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Seventeenth-century Netherlands is a time and place that inspires our imagination. This maritime country conjures up images of windmills and dikes, picturesque farms, bustling cities, and harbors filled with ships returning home from far-away lands, their holds packed with spices. The small country enjoyed vibrant economic growth and a remarkably tolerant society that welcomed people of all religious backgrounds. The enormous legacy of this period of the Dutch republic, which artists, writers, and poets celebrated as its Golden Age, has enriched all our lives. As historians search for a fuller understanding of its unique character, they continually return to the central role of the family. Children are an essential part of the story, because how they were raised and taught, how they played, and what they ate and drank offer fundamental insights into Dutch lives. The images in the book are organized around eight themes: Infancy; St. Nicholas: Bringer of Sweets and Toys; Celebrations and Music; Toys and Games; Animals as Pets and Companions; Inventing Fun, Games, and Mischief; Shopping for Food Treats; and Winter Activities: Outdoors. A recipe chapter provides inspiration for cooking projects, allowing children to prepare tastes of the past. Through words and images, we learn that while some pleasures enjoyed by Dutch youngsters 400 years ago have changed, some have remained the same and are sources of fun and excitement for children today.
Offers an overview of children's literature in the context of professional discussion of children's literature and reading. Focusing on controversial issues and designed to provoke thought and debate, this text examines literary response to and analysis of the field of literary texts written by adults for children.
Pleasures and Perils follows a group of young girls living on Nevis, an island society in the Eastern Caribbean. In this provocative ethnography, Debra Curtis examines their sexuality in gripping detail: why do Nevisian girls engage in sexual activity at such young ages? Where is the line between coercion and consent? How does a desire for wealth affect a girl's sexual practices? Curtis shows that girls are often caught between conflicting discourses of Christian teachings about chastity, public health cautions about safe sex, and media enticements about consumer delights. Sexuality's contradictions are exposed: power and powerless¡ness, self-determination and cultural control, violence and pleasure. Pleasures and Perils illuminates the methodological and ethical issues anthropologists face when they conduct research on sex, especially among girls. The sexually explicit narratives conveyed in this book challenge not only the reader's own thoughts on sexuality but also the broader limits and possibilities of ethnography.
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”
Analysis of the mermaid in Japanese and English fairy tales through the framework of pleasure. Lucy Fraser's The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid "explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen's. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English, meeting a need in Western fairy-tale studies for more culturally diverse perspectives. Fraser provides a model for critical cross-cultural fairy tale analysis in her examination of the journey of a single fairy tale across two languages. The book begins with the various approaches to reading and writing fairy tales, with a history of "The Little Mermaid" in Japanese and English culture. Disney's The Little Mermaid and Studio Ghibli's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea are discussed as examples that simulate pleasurable physical experiences through animation's tools of music and voice, and visual effects of movement and metamorphosis. Fraser then explores the literary effects of the fairy tale by male authors, such as Oscar Wilde, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, and Abe Kobo, who invoke familiar fairy-tale conventions and delineate some of the pleasures of what can be painful enchantment with a mermaid or with the fairy tale itself. The author examines the portrayals of the mermaid in three short stories by Matsumoto Yuko, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Ogawa Yoko, engaging with familiar fairy tales, reference to fairy-tale research, and reflections on the immersive experience of reading. Women characters and authors are also hyperaware of the possible meanings of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" and of the fairy tale itself, furthering the discussion with Nonaka Hiiragi's novel Ningyo-hime no kutsu, and D[di?]'s novel Sento no ningyo-hime to majo no mori, as well as an episode of the science fiction television series Dark Angel.Fraser concludes that the "pleasure" framework is useful for a cross-cultural study of creative engagements with and transformations of a particular fairy tale. Few studies have examined Japanese fairy-tale transformations to the extent that Fraser has, presenting fascinating information that will intrigue fairy-tale scholars and those wanting to learn more about the representation of pleasure behind the imaginative and fantastical.
In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."--The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives…with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.
Originally published in 1889, this work's protagonist Andrea Sperelli introduced the Italian culture to aestheticism and a taste for decadence. The young count seeks beauty, despises the bourgeois world, and rejects the basic rules of morality and social interaction. His corruption is evident in his sadistic superimposing of two women.