This in-depth study of the essay as a form of literary and philosophical expression examines the links between essay writing and the concept of friendship over a long textual tradition running from Plato's "Phaedrus" through Montaigne's "Essais" to Derrida's "Politiques de l'amitie". Literary critic and philosopher Kuisma Korhonen suggests that the search for "textual friendship" motivates essayists as diverse as Bacon, Saint-Evremond, Mme de Lambert, Emerson, and Derrida. All of these writers have written at least one essay about friendship, and in each case, Korhonen interprets the notion of friendship as a figure for the textual encounter, both between the writer and reader and between each text and its many referenced predecessors. Korhonen points out that despite the boundary of text separating writer and reader, the essay invites friendship. Through its references to other writers it links readers and writers across boundaries of time and space.Korhonen discusses at length these "impossible encounters", drawing on the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, especially his emphasis on the ethical implications of "the Other". Korhonen goes on to construct "an ethical genealogy of the essay", focusing mainly on Montaigne. He notes three textual strategies in Montaigne's essay: the use of rhetoric in producing a "friendly ethos", the philosophical dialogue going back to Plato as a subtext for the essay form, and a Pyrrhonian scepticism that questions the status of propositional language. Finally, Korhonen examines specific texts on friendship, including Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, Saint-Evremont, Mme de Lambert, and Derrida. This is a work of great erudition that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the expressive possibilities and philosophical implications of the essay.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781591022602 20160528

• 1. Introduction 2. Classical Friendship: Aristotle and Dante's Convivio 3. Cicero's De Amicitia and Dante's Convivio 4. Christian Friendship 5. The Vita Nuova: Dante's Friendship with Guido Cavalcanti and Others 6. Amor and Amicizia in Inferno 2 7. Friendship in Purgatorio 30 and Purgatorio 31.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9781442650596 20160619

In the ancient world, friendship was a virtue of great philosophical importance. Aristotle wrote extensively about it, as did Cicero. Their conception of friendship as a relationship based on reason and virtue was transformed by Christianity into a connection based on the mutual love of an individual and God. In Dante's Idea of Friendship, Filippa Modesto offers sharp readings of the Commedia, Vita Nuova, and Convivio that demonstrate Dante's interest in that theme. Drawing on a lucid and wide-ranging examination of the literature on friendship, she shows how he weaved together the contradictory classical and the Christian concepts of friendship into a harmonious synthesis in which friendship became a handmaiden to salvation and happiness. A fresh, perceptive interpretation of Dante's works, Dante's Idea of Friendship will engage medievalists, classicists, and scholars of friendship throughout the ages.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781442650596 20160619

• Foreword
• A little taxonomy of friends
• A charming gift for false intimacy
• Best friends
• The quickest way to kill friendships
• Friends-who needs 'em?
• An extremely sketchy history of friendship
• Reciprocity, or is it obligation?
• A friendship diary : adulation, stimulation, obligation
• Pity is at the bottom of women
• Boys will be boys
• Petty details vs. eternal verities
• Disparate friends
• Cliques and clans and communities
• Talking the talk
• Techno-friendships
• Friendship's new rival
• Broken friendships
• Friendlessness
• Is there an art of friendship?

• Robben Island and its representation by prisoners The 'Robben Island Shakespeare' The role of the 'I' and its relation to imprisonment in Robben Island prison literature and Hamlet's Denmark.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9781441183743 20160612

Hamlet's Dreams brings together the Robben Island Prison of Nelson Mandela and the prison that is Denmark for Shakespeare's Hamlet. David Shalkwyk uses the circulation of the so-called 'Robben Island Shakespeare', a copy of the Alexander edition of the Complete Works that was secretly circulated, annotated and signed by a group of Robben Island political prisoner in the 1970s (including Nelson Mandela), to examine the representation and experience of imprisonment in South African prison memoirs and Shakespeare's Hamlet. It looks at the ways in which oppressive spaces or circumstances restrict the ways in which personal identity can be formed or formulated in relation to others. The 'bad dreams' that keep Hamlet from considering himself the 'king of infinite space' are, it argues, the need for other people that becomes especially evident in situations of real or psychological imprisonment.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781441183743 20160612

• Introduction: reading Roman friendship-- 1. Men and women-- 2. Love and friendship I: questions and themes-- 3. Love and friendship II: authors and texts-- 4. Friendship and death: the culture of commemoration.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9781107003651 20160610

This book invites us to approach friendship not as something that simply is, but as something performed in and through language. Roman friendship is read across a wide spectrum of Latin texts, from Catullus' poetry to Petronius' Satyricon to the philosophical writings of Cicero and Seneca, from letters exchanged by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his beloved teacher Fronto, to those written by men and women at an outpost in northern Britain. One of the most innovative features of this study is the equal attention it pays to Latin literature and to inscriptions carved in stone across the Roman Empire. What emerges is a richly varied and perhaps surprising picture. Hundreds of epitaphs, commissioned by men and women, citizens and slaves, record the commemoration of friends, which is of equal importance to understanding Roman friendship as Cicero's influential essay De amicitia.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781107003651 20160610

