Many of you may find yourself wondering what the Gentleman's Club is. The title of this publication may lead you to thoughts of a gentile establishment with inviting illuminant advertisements, boisterous primitive music, a vast collection of top shelf elixirs and scores of softly curved sexual beings waiting to detach you from your reality through the fulfillment of you inner fantasies. Rest assure that what you think you know, you have no idea.Welcome to the Gentleman's Club, a sociological movement designed to improve the social competence of today's young men by helping them understand who they are as men and who they really are as gentleman. Serving as a response to current and future socioeconomic challenges that men face everyday, the Gentleman's Club promotes cultural change by empowering men to achieve their highest potential. Those who accept this invitation will embark on a journey that few have ever travelled, shedding the identity they once knew and embracing the identity they were called to walk in.Being a male is a matter of birth, being a man is a matter of age, but being a gentleman is a matter of choice. If you are willing to make that choice, then accept this invitation and prepare to be transformed. Welcome to the Gentleman's Club.

The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often been depicted as pitting antiquarian conservatives against the insurgent critics of established authority. The Shock of the Ancient turns the canonical vision of those events on its head by demonstrating how the defenders of Greek literature—rather than clinging to an outmoded tradition—celebrated the radically different practices of the ancient world. At a time when the constraints of decorum and the politics of French absolutism quashed the expression of cultural differences, the ancient world presented a disturbing face of otherness. Larry F. Norman explores how the authoritative status of ancient Greek texts allowed them to justify literary depictions of the scandalous. The Shock of the Ancient surveys the diverse array of aesthetic models presented in these ancient works and considers how they both helped to undermine the rigid codes of neoclassicism and paved the way for the innovative philosophies of the Enlightenment. Broadly appealing to students of European literature, art history, and philosophy, this book is an important contribution to early modern literary and cultural debates.

An ambitious, original book describing a century of Europe coping with America: its inventions, personalities, films, armies, business, and politics. These decades reveal how much emotional energy Europeans invested in finding their own ways to reconcile tradition and modernity under the pressure of the ever-evolving American challenge.

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As the United States rushed toward industrial and technological modernization in the late nineteenth century, people worried that the workplace had become too competitive, the economy too turbulent, domestic chores too taxing, while new machines had created a fast-paced environment that sickened the nation. Physicians testified that, without a doubt, modern civilization was causing a host of ills—everything from irritability to insomnia, lethargy to weight loss, anxiety to lack of ambition, and indigestion to impotence. They called this condition neurasthenia. Neurasthenic Nation investigates how the concept of neurasthenia helped doctors and patients, men and women, and advertisers and consumers negotiate changes commonly associated with “modernity.” Combining a survey of medical and popular literature on neurasthenia with original research into rare archives of personal letters, patient records, and corporate files, David Schuster charts the emergence of a “neurasthenic nation”—a place where people saw their personal health as inextricably tied to the pitfalls and possibilities of a changing world.

This study introduces the concepts of naturalization and naturalized modernity, and uses them as tools for understanding the way modernity has been experienced and portrayed in Japanese literature since the end of the Second World War.