Bøger udgivet af University of Wisconsin Press

Fans of Jerry Apps will delight in his latest novel, Blue Shadows Farm, which follows the intriguing family story of three generations on a Wisconsin farm. Silas Starkweather, a Civil War veteran, is drawn to Wisconsin and homesteads 160 acres in Ames County, where he is known as the mysterious farmer forever digging holes. After years of hardship and toil, however, Silas develops a commitment to farming his land and respect for his new community. When Silas's son Abe inherits Blue Shadows Farm he chooses to keep the land out of reluctant necessity, distilling and distributing "purified corn water" throughout Prohibition and the Great Depression in order to stay solvent. Abe's daughter, Emma, willingly takes over the farm after her mother's death. Emma's love for this place inspires her to open the farm to school-children and families who share her respect for it. As she considers selling the land, Emma is confronted with a difficult question--who, through thick and thin, will care for Blue Shadows Farm as her family has done for over a century? In the midst of a controversy that disrupts the entire community, Emma looks into her family's past to help her make crucial decisions about the future of its land. Through the story of the Starkweather family's changing fortunes, and each generation's very different relationship with the farm and the land, Blue Shadows Farm is in some ways the narrative of all farmers and the increasingly difficult challenges they face as committed stewards of the land. Finalist, General Fiction, Midwest Book Awards

The story of Don Juan first appeared in writing in seventeenth-century Spain, reaching Russia about a century later. Its real impact, however, was delayed until Russia's most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, put his own, unique, and uniquely inspirational, spin on the tale. Published in 1830, TheStone Guest is now recognized, with other Pushkin masterpieces, as part of the Russian literary canon. Alexander Burry traces the influence of Pushkin's brilliant innovations to the legend, which he shows have proven repeatedly fruitful through successive ages of Russian literature, from the Realist to the Silver Age, Soviet, and contemporary periods. Burry shows that, rather than creating a simple retelling of an originally religious tale about a sinful, consummate seducer, Pushkin offered open-ended scenes, re-envisioned and complicated characters, and new motifs that became recursive and productive parts of Russian literature, in ways that even Pushkin himself could never have predicted.

Most films tell tales, but what does that involve? How do motion pictures tease us into building what we all agree to call stories? In this study, David Bordwell offers the first comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of the film medium, and diverse story-telling patterns to construct their fictional narratives. The result is a pioneering, far-reaching work which will change the way we perceive narrative film--and which every serious film scholar, student or fan will welcome. "This book is of crucial importance to film specialists. I cannot think that any film teacher/scholar would miss reading this work."--Don Fredricksen, Cornell University "David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film is a major contribution to film studies and to narrative theory. The work, I predict, will be widely read, praised, debated, and damned. Brodwell's originality lies not so much in demonstrating the deficiencies of other theories, which he does very convincingly, but in the scope and design of his project, against which there is no competition of comparable intellectual weight."--Jerry Carlson, DePaul University

Brimming with honestly and passion, The Education of a WASP chronicles one white woman's discovery of racism in 1960s America. First published in 1970 and highly acclaimed by reviewers, Lois Stalvey's account is as timely now as it was then. Nearly twenty years later, with ugly racial incidents occurring on college campuses, in neighborhoods, and in workplaces everywhere, her account of personal encounters with racism remains deeply disturbing. Educators and general readers interested in the subtleties of racism will find the story poignant, revealing, and profoundly moving."Delightful and horrible, a singular book." --Choice "An extraordinarily honest and revealing book that poses the issue: loyalty to one's ethnic group or loyalty to conscience." --Publishers Weekly

Surveying three decades of land reform efforts in Latin America, Peter Dorner draws upon his broad experience as both a policy maker and a researcher specializing in land tenure systems. He argues that the failures of Latin American land reforms are due to a lack of political will and commitment exacerbated by inadequate capital resources. Avoiding polemics, Dorner evaluates the many competing theoretical and ideological positions in the ongoing debates over land reform, from structuralist economics to liberation theology. He then looks at a range of actual reform experiences, including local peasant initiatives and international aid projects. Emphasizing the growing complexity of Latin American economies, Dorner demonstrates that solutions successful in one country may fail in another. He concludes that aid and political pressure from the international community can play only a peripheral role. Recognizing that change must come from within, Latin American countries must develop multifaceted approaches to meet objectives based on their own individual experiences. Dorner warns that "romantic" expectations for future land reform relying on any one solution will continue to lead to disillusionment. If opportunities for the landless population were actually a top priority of governments and power-brokers, Dorner believes, they could be achieved through agrarian reform policies that set clear goals and criteria for implementation. Nevertheless, the potential gains from such a program are, in most cases, more limited now than thirty years ago.

