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Ever since William Dean Howells declared his "realism war" in the 1880s, literary historians have regarded the rise of "realism" and "naturalism" as the great development in American post-Civil War fiction. Yet there are many problems with this generalization. It is virtually impossible, for example, to extract from the novels and manifestoes of American writers of this period any consistent definitions of realism or naturalism as modes of literary representation. Rather than seek common traits in widely divergent "realist" and "naturalist" literary works, Michael Davitt Bell focuses here on the role that these terms played in the social and literary discourse of the 1880s and 1890s. Bell argues that in America, "realism" and "naturalism" never achieved the sort of theoretical rigor that they did in European literary debate. Instead, the function of these ideas in America was less aesthetic than ideological, promoting as "reality" a version of social normalcy based on radically anti-"literary" and heavily gendered assumptions. What effects, Bell asks, did ideas about realism and naturalism have on writers who embraced and resisted them? To answer this question, he devotes separate chapters to the work of Howells and Frank Norris (the principal American advocates of realism and naturalism in the 1880s and 1890s), Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bell reveals that a chief function of claiming to be a realist or a naturalist was to provide assurance that one was a "real" man rather than an "effeminate" artist. Since the 1880s, Bell asserts, all serious American fiction writers have had to contend with this problematic conception of literaryrealism. The true story of the transformation of American fiction after the Civil War is the history of this contention - a history of individual accommodations, evasions, holding actions, and occasional triumphs.

In this engaging and provocative book, S. Craig Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema -- the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films" like Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society. Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash against crime, drugs, affirmative action, and rap music, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable.Further, Watkins considers the imprint of black youth on the landscape of black filmmaking. He asks: after decades of neglect, why did the film industry suddenly develop a heightened interest in black cinema? Watkins shows how the black film wave was driven by several factors -- the transformation of the popular film industry; a reinvigorated independent filmmaking niche; the cross-marketing of music, video, and film; a burgeoning hip hop consumer culture; and historically specific struggles over the meanings and representations of "blackness" in American culture. He contends that despite social and economic marginalization, black youth have gained unprecedented access to the popular media and continue to influence not only black popular culture but the broader U.S. popular culture scene as well.Representing offers a fascinating look at commercial culture and shows how and why it has become a crucial site for black American youth as they struggle to make their everyday lives more empowering, rewarding, and pleasurable in the face of formidable disadvantages.

Bertrand Russell was fond of recounting the following story about Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge: "He used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards and forwards like a caged tiger. ...On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?' 'Both, ' he said, and then reverted to silence". This is the first study to argue that Wittgenstein's philosophical writings are religious just as they stand. Although Wittgenstein often framed his writings on logic and philosophy in ethical and religious terms, the writings rarely discuss ethics and religion directly. This has led many scholars to dismiss Wittgenstein's remarks on such matters as isolated and eccentric personal views, while other scholars have attempted to reconstruct a plausible religious position from his cryptic religious comments and a selective use of his philosophy. Philip R. Shields shows that a matrix of ethical and religious concerns informs even the most technical writings on logic and language, and that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is simultaneously a logical and an ethical demand. Rather than merely saying specific things about theology and religion, major texts from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations express their fundamentally religious nature by showing that there are powers which bear down upon and sustain us. These powers manifest themselves in the structures that make significant use of language possible. Shields finds a religious view of the world at the very heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy. This perspective illuminates the distinctiveness andpeculiarity of Wittgenstein's philosophy and reveals more continuity between the "early" and the "later" thought than is usually supposed.

