Fulfillment can never result from work-related productivity and financial success alone."--BOOK JACKET.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Provides an overview of the various occupations men, women, and children held in nineteenth-century America.

The spread of industrialism, the emergence of professionalism, the challenge to slavery - these and other developments fueled an anxious debate about work in antebellum America. In this book, Nicholas K. Bromell discusses the ways in which American writers participated in this cultural contestation of the nature and meaning of work. In chapters on Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, Bromell shows how these writers not only scrutinized work - be it factory labor, agriculture, maternal labor, or slave labor - but also reflected upon its relation to their own work of writing. Bromell argues that American writers generally sensed a deep affinity between the mental labor of writing and such bodily labors as blacksmithing, house building, housework, mothering, field labor, growing beans, and so on. Nevertheless, writers resisted identifying their labor as purely or simply bodily, both because society placed mental and spiritual labor at the top of its scale of values and because the body was so often the site of gender or racial subjugation. Bromell also makes important contributions to three areas of nineteenth-century social history. He probes the period's conflicting ideas of mothers as both spiritual "angels of the house" and ineluctably embodied laborers in the home. Using as an example the exhibitions of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, he discusses the advent of an industrial ideology that sought to devalue the meaning of skilled manual labor. Finally, he suggests that, paradoxically, slaves were sometimes able to find in their labor a mode of self-actualization within slavery. Deftly combining literary and social history, canonical and noncanonical texts, primary source material and contemporary theory, By the Sweat of the Brow establishes work as an important subject of cultural criticism. At the same time, it contributes to discussions of race, gender, and the body in American literary studies.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

A book of poetic essays written in English, Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is full of religious inspirations. With the twelve illustrations drawn by the author himself, the book took more than eleven years to be formulated and perfected and is Gibran's best-known work. It represents the height of his literary career as he came to be noted as ‘the Bard of Washington Street.’ Captivating and vivified with feeling, The Prophet has been translated into forty languages throughout the world, and is considered the most widely read book of the twentieth century. Its first edition of 1300 copies sold out within a month.

Hailed as "the most radical repackaging of the Bible since Gutenberg", these Pocket Canons give an up-close look at each book of the Bible.