Literary scholars largely agree that the Romantic period altered the definition of tragedy, but they have confined their analyses to Western European authors. Maksim Hanukai introduces a new, illuminating figure to this narrative, arguing that Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, can be understood as a tragic Romantic poet, although in a different mold than his Western counterparts. Many of Pushkin's works move seamlessly between the closed world of traditional tragedy and the open world of Romantic tragic drama, and yet they follow neither the cathartic program prescribed by Aristotle nor the redemptive mythologies of the Romantics. Instead, the idiosyncratic and artistically mercurial Pushkin seized upon the newly unstable tragic mode to develop multiple, overlapping tragic visions. Providing new, innovative readings of such masterpieces as The Gypsies, Boris Godunov, The Little Tragedies, and The Bronze Horseman, Hanukai sheds light on an unexplored aspect of Pushkin's work, while also challenging reigning theories about the fate of tragedy in the Romantic period.

Equals in Learning and Piety is an intellectual history of the 'Yan Taru (Associates) movement, a women-led Islamic educational organization that continues to this day in both northern Nigeria and in the United States. Drawing on extensive scholarship across disciplines including history, Islamic studies, anthropology, gender and women's studies, and literary studies-and alongside rigorous ethnographic research and interviews with leading Nigerian Muslim scholars-Beverly Mack argues that this formidable Muslim women's movement consolidated the religious and social order established by the Sokoto Jihad in the early nineteenth century. Mack shows how women scholars instructed rural Hausa and Fulani women in Muslim ethics, doctrine, traditions, and behavior that followed and replaced the traumatic experience of warfare unleashed by the Jihad. She shows that these unique social engagements shaped people's agency in the dynamic process of social change throughout the nineteenth century. Women imaginatively reconciled Muslim reformist doctrines and traditional practices in Nigeria, and these doctrines have continued to be influential in the diaspora, especially among Black American Muslims in the United States in the twenty-first century. With this major investigation of a little-studied phenomenon, Mack demonstrates the importance of women to the religious, political, and social transformation of Nigerian Muslim society.

Modeled after Wisconsin's own unemployment compensation plan in the 1930s, federal unemployment insurance has long been considered one of the most important public policy achievements of the New Deal. Always paying benefits according to legislative and administrative guidelines and never requiring a taxpayer bailout, the program has nonetheless undergone strains induced by structural changes in both the economy and the prevailing political milieu. An outgrowth of a conference to celebrate the program's fiftieth anniversary, the papers collected in this volume describe the history of the program, analyze the strains it has undergone and that it faces in the 1990s, delineate the source of current debates over unemployment compensation, and offer suggestions for the future of the program.

Proverbs, though anonymous, speak with great authority, and politicians from classical to modern times have deployed them effectively in their rhetoric. In looking at political proverbs in the twentieth century, Wolfgang Mieder--the leading expert on proverbs today--offers proof of the power of these bits of borrowed wisdom to serve any master or any purpose, for good or ill. Mieder first singles out Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, in which the Führer used proverbs to advocate the deadly goals of Nazism. Pitted against Hitler's rhetoric is that of Winston Churchill, who was, Mieder demonstrates, as gifted with the proverb as any leader in this century. He moves next to America and Harry S. Truman, whose proverbial plain English won him the trust of the people. The politics of the Cold War made ample use of proverbs as well, a trend Mieder illustrates through cartoons and caricatures of the time. He also traces the origin, history, meaning, and use of two proverbial slurs, one against Native Americans ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian") and the other against Asian Americans ("No tickee, no washee.") The Politics of Proverbs offers a historical view, but also shows that new proverbs are continually coined and passed into common parlance, and old proverbs are updated to suit modern situations. Mieder's lively and instructive examples show how anyone, whether on the political grandstand or the back porch, can exploit the supposed wisdom of proverbs to justify his or her opinions and actions. By exposing the use and function of the proverb in political rhetoric, this book alerts readers to the possibilities and dangers--and the expressive power--of these not so quaint sayings.

