Synopses & Reviews
In Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial, Michael Rubenstein documents the relationship between Irish modernism and a restricted segment of the material culture of the modern state known colloquially as "public utilities" or "water, gas, and electricity." The water tap, the toilet, the gas jet, and the electrical light switch: these are all sites, in Irish modernism, of unexpected literary and linguistic intensities that burst through the routines of everyday life, defamiliarizing and reconceptualizing that which we might not normally consider worthy of literary attention. Such public utilities--material networks of power and provision, submission and entitlement--are taken up in Irish modernism not only as a nexus of anxieties about modern life, but also as a focal point for the hopes held out for the postcolonial Irish Free State. Public utilities figure a normative and utopian standard of modernity and modernization; they embody in Irish modernism and in other postcolonial literatures an ideal for the postcolonial state; and they figure a continuity between the material networks of the modern state and the abstract ideals of revolutionary republicanism (liberty, equality, and brotherhood). They define a new territory of contestation within the discourses of civil and human rights. Moreover, public utilities influence the formal qualities of both Irish modernist and postcolonial literature.
In analyses of literary works by James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, and Patrick Chamoiseau, Rubenstein asks us to think about the industrial networks of the twentieth century alongside self-consciously "national" literary works and to understand them as different but inherently related forms of public works. In doing so his book maps thematic and formal relationships between national infrastructure and national literature, revealing an intimate dialogue between the nation's literary arts and the state's engineering cultures.
"Public Works, Michael Rubenstein's pathbreaking book, brilliantly explores relationships between modern 'engineering cultures' and literary cultures. Juxtaposing literary texts and electric power generators, plays and water schemes, he offers us nothing less than a new way to read literary modernism's engagement with the real. His book represents a major intervention in postcolonial studies, uncovering new and pragmatic models of imagined community after colonialism. Additionally, Rubenstein's work marks a significant move in contemporary Irish studies by developing paradigms that help us read Ireland's postcolonial statehood in a global context. It also offers highly original readings of a series of Irish late-modernist writers, all in a timely and truly interdisciplinary project, beautifully done." --Enda Duffy, University of California, Santa Barbara
". . . one of the most original and important contributions to Irish studies, and to a number of other fields as well, that has been written by a young scholar in recent years. It will be an important and much discussed book. It participates in, and outlines the future of, significant new directions in areas such as Irish studies, modernist studies, postcolonial studies, and the study of the relations among technology, materiality, and culture." --Marjorie Howes, Boston College
"Can you imagine a Joycean appeal for the payment of taxes? If you do not find it easy, you may be ready to take in the superb literary flair and pitch-perfect sense of present urgencies that puts Public Works at the sharpest edge of new scholarship. Michael Rubenstein makes a tiger's leap into the recent past, when the intimacy of the home had not yet learned to take for granted its connection to networks of electricity, gas, and water. He has written the book on the very hot topic of infrastructure, and he's done so while also figuring out a new direction for postcolonial studies. You will never be able to read Ulysses the same way again." --Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
Review
“This first modern edition . . . of Alice Thorntons autobiography is not just important to scholars of early modern history and literature; it is essential.”—Catherine Loomis, author of
The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen
Review
“A valuable addition to the discussion of how early modern people experienced and negotiated grief, loss, and illness.”—Joe Eldridge Carney, author of
Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship Synopsis
An early modern domestic and spiritual memoir,
My First Booke of My Life depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626-1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. Her memoir documents her perspective on the Irish rebellion and English civil war as well as on a plethora of domestic dangers and difficulties: from her reluctant marriage, which sought to rescue the sequestered family estate and clear her brothers name, to financial crises, to the illnesses and deaths of several family members and six children, to slanderous criticisms of her fidelity and her parenting.
This first complete edition of an autobiographical apologia begins with recollections of Thorntons childhood and ends with the death of her husband, restoring almost half of the original text omitted from the nineteenth-century edition. The image she fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal. Inseparable from the praise of God and family is the distinctive sense of identity that emerges from the introduction, text, and annotations, all of which provide a significant contribution to early modern womans writing.
About the Author
Raymond A. Anselment is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author and editor of several books, including
The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England, a
Choice Outstanding Academic Book.