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Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In Modernist Patterns, Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith. By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, Modernist Patterns expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.

At the turn of the century, a spate of sensational trials kept French and English readers spellbound and ignited bitter tugs of war over marriage and divorce laws, women's rights, temperance, gay prostitution, and lesbian literature. The chapters in Disorder in the Court each focus on a specific high-profile trial, and the public debates surrounding it, in order to address the role of the state in regulating sexual morality. The authors draw on police archives, records of coroners' inquests, magistrates' courts, and news coverage to bring to life social conflicts sparked by differing ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality. Also explored is the role of the police and 'scientific' methods of criminology in an era when working class marital conflicts were resolved by an axe blow, unwanted middle class spouses were dispatched with an arsenic diet, and government agents scanned sensational novels or loitered in Paris urinals in search of vice.

The experiences of American soldiers in World War I differed enormously from those of European combatants. With the U. S. emerging from its previous isolation, soldiers arrived in the European theater late, fought briefly, and soon found themselves among the victors. Exposed for the first time to a foreign culture and bombarded by the messages of America's first concerted propaganda campaign, doughboys and other American participants struggled to make sense of their role and participation in the war. Mark Meigs here juxtaposes more official views--as expressed in speeches and in The Stars and Stripes, army handbooks, and unit histories--with informal, widely disseminated sources, such as popular songs, jokes, and postwar fiction, together with the soldiers' own letters and journals. Optimism at Armageddon begins with an exploration of how Americans rationalized their involvement and goes on to examine the effects of veterans' experiences during the war, focusing on combat, cultural and sexual contact with their European hosts, and death and concludes with the doughboys' account of their return to American society.

Arising from Bondage is an epic story of the struggle of the Indo-Caribbean people. From the 1830's through World War I hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers were shipped from India to the Caribbean and settled in the former British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Like their predecessors, the African slaves, they labored on the sugar estates. Unlike the Africans their status was ambiguous--not actually enslaved yet not entirely free--they fought mightily to achieve power in their new home. Today in the English-speaking Caribbean alone there are one million people of Indian descent and they form the majority in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. This study, based on official documents and archives, as well as previously unpublished material from British, Indian and Caribbean sources, fills a major gap in the history of the Caribbean, India, Britain and European colonialism. It also contributes powerfully to the history of diaspora and migration.

In Selected Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray, Edgar F. Harden provides a lively and accessible framework for selected letters, diaries, and comical illustrations of Thackeray. Harden has carefully selected documents which convey the essential biographical developments of a very interesting life and pictorial expressions of a great man of letters. He traces Thackeray's growth and development as a writer, from his school days in Southhampton to Cambridge University, which he left without a degree, to his ascendence as a writer. In spite of his personal struggles Thackeray articulates in his letters a great exuberance for life. Harden has included seventy five of Thackeray's comical illustrations, which support and enhance the letters they accompany.