America's sense of space has always been tied to what Hayden White called the narrativization of real events. If the awe-inspiring manifestations of nature in America (Niagara Falls, Virginia's Natural Bridge, the Grand Canyon, etc.) were often used as a foil for projecting utopian visions and idealizations of the nation's exceptional place among the nations of the world, the rapid technological progress and its concomitant appropriation of natural spaces served equally well, as David Nye argues, to promote the dominant cultural idiom of exploration and conquest. From the beginning, American attitudes towards space were thus utterly contradictory if not paradoxical; a paradox that scholars tried to capture in such hybrid concepts as the middle landscape (Leo Marx), an engineered New Earth (Cecelia Tichi), or the technological sublime (David Nye). Not only was America's concept of space paradoxical, it has always also been a contested terrain, a site of continuous social and cultural conflict. Many foundational issues in American history (the dislocation of Native and African Americans, the geo-political implications of nation-building, immigration and transmigration, the increasing division and clustering of contemporary American society, etc.) involve differing ideals and notions of space. Quite literally, space and its various ideological appropriations formed the arena where America's search for identity (national, political, cultural) has been staged. If American democracy, as Frederick Jackson Turner claimed, is born of free land, then its history may well be defined as the history of the fierce struggles to gain and maintain power over both the geographical, social and political spaces of America and its concomitant narratives. The number and range of topics, interests, and critical approaches of the essays gathered here open up exciting new avenues of inquiry into the tangled, contentious relations of space in America. Topics include: Theories of Space - Landscape / Nature - Technoscape / Architecture / Urban Utopia - Literature - Performance / Film / Visual Arts.

1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.

In the book titled Vergil's political commentary in Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, the author examines Vergil’s political views by analyzing the whole of the poet’s work. He introduces the notion of the functional model suggesting that the poet often used this instrument when making a political statement. New interpretations of a number of the Eclogues and passages of the Georgics and the Aeneid are suggested and the author concludes that Vergil’s political engagement is visible in much of his work. During his whole career the poet was consistent in his views on several major political themes. These varied from, the distress caused by the violation of the countryside during and after the expropriations in the 40s B.C., to the horrors of the civil war and the violence of war in general, and the necessity of strong leadership. Vergil hoped and expected that Octavian would establish peace and order, and he supported a form of hereditary kingship for which he considered Octavian a suitable candidate. He held Cleopatra in high regard, and he appreciated a more meaningful role for women in society. Vergil wrote poetry that supported Augustus, but he had also the courage to criticize Octavian and his policies. He was a commentator with an independent mind and was not a member of Augustus’ putative propaganda machine.

The authors of this book ask how digital research tools are changing the ways in which practicing editors historicize Shakespeare's language. Scholars now encounter, interpret, and disseminate Shakespeare's language through an increasing variety of digital resources, including online editions such as the Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE), searchable lexical corpora such as the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) or the Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) collections, high-quality digital facsimiles such as the Folger Shakespeare Library's Digital Image Collection, text visualization tools such as Voyant, apps for reading and editing on mobile devices, and more. What new insights do these tools offer about the ways Shakespeare's words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital editions make about Shakespeare's language? A growing body of work in the digital humanities allows textual critics to explore new approaches to editing in digital environments, and enables language historians to ask and answer new questions about Shakespeare's words. The authors in this unique book explicitly bring together the two fields of textual criticism and language history in an exploration of the ways in which new tools are expanding our understanding of Early Modern English.

How do writers and their readers imagine the future in a turbulent time of sex war and sex change? And how have transformations of gender and genre affected literary representations of "woman," "man," "family," and "society"? This final volume in Gilbert and Gubar's landmark three-part No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century argues that throughout the twentieth century women of letters have found themselves on a confusing cultural front and that most, increasingly aware of the artifice of gender, have dispatched missives recording some form of the "future shock" associated with profound changes in the roles and rules governing sexuality. Divided into two parts, Letters from the Front is chronological in organization, with the first section focusing on such writers of the modernist period as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and the second devoted to authors who came to prominence after the Second World War, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and A.S. Byatt. Embroiled in the sex antagonism that Gilbert and Gubar traced in The War of the Words and in the sexual experimentations that they studied in Sexchanges, all these artists struggled to envision the inscription of hitherto untold stories on what H.D. called "the blank pages/of the unwritten volume of the new." Through the works of the first group, Gilbert and Gubar focus in particular on the demise of any single normative definition of the feminine and the rise of masquerades of "femininity" amounting to "female female impersonation." In the writings of the second group, the critics pay special attention to proliferating revisions of the family romance--revisions significantly inflected by differences in race, class, and ethnicity--and to the rise of masquerades of masculinity, or "male male impersonation." Throughout, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the impact on literature of such crucial historical events as the Harlem Renaissance, the Second World War, and the "sexual revolution" of the sixties. What kind of future might such a past engender? Their book concludes with a fantasia on "The Further Adventures of Snow White" in which their bravura retellings of the Grimm fairy tale illustrate ways in which future writing about gender might develop.

First published in 1999. and Middlemarch and of a range of nineteenth-century historical works, including works by and about women that are discussed extensively here for the first time. The blurring of boundaries between historical and fictional narratives, stimulated by the enormous success of Walter Scott's novels, and the development of social history are shown to have been key factors in an uneven, controversial, but persistent feminization of history, the first because of the longstanding association of novels with women the second because social history focuses on the private sphere, traditionally women's domain. Along with the appearance of numerous historical texts written by women and taking women as their subjects, these developments challenged conventional beliefs about historical authority and relevance that had long relegated women to the margins, both literally and metaphorically. In its exploration of these changes and their implications, Gender and Victorian Historical Writing revises standard assumptions about Victorian ideas of history, finding an awareness of and experimentation with gender and genre that prefigure theoretical and scholarly concerns in contemporary women's history.