As state economic policies promote integration under a single logic of modernist development, many impoverished groups remain on the margins. Development in Spirit explores the practices employed by communities on the fringes of such nation-building projects. Using an everyday political economy lens, Seb Rumsby demonstrates how seemingly powerless actors actively engage with larger forces, shaping their experience of development in ways that are underexamined but have far-reaching consequences. Following state-led market reforms in the 1980s, Vietnam experienced stunning economic transformation. But for the Hmong communities of the country's north and central highlands, the benefits proved elusive. Instead, the Hmong people have pursued their own alternative paths to development. Rumsby shows how mass conversion to Christianity led to a case of "unplanned development" that put the Hmong on a trajectory of simultaneous integration into the market economy and resistance to state authority. Many of the strategies community members employ are tied to the Christianization of everyday life. Religious actors play complex and often contradictory roles in facilitating networks of exchange, challenging or enforcing gender norms, promoting communalism and enforcing discipline, and shaping local ideas about progress. They are influenced by national and transnational religious networks, especially US-produced radio broadcasts by Hmong American Christians and local converts. This compelling account provides fresh theoretical and empirical insights into the interplay of religion, neoliberal development, and marketization across the world.

Winner of the 1998 Award for Excellence in Indexing, American Society of Indexers and H. W. Wilson Company

Tom Wendelburg lives to fish. A prolific outdoor writer and photographer, a respected and innovative flytier, a keen observer of fish habitat and behavior, a versatile and passionate fisherman--Wendelburg is all of these. He is one of the most-published writers on fishing, with bylines in such magazines as Fly Fisherman, but this is his first book. Catching Big Fish on Light Fly Tackle is a book to be savored and re-read, for it distills decades of fly-fishing knowledge. It includes Wendelburg's philosophy of using light tackle, his insights on surface and underwater tactics, discussions of his favorite fish (trout, bass, bluegills, salmon, and steelhead) and of his favorite flies, including much-admired fly patterns that he developed (Wendelburg's Hare's Ear Scud and his no-hackle hairwing dry fly). Wendelburg is a consummate fisherman and a first-rate teacher, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

The internet brings new urgency to the study of folklore. The digital networks we use every day amplify the capacity of legends to spread swiftly, define threats, and inform action. Using the case of a particularly popular digital bogeyman known as the Slender Man, Andrew Peck brings the study of legends into the twenty-first century. Peck explains not only how legends circulate in the digital swirl of the internet but also how the internet affects how legends seep into our offline lives and into the mass media we consume. What happens, he asks, when legends go online? How does the internet enable the creation of new legends? How do these ideas go viral? How do tradition and technology interact to construct collaborative beliefs? Peck argues that the story of the Slender Man is really a story about the changing nature of belief in the age of the internet. Widely adopted digital technologies, from smartphones to social media, offer vast potential for extending traditional and expressive social behaviors in new ways. As such, understanding the online landscape of contemporary folklore is crucial for grasping the formation and circulation of belief in the digital age. Ultimately, Peck argues that advancing our comprehension of legends online can help us better understand how similar belief genres-like fake news, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors, meme culture, and anti-expert movements-are enabled by digital media.

Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold? These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.

Catullus' life was akin to pulp fiction. In Julius Caesar's Rome, he engages in a stormy affair with a consul's wife. He writes her passionate poems of love, hate, and jealousy. The consul, a vehement opponent of Caesar, dies under suspicious circumstances. The merry widow romances numerous young men. Catullus is drawn into politics and becomes a cocky critic of Caesar, writing poems that dub Julius a low-life pig and a pervert. Not surprisingly, soon after, no more is heard of Catullus. David Mulroy brings to life the witty, poignant, and brutally direct voice of a flesh-and-blood man, a young provincial in the Eternal City, reacting to real people and events in a Rome full of violent conflict among individuals marked by genius and megalomaniacal passions. Mulroy's lively, rhythmic translations of the poems are enhanced by an introduction and commentary that provide biographical and bibliographical information about Catullus, a history of his times, a discussion of the translations, and definitions and notes that ease the way for anyone who is not a Latin scholar.

