New this week: Literary bad boy from the 1500s

“He married an older and much richer woman whom he badly mistreated; indulged habitually in a life of sexual predation; was repeatedly sued, arrested, and imprisoned; survived several supposed attempts on his life . . .

. . . and died, nearly indigent in 1591.” This, at least, saved him from the indignity of Internet gossip about his goings-on. [Wait, does this count?]

When George Puttenham wasn’t acting the scoundrel, he was writing literary theory, and his The Art of English Poesy, one of the foundations for the study of English literature, provides an intimate view of Renaissance court culture. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn collaborated on Cornell’s edition of Puttenham’s work and have done a spectacular job. Scholars of literature—and aficionados of literary reprobates—will be enjoying this book for years to come.

Nearly 25,000 served . . .

One of the more esoteric stars of the Cornell backlist is Barbara G. Myerhoff’s classic ethnography Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians, first published in 1974—sales have reached almost 25,000. Peyote Hunt has long been a staple of syllabi for courses in the anthropology of religion. In his review of the book in History of Religions, Benjamin Ray wrote, “Barbara G. Myerhoff’s splendid study . . . is a participant-observer account . . . of a shamanic priest and his small party of pilgrims as they journey to their original homeland, now a distant sacred center, in search of peyote.” The ninth printing has just arrived in our warehouse—get ’em while they’re hot!

Cornell Author Faisal Devji on Liberalism and Islam

Faisal Devji, author of Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005), has written an article for openDemocracy on recent efforts by liberal Muslim religious and intellectual leaders to promote the cause of dialogue and debate with Christians on a global scale, in the face of opposition by more militant Muslims. These efforts, Devji finds, are “a case-study in both the state of religious thinking and the democratization of sovereignty in the global arena.”

The Devil(s) you say

BoingBoing linked to an intriguing Fortean Times piece about the Devil Museum in Lithuania. As Halloween approaches, perhaps it’s time for you to brush up on the many faces of the Devil. As always, Cornell University Press is ready to help, this time with an acclaimed series of books by Jeffrey Burton Russell:

Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages
Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World
Satan: The Early Christian Tradition
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History

Alex Ross on the radio . . .

Today (10/19/07) while being interviewed on WBUR’s On Point, Alex Ross praised Rebecca Rischin’s For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet. Thanks, Alex!

On Point: Listening to the 20th Century

Margaret Fuller: Her letters, collected

In the October 19, 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlino Romano makes a case for the centrality of Margaret Fuller as a Transcendentalist thinker. Cornell University Press has played a crucial rule in bringing Fuller’s work to light by publishing Robert N. Hudspeth’s editions of her letters. You might wish to start with “My Heart is a Large Kingdom”: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller. In the New York Review of Books, Caleb Crain wrote: “In My Heart is a Large Kingdom: Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller, Hudspeth has carved an elegant single volume of letters out of the complete and authoritative six that he has already edited. Hudspeth is a scholar’s scholar: meticulous, unobtrusive, indefatigable. And in My Heart is a Large Kingdom, he reveals that he also has a novelist’s eye. . . . Thanks to Hudspeth’s scrupulous edition, it is easier to meet the private Fuller than ever before.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The Fuller Brushoff—Margaret Fuller as Transcendentalist

Recent Reviews of Cornell Press Books in the Academic Journals

From the September 2007 issue of The Journal of American History, Anne M. Boylan’s review of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis:

“Petrulionis knows how to tell a good story. . . . With its interesting story, evocative analysis of how national issues reverberated in a specific locality, and engaging characters, To Set This World Right should prove an appealing book to assign to undergraduates. Scholars will admire those virtues while also appreciating the book’s recovery of Thoreau’s career in antislavery.”

From the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Modern History, Robert Forster’s review of Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France by Jay Smith:

“In Nobility Reimagined, Smith has written an original kind of history of ideas of eighteenth-century France, focusing on a few key concepts. His is an important addition to our understanding of the origins of the French Revolution, and his goal of presenting a new approach to the processes of cultural change will stimulate a historical debate for our own time.”

From the October 2007 issue of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Carol Symes’s review of Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America by Claire Sponsler:

“Ritual Imports undertakes six fascinating case studies, amounting to a provocative exploration of America’s perennial fascination with the Middle Ages and the half-forgotten ways in which vestiges of the medieval have survived in various local contexts. It should be required reading for all students and teachers of medieval drama, of course, but also for historians of American theatre and even for scholars of U.S. labor history and immigration, African American studies, Latin American studies, and other related areas of inquiry.”

From the Winter 2007 issue of Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Barbara C. Allen’s review of Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 by Diane P. Koenker:

“Koenker’s study . . . makes important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between Russian workers, their unions, and the Soviet and Communist Party leadership. Moreover, it challenges the conventional periodization of early Soviet history. This is a complex and nuanced study, which explores diverse worker responses to the regime. . . . It should be a staple of graduate reading lists in modern Russian history, modern European history, and comparative labor history.”

Blackwater, continued

Quick roundup of some more articles that quote P. W. Singer on Blackwater:

Counterpunch: Killing for Profit
Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: The Hired Guns of Iraq
Washington Post: A Tougher Line on Government Contracting

And this by Singer:
Salon: The dark truth about Blackwater

Lessing Wins Nobel Prize; Cornell Press Book Examines National Identity in Her Work

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to British novelist Doris Lessing, whom the Swedish Academy praised as an “epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”. Born in 1919 to English parents living in Iran, she was raised in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, Lessing migrated to England in the 1930s. Her books include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the Children of Violence series (1952-1969), The Golden Notebook (1962), Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988).

In her 1998 Cornell University Press book, From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Louise Yelin explores Lessing’s fiction from the perspective of her colonial African childhood and position as a white woman in postcolonial Britain, highlighting the invented, hybrid nature of national identity that appears throughout her work. In the 2001 Yearbook of English Studies, Stephen Cowden lauded this comparative study of the three women writers working at the edge of the British Empire as a “complex account of the relationship between issues of gender, national identity, and political affiliation,” while Betsy Draine, writing in Contemporary Literature, declared that “Yelin’s study presents the novels provocatively, insightfully, and with a perfectly balanced appreciation of text and context. . . . Her uncovering . . . testifies to the imaginative power of writers with a will to write a different story.”

London Underground: New Game Mines Territory Explored in Two Cornell Titles

David L. Pike’s books—2005’s Subterranean Cities and the just-published Metropolis on the Styx—explore the cultural history of underground spaces in the modern city and the role of these forbidding places in the modern imagination.

Focusing on London and Paris, Pike’s books guide readers through the labyrinths, both physical and psychical, that lurk beneath the sidewalks and present, according to novelist and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, “a considerable work of urban archaeology, textual burrowing, and headlong epiphany. . . . [in which] cities of metaphor are mapped from clues found in lost libraries, on excursions to catacombs, movie houses, sepulchres, and sewers.”

Tapping into this same fascination with the chthonic, the creators of the highly anticipated PC/online game Hellgate: London set their adventure in a post-apocalyptic London that has been overrun by hordes of terrifying demons, leaving the city desolate and forcing the unlucky survivors to the only sanctuary left, the Underground, banded together in order to gain a foothold against the minions of darkness and ultimately save the bloodline of humanity.

While we can’t guarantee gamers that these books will help them defeat their virtual opponents, they do offer a larger cultural, historical, and imaginative context in which to think about the game’s setting.