Fanny Hill in Bombay : The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910583576303321
• Autore: Gladfelder Hal
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012
• ISBN: 1-4214-2837-7
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (328 p.)
• Soggetti: Biography: writers
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Sommario/riassunto: John Cleland is among the most scandalous figures in British literary history, both celebrated and attacked as a pioneer of pornographic writing in English. His first novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, is one of the enduring literary creations of the eighteenth century, despite over two hundred years of legal prohibition. Yet the full range of his work is still too little known.In this study, Hal Gladfelder combines groundbreaking archival research into Cleland's tumultuous life with incisive readings of his sometimes extravagant, sometimes perverse body of work, positioning him as a central figure in the development of the novel and in the construction of modern notions of authorial and sexual identity in eighteenth-century England.Rather than a traditional biography, Fanny Hill in Bombay presents a case history of a renegade authorial persona, based on published works, letters, private notes, and newly discovered legal testimony. It retraces Cleland's career from his years as a young colonial striver with the East India Company in Bombay through periods of imprisonment for debt and of estrangement from collaborators and family, shedding light on his paradoxical status as literary insider and social outcast.As novelist, critic, journalist, and translator, Cleland engaged with the most challenging intellectual currents of his era yet at the same time was vilified as a pornographer, atheist, and sodomite. Reconnecting Cleland's writing to its literary and social milieu, this study offers new insights into the history of authorship and the literary marketplace and ; contributes to contemporary debates on pornography, censorship, the history of sexuality, and the contested role of literature in eighteenth-century culture.

Quartermaster, The : Montgomery C. Meigs, Lincoln's General, Master Builder of the Union Army

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910149716603321
• Autore: O'Harrow Robert
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Tantor Audio
• ISBN: 1-5159-9434-1
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Musica
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Sommario/riassunto: Born to a well to do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America's forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand new US Capitol.Introduced to President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward, Meigs became Lincoln's Quartermaster. It was during the Civil War that Meigs became a national hero. He commanded Ulysses S. Grant's base of supplies that made Union victories possible. He sustained Sherman's army in Georgia, and the March to the Sea. After the war, Meigs built Arlington Cemetery.Robert O'Harrow Jr. brings Meigs alive in the commanding and intensely personal Quartermaster. We get to know this major military figure that Lincoln and his Cabinet and Generals called the key to victory and learn how he fed, clothed, and armed the Union Army using his ingenuity and devotion. O'Harrow tells the full dramatic story of this fierce, loyal, forward-thinking, major American figure.