This second volume of The Theatre of the Holocaust, when combined with the first, represents the most significant and comprehensive international collection of plays on the Holocaust. Since the appearance of Volume 1 in 1982, theatre and Holocaust studies have undergone astonishing transformations. In Volume 2, Skloot presents six plays acknowleding the most recent theatrical forms in our post-modern age.

An insightful look at the onset of colonialism in Central Africa from economic, religious, and political perspectives, examining the ultimately tragic participation of African elites in colonial rule.

This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants--ferns, conifers, and flowering plants--growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett's 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett's book so useful. Features include: * coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families * more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa * keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations * habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy * a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds * glossaries of botanical and habitat terms * a full index for each volumeWetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.

This is by far the best and most comprehensive manual and illustrated guide to native and naturalized vascular plants--ferns, conifers, and flowering plants--growing in aquatic and wetland habitats in northeastern North America, from Newfoundland west to Minnesota and south to Virginia and Missouri. Published in two volumes, this long-awaited work completely revises and greatly expands Norman Fassett's 1940 classic A Manual of Aquatic Plants, yet retains the features that made Fassett's book so useful. Features include: * coverage of 1139 plant species, 1186 taxa, 295 genera, 109 families * more than 600 pages of illustrations, and illustrations for more than 90% of the taxa * keys for each species include references to corresponding illustrations * habitat information, geographical ranges, and synonomy * a chapter on nuisance aquatic weeds * glossaries of botanical and habitat terms * a full index for each volumeWetland ecologists, botanists, resource managers, public naturalists, and environmentalists concerned with the preservation of wetland areas, which are increasingly threatened, will welcome this clear, workable, and comprehensive guide.

In How the Russians Read the French, Priscilla Meyer shows how Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy engaged with French literature and culture to define their own positions as Russian writers with specifically Russian aesthetic and moral values.

For thousands of years, our world has been shaped by biblical monotheism. But its hallmark--a distinction between one true God and many false gods--was once a new and radical idea. Of God and Gods explores the revolutionary newness of biblical theology against a background of the polytheism that was once so commonplace. Jan Assmann, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient Egypt working today, traces the concept of a true religion back to its earliest beginnings in Egypt and describes how this new idea took shape in the context of the older polytheistic world that it rejected. He offers readers a deepened understanding of Egyptian polytheism and elaborates on his concept of the "Mosaic distinction," which conceives an exclusive and emphatic Truth that sets religion apart from beliefs shunned as superstition, paganism, or heresy.>Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has assumed a lasting role in American culture. "The House of Usher" and its literary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction. Dale Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. The author concludes that the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream.

Like the history of women, dance has been difficult to capture as a historical subject. Yet in bringing together these two areas of study, the nine internationally renowned scholars in this volume shed new and surprising light on women's roles as performers of dance, choreographers, shapers of aesthetic trends, and patrons of dance in Italy, France, England, and Germany before 1800. Through dance, women asserted power in spheres largely dominated by men: the court, the theater, and the church. As women's dance worlds intersected with men's, their lives and visions were supported or opposed, creating a complex politics of creative, spiritual, and political expression. From a women's religious order in the thirteenth-century Low Countries that used dance as a spiritual rite of passage to the salon culture of eighteenth-century France where dance became an integral part of women's cultural influence, the writers in this volume explore the meaning of these women's stories, performances, and dancing bodies, demonstrating that dance is truly a field across which women have moved with finesse and power for many centuries past.

The epic Metamorphoses, Ovid's most renowned work, has regained its stature among the masterpieces of great poets such as Vergil, Horace, and Tibullus. Yet its irreverent tone and bold defiance of generic boundaries set the Metamorphoses apart from its contemporaries. Ovid before Exile provides a compelling new reading of the epic, examining the text in light of circumstances surrounding the final years of Augustus' reign, a time when a culture of poets and patrons was in sharp decline, discouraging and even endangering artistic freedom of expression. Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art--specifically poetry--changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid's final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses, responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.