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the spectre of an intense nineteenth-century debate about the very nature -- and ownership -- of childhood. In the engagingly written Ventures into Childland, U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up", Knoepflmacher probes deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and between the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales".As Knoepflmacher shows, male and female constructions of childhood in these fairy tales differed radically. Male writers -- John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald, and Lewis Carroll -- often displayed an uneasy relation to adult gender roles. By privileging a special girl reader, they attempted to blur sexual differences and sentimentalize and arrested childhood. Female authors, on the other hand -- Jean Ingelow, Christina Rossetti, and Juliana Ewing -- tried to wrest fairy tales away from the male authors who had appropriated the genre. These women's tales relate fables of growth that are more grounded in actuality than the men's, and that more often allow their girl characters to mature.These disputes are poignant at a time when our inherited notion of childhood as a precious preserve seems seriously threatened. Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies.

We think of myth as a fictional story, and Plato was the first to use the term muthos in that sense. But Plato also used muthos to describe the practice of making and telling stories, the oral transmission of all that a community keeps in its collective memory. In the first part of Plato the Myth Maker, Luc Brisson reconstructs Plato's multifaceted and not uncritical description of muthos in light of the latter's famous Atlantis story. The second part of the book contrasts this sense of myth, as Plato does, with another form of speech that he believed was far superior: the logos of philosophy. Appearing for the first time in English, Plato the Myth Maker is a solid and important contribution to the history of myth, based on the privileged testimony of one of its most influential critics and supporters.

By the turn of the century, the largest generation of Americans in history, the "Baby Boomers", will be approaching age 65 years. But as the demand for health and long-term care is growing dramatically, health care programs have been shrinking instead of expanding to meet the older generation's needs. In this timely book, John R. Wolfe offers practical solutions to the coming health crisis, exploring innovative ways of developing insurance plans for the care of the large, aging "Baby Boom" generation and beyond. In previous decades, when younger Americans far outnumbered older ones, retirees could depend on financial support through taxes from the population at large. But as "Boomers" retire and the work force begins to shrink, there will be a disproportionately large population of retirees to workers. With such a big jump in the percentage of older Americans in the population, fewer workers will be able to transfer funds, through taxes, to retirees. Moreover, other traditionally reliable sources of financial assistance - Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - have faced serious financial difficulties in recent years. Who will the aged turn to for assistance? The Coming Health Crisis suggests that as funds from all quarters dwindle, older Americans will have to look to alternative programs for financial assistance. Wolfe urges immediate action to develop new saving programs and increase existing transfer schemes to head off an imminent crisis. Although tax increases might provide some resources, he demonstrates that it is more important to accumulate capital to create solid reserves for the future. Wolfe also explores two roles for government: prefunding new or existing socialinsurance programs and promoting private insurance options. By exempting insurance fund income from corporate taxation and permitting people at all income levels to defer income tax on accounts earmarked for long-term care, he shows how government could greatly encourage and expand personal saving. Finally, this work assesses the value of other recent health and long-term-care innovations: social/health maintenance organizations, long-term-care individual retirement accounts, and reverse annuity mortgages, in addition to vouchers, care rationing, mandatory public insurance, and expanded private coverage. Through this wide-ranging survey, Wolfe demonstrates that, through a combination of these programs, we can care for the aging "Baby Boom" generation by anticipating their needs and saving now.

Readers who want to understand what American religion is really like need to come here-to the heart land of congregational life-rather than letting their impressions be shaped by the latest scandals reported by the media.

From Einstein and Truman to Sartre and Derrida, many have declared the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be decisive events in human history. None, however, have more acutely understood or perceptively critiqued the consequences of nuclear war than Japanese writers. Until now the responses of the one people subjected to nuclear war have gone largely unknown outside of Japan. In this first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japanese intellectual and artistic life, John Whittier Treat shows how much we have to learn from Japanese writers and artists about the substance and meaning of the nuclear age. Treat recounts the controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki - a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored - from August 6, 1945, to the present day. He includes works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, to such important Japanese intellectuals today as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, he shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.

What emerges from Tannery's analysis is the portrait of an Absolute Agnostic, living his agnosticism as if it were itself a faith. Tannery's through and brilliant documenting of this spiritual journey will radically alter any future readings of Malraux.