Background
Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana and attended The Putney School.
(Edgar Degas traveled to New Orleans in 1872, arriving at ...)
Edgar Degas traveled to New Orleans in 1872, arriving at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities: the decisive period of Reconstruction following the agony of the Civil War. What was it about this war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city that elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings? This fascinating book gives readers the answer. 16 photos.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067943562X/?tag=2022091-20
(The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists conv...)
The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists converge at a singular moment in American life, a great companion to fans of the film A Quiet Passion, starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. At the close of the Civil War, the lives of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade intersected in an intricate map of friendship, family, and romance that marked a milestone in the development of American art and literature. Using the image of a flitting hummingbird as a metaphor for the gossamer strands that connect these larger-than-life personalities, Christopher Benfey re-creates the summer of 1882, the summer when Mabel Louise Todd-the protégé to the painter Heade-confesses her love for Emily Dickinson's brother, Austin, and the players suddenly find themselves caught in the crossfire between the Calvinist world of decorum, restraint, and judgment and a new, unconventional world in which nature prevails and freedom is all.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143115081/?tag=2022091-20
(When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the C...)
When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to “Old Japan,” with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the course of twenty-five years, from a feudal backwater to an international power. This great wave of historical and cultural reciprocity between the two young nations, which intensified during the late 1800s, brought with it some larger-than-life personalities, as the lure of unknown foreign cultures prompted pilgrimages back and forth across the Pacific. In The Great Wave, Benfey tells the story of the tightly knit group of nineteenth-century travelers—connoisseurs, collectors, and scientists—who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving Old Japan. As Benfey writes, “A sense of urgency impelled them, for they were convinced—Darwinians that they were—that their quarry was on the verge of extinction.” These travelers include Herman Melville, whose Pequod is “shadowed by hostile and mysterious Japan”; the historian Henry Adams and the artist John La Farge, who go to Japan on an art-collecting trip and find exotic adventures; Lafcadio Hearn, who marries a samurai’s daughter and becomes Japan’s preeminent spokesman in the West; Mabel Loomis Todd, the first woman to climb Mt. Fuji; Edward Sylvester Morse, who becomes the world’s leading expert on both Japanese marine life and Japanese architecture; the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spends ten years in the East and writes seminal works on Japanese culture before turning his restless attention to life on Mars; and President (and judo enthusiast) Theodore Roosevelt. As well, we learn of famous Easterners come West, including Kakuzo Okakura, whose The Book of Tea became a cult favorite, and Shuzo Kuki, a leading philosopher of his time, who studied with Heidegger and tutored Sartre. Finally, as Benfey writes, his meditation on cultural identity “seeks to capture a shared mood in both the Gilded Age and the Meiji Era, amid superficial promise and prosperity, of an overmastering sense of precariousness and impending peril.” From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375754555/?tag=2022091-20
(When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the C...)
When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the Civil War, argues cultural historian Christopher Benfey, the nation lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward to "Old Japan," with its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, ultimately transforming itself, in the cours...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FDV7HPC/?tag=2022091-20
( One of the foremost critics in contemporary American le...)
One of the foremost critics in contemporary American letters, Christopher Benfey has long been known for his brilliant and incisive essays. Appearing in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, Benfey's writings have helped us reimagine the American literary canon. In American Audacity, Benfey gathers his finest writings on eminent American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Millay, Faulkner, Frost, and Welty), bringing to his subjects---as the New York Times Book Review has said of his earlier work---"a scholar's thoroughness, a critic's astuteness and a storyteller's sense of drama." Although Benfey's interests range from art to literature to social history, this collection focuses on particular American writers and the various ways in which an American identity and culture inform their work. Broken into three sections, "Northerners," "Southerners," and "The Union Reconsidered," American Audacity explores a variety of canonical works, old (Emerson, Dickinson, Millay, Whitman), modern (Faulkner, Dos Passos), and more contemporary (Gary Snyder, E. L. Doctorow). Christopher Benfey is the author of numerous highly regarded books, including Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet; The Double Life of Stephen Crane; Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable; and, most recently, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan; and A Summer of Hummingbirds. Benfey's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Currently he is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. "A gifted literary historian and critic." ---The New York Review of Books "Longer than book reviews and shorter than lengthy reappraisals of a poet or critic, the individual essays exhibit a confident, if modest, touch . . . His unadorned sentences . . . will encourage readers to buy books by the bibliographers and scholars he reviews as well as return readers to the audacious figures that comprise America's literary history." ---Larry T. Shillock, Bloomsbury Review "In its vigorous and original criticism of American writers, Christopher Benfey's American Audacities displays its own audacities on every page." ---William H. Pritchard
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472116266/?tag=2022091-20
(A renowned critic pens this surprising and scandalous sto...)
A renowned critic pens this surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within the lives of some of the nation's most noted writers, poets, and artists shaped and changed American thought.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002COH0N2/?tag=2022091-20
( Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during t...)
Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during the fall of 1872 to visit the American branch of his mother's family, the Mussons. This war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings. He arrived at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities, still recovering from the agony of the Civil War. This decisive period of Reconstruction, in which his American relatives were importantly involved, was also the time when the American writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable were beginning to mine the resources of New Orleans culture and history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520218183/?tag=2022091-20
Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana and attended The Putney School.
He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his Bachelor of Arts at Guilford College.
He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Benfey holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University. Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature.
He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
(When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the C...)
(When the United States entered the Gilded Age after the C...)
(Edgar Degas traveled to New Orleans in 1872, arriving at ...)
(A renowned critic pens this surprising and scandalous sto...)
(The country's most noted writers, poets, and artists conv...)
( One of the foremost critics in contemporary American le...)
( Edgar Degas traveled from Paris to New Orleans during t...)
(Will be shipped from US. Brand new copy.)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.