of Difference at once offers a fresh and compelling reading of Pope and makes an important contribution to constructive criticism.Though it will be of particular interest and importance to specialists in both eighteenth-century studies and criticism and theory, Quests of Difference is written with the general reader in mind. All readers will appreciate the intelligence and balance of Atkin's approach as well as the clarity, informality, and grace that distinguish his writing.

Josiah Royce's voyage to the South Seas in 1888, undertaken on his physician's advice, restored the philosopher to full physical and mental vigor. What is not so well known is that after a few months of sailing Royce began to "bag new game," as he put it, in his philosophical pursuits. Frank M. Oppenheim examines Royce's writings from this year of travel, including his correspondence and the notes he made on his reading, and finds there the seeds of much of his later thought.While Professor Oppenheim is careful not to overstate the importance of this year of travel in the development of Royce's philosophy, he shows without question that the period was fruitful both intellectually and psychologically. His thoughtful analysis gives us a fuller appreciation of the philosopher and the man.