The Hausa are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, with populations in Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana. Their long history of city-states and Islamic caliphates, their complex trading economies, and their cultural traditions have attracted the attention of historians, political economists, linguists, and anthropologists. The large body of scholarship on Hausa society, however, has assumed the subordination of women to men. Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century refutes the notion that Hausa women are pawns in a patriarchal Muslim society. The contributors, all of whom have done field research in Hausaland, explore the ways Hausa women have balanced the demands of Islamic expectations and Western choices as their society moved from a precolonial system through British colonial administration to inclusion in the modern Nigerian nation. This volume examines the roles of a wide variety of women, from wives and workers to political activists and mythical figures, and it emphasizes that women have been educators and spiritual leaders in Hausa society since precolonial times. From royalty to slaves and concubines, in traditional Hausa cities and in newer towns, from the urban poor to the newly educated elite, the "invisible women" whose lives are documented here demonstrate that standard accounts of Hausa society must be revised. Scholars of Hausa and neighboring West African societies will find in this collection a wealth of new material and a model of how research on women can be integrated with general accounts of Hausa social, religious, political, and economic life. For students and scholars looking at gender and women's roles cross-culturally, this volume provides an invaluable African perspective.

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the classical tradition can be part of a self-conscious, prideful approach to African American culture, esthetics, and identity. Ulysses in Black demonstrates that, similar to their white counterparts, African American authors have been students of classical languages, literature, and mythologies by such writers as Homer, Euripides, and Seneca.

As a young man in South Africa, Nelson Mandela aspired to be an interpreter or clerk, noting in his autobiography that "a career as a civil servant was a glittering prize for an African." Africans in the lower echelons of colonial bureaucracy often held positions of little official authority, but in practice the occupants of these positions functioned as hidden lynchpins of colonial rule. As the primary intermediaries among European colonial officials, African chiefs, and subject populations, these men (and a few women) could manipulate the intersections of power, authority, and knowledge at the center of colonial society. By uncovering the role of African civil servants in the construction, function, and legal apparatus of colonial states, the essays in this volume highlight a new perspective. They offer important insights on hegemony, collaboration and resistance, structures and changes in colonial rule, the role of language and education, the production of knowledge and expertise in colonial settings, and the impact of colonization in dividing African societies by gender, race, status, and class. Contributors: Maurice Nyamanga Amutabi, Ralph Austen, Andreas Eckert, Ruth Ginio, Hervé Jezequel, Martin Klein, Benjamin Lawrance, Roger Levine, Saliou Mbaye, Thomas McClendon, Emily Osborn, David Pratten, Richard Roberts, Brett Shadle

Moving beyond past histories of Viet Nam that have focused on nationalist struggle, this volume brings together work by scholars who are re-examining centuries of Vietnamese history. Crossing borders and exploring ambiguities, the essays in Viet Nam: Borderless Histories draw on international archives and bring a range of inventive analytical approaches to the global, regional, national, and local narratives of Vietnamese history. Among the topics explored are the extraordinary diversity between north and south, lowland and highland, Viet and minority, and between colonial, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and dynastic influences. The result is an exciting new approach to Southeast Asia's past that uncovers the complex and rich history of Viet Nam.

Since the 1960 publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, award-winning Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been both celebrated and maligned. Praised for her lyrical prose and vivid female characters and attacked for her frank treatment of sexuality and alleged sensationalism, O'Brien and her work seem always to spawn controversy, including the past banning in Ireland of several of her works. O'Brien's attention to "women's" concerns such as sex, romance, marriage, and childbirth has often relegated her to critical neglect at best and, at worst, outright contempt. This essay collection promises to be a long overdue critical reevaluation and exciting rediscovery of her oeuvre. Wild Colonial Girl situates O'Brien in Irish contexts that allow for an appraisal of her significant contribution to a specifically Irish women's literary tradition while attesting to the potency of writing against patriarchal conventions. Each chapter's clear and detailed readings of O'Brien's fiction build a convincing case for her literary, political, and cultural importance, providing an invaluable critical guide for an enriched appreciation of O'Brien and her work.

Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution--figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov--Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals' return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources--newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories--to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history. "These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system."--David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review