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Gendering Classicism explores the intersection of feminism, historical fiction, and modernism through the work of six writers, all of whom wrote historical novels set in ancient Greece or Rome: Naomi Mitchison, Mary Butts, Laura Riding, Phyllis Bentley, Bryher, and Mary Renault. As women gained access to higher education in the late nineteenth century, they gained access also to the classical learning that had for so long demarcated and legitimated the British ruling classes. Steeped in misogyny, the classical tradition presented educated women with a massive project: the recasting of that tradition in terms that acknowledged the existence of women - as historical agents and interpreters of the historical past.

By 1901, the public museum was firmly established as an important national institution in British life. Its very centrality led to its involvement in a wide range of debates about art, knowledge, national identity, and individual agency. Ruth Hoberman argues that these debates concerned writers as well. Museum Trouble focuses on fiction written between 1890 and 1914 and the ways in which it engaged the issues dramatized by and within the museum. Those issues were many. Art critics argued about what kind of art to buy on behalf of the nation, how to display it, and whether salaried professionals or aristocratic amateurs should be in charge. Museum administrators argued about the best way to exhibit scientific and cultural artifacts to educate the masses while serving the needs of researchers. And novelists had their own concerns about an increasingly commercialized literary marketplace, the nature of aesthetic response, the impact of evolution and scientific materialism, and the relation of the individual to Britain’s national and imperial identity. In placing the many crucial museum scenes of Edwardian fiction in the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cultural discourse, Museum Trouble shows how this turn-of-the-century literature anticipated many of the concerns of the modernist writers who followed.

Eight distinguished English writers--Lytton Strachey, Geoffrey Scott, David Cecil, Percy Lubbock, A. J. A. Symons, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Harold Nicolson--all wrote biographies of great influence. Hoberman suggests that it is time to re-examine these people and their contribution to biography. The biographers featured in this study were vastly different writers writing about people as diverse as Queen Elizabeth and Roger Fry, but they shared a common concern: "the reshaping of traditional biography into a more flexible, more artful form, able to accommodate modern ideas of self, of time, and of narration." These lives, written between the wars, no longer have the "serious," "joyless," "depressing similarity" that Virginia Woolf com­plained about in Victorian biographies. Between the wars a number of discoveries, gener­al currents, personalities, and theories made tradi­tional biography seem inadequate. No longer was the compilation of letters and autobiographical frag­ments enough. Childhood became important, as did the unconscious, unwilled element in character. So­cial forces became paramount.

Our culture attempts to separate competing ideological factions by denying relationships between multiple perspectives and influences outside of one’s own narrow interpretive community. The distinguished essayists in this volume find Daniel R. Schwarz’s pluralistic, self-questioning approach to what he calls “reading texts and reading lives” quite relevant to the current historical moment and political situation. A legendary scholar of modernist literature, Schwarz’s critical principles are a healthy corrective to cultural hubris. The essayists treat works ranging from fictions by Joyce, Conrad, Morrison, and Woolf to the poetry of Yeats, to Holocaust literature, to the environmental writings of Wendell Berry, to the photographs of Lee Friedlander. The authors focus on different works, but they follow Schwarz in stressing formal elements most often associated with traditional realism while keeping an eye on historical and author-centered approaches. The essayists also follow Schwarz in their emphasis on narrative cohesion and in how they look for signs of agency among characters who possess the will to alter their fate, even in a seemingly random universe such as the one depicted by Conrad. Readers with eyes to ethics and aesthetics, they follow Schwarz in encouraging a values-centered approach that leaves room for the reader to address the ways in which reading a text correlates to the reader’s ability to find meaning and value in experience outside the text. Like Schwarz, the essays look for intentionality of authorial meaning (rather than something called an “author function”) as well as for the relationship between lived experience and the imagined world of the literary work (rather than the endless semiotic play of an ultimately indecipherable text).

Bring Hope, Faith, and Love to Your Relationships. The biblical character of Ruth was striking in her capacity to bring life to her relationships. Even in the midst of tragedy and difficulty, her presence blessed and influenced friends and strangers in her community, the man she grew to love, her children, and her in-laws. This six-week Fisherman Bible Studyguide uses Ruth's story to help you reflect on your own relationships and the ways in which God might be inviting you to move different ways--ways that will lead you into life-giving patterns of relating with others. Fisherman Bible Studyguides offer: * Penetrating questions that generate discussion * Flexible format for group or individual needs * Helpful leader’s notes * Emphasis on daily application of Bible truth