This text focuses on literary representations of three categories of ideal friendship - Christian, chivalric and humanistic - and the writers' strategies of establishing the ethical authority of their contemporary friends and codes on a par with antiquity's "amicitia perfecta". The study identifies the extent to which writers acknowledged women as perfect friends. The selected texts under examination include hagiographies, works of Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx, "The Quest of the Holy Grail", Thomas's "Tristan", the "Prose Lancelot", "Ami and Amile", the "Decameron" and L.B. Alberti's "Dell'amicizia". Literary comparatists and historians, ethical historians and students of rhetoric should be interested by the comparative study of the rhetorical topos of perfect friendship, the varied ethical criteria inherent there and the writers' strategies for representing and authorizing an idea.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9789004100183 20160528

• SECTION I: JOHN EVELYN, JEREMY TAYLOR AND ELIZABETH CAREY: FRIENDSHIP, RELIGION AND 'THE MATERIAL INTERCOURSES OF OUR LIFE'-- SECTION II: MILTON, FRIENDSHIP, AND READER-FRIENDS-- SECTION III: DOROTHY OSBORNE, WILLIAM TEMPLE, LORD ARLINGTON, AND OTHERS: FRIENDSHIP IN PRIVATE AND POLITICS.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9780198790792 20170123

Cedric C. Brown combines the study of literature and social history in order to recognize the immense importance of friendship bonds to early modern society. Drawing on new archival research, he acknowledges a wide range of types of friendship, from the intimate to the obviously instrumental, and sees these practices as often co-terminous with gift exchange. Failure to recognize the inter-connected range of a friendship spectrum has hitherto limited the adequacy of some modern studies of friendship, often weighted towards the intimate or gendered-related issues. This book focusses both on friendships represented in imaginative works and on lived friendships in many textual and material forms, in an attempt to recognize cultural environments and functions. In order to provide depth and coherence, case histories have been selected from the middle and later parts of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless many kinds of bond are recognized, as between patron and client, mentor and pupil, within the family, within marriage, in courtship, or according to fashionable refined friendship theory. Both humanist and religious values systems are registered, and friendships are configured in cross-gendered and same-sex relationships. Theories of friendship are also included. Apart from written documents, the range of 'texts' extends to keepsakes, pictures, funerary monument and memorial garden features. Figures discussed at length include Henry More and the Finch/Conway family, John Evelyn, Jeremy Taylor, Elizabeth Carey/Mordaunt, John Milton, Charles Diodati, Cyriac Skinner, Dorothy Osborne/Temple, William Temple, Lord Arlington, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, and Katherine Phillips and her circle, especially Anne Owen/Trevor and Sir Charles Cotterell.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780198790792 20170123

Despite the deep-seated notion that the archetypal American poet sings a solitary "Song of Myself, " much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with friendship and its pleasures, contradictions, and discontents. Beautiful Enemies examines this obsession with the problems and paradoxes of friendship, tracing its eruption in the New American Poetry that emerges after the Second World War as a potent avant-garde movement. The book argues that a clash between friendship and nonconformity is central to postwar American poetry and its development. By focusing on of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets--the New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka--the book offers a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. At the same time, this study challenges both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion. Beautiful Enemies foregrounds a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to individualism and dynamic movement that runs directly counter to an equally profound devotion to avant-garde collaboration and community. Delving into unmined archival evidence (including unpublished correspondence, poems, and drafts), the book demonstrates that this tense dialectic--between an aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship--actually energizes postwar American poetry, drives the creation, meaning, and form of important poems, frames the interrelationships between certain key poets, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Combining extensive readings of the poets with analysis of cultural, philosophical, and biographical contexts, Beautiful Enemies uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of twentieth-century American poetry.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780195181005 20160528

• List of Contents Introduction 1 The Virtuousness of Conventions: Friendship and the Ethics of Fiction 1.1. Friendship Values, Friendship Virtues in Frances Brooke's The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) 1.2. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the Narcissistic Impotence of Romantic Friendship 2 Public or Private? Friendship and the Novel Sphere in Utopian and Sentimental Writing 2.1. A Utopian Conjunction? Philanthropic Design and Particular Friendship in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) 2.2. Helen Maria Williams's Julia (1790) and the Paradigm of Active Sensibility in the Sentimental Novel 3 A Question of Perspective and Character: Friendship and Narrative Situation 3.1. 'Excite me to Virtue': Friendship as Reason and Purpose in Charlotte Lennox's Euphemia (1790) 3.2. The Perceptive Pluralism of Friendship in Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet (1824) 4 The Progress of the Plot: Epistemologies of Friendly Interventions 4.1. Not False, but Wrong? Friendly Interventions in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) 4.2. Friendship, Truth, and the Generosity of Heart in Maria Edgeworth's Helen (1834) Conclusion: Friendship and the Novel Genre Bibliography.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9781472463753 20170123

Friendship has always been a universal category of human relationships and an influential motif in literature, but it is rarely discussed as a theme in its own right. In her study of how friendship gives direction and shape to new ideas and novel strategies of plot, character formation, and style in the British novel from the 1760s to the 1830s, Katrin Berndt argues that friendship functions as a literary expression of philosophical values in a genre that explores the psychology and the interactions of the individual in modern society. In the literary historical period in which the novel became established as a modern genre, friend characters were omnipresent, reflecting enlightenment philosophy's definition of friendship as a bond that civilized public and private interactions and was considered essential for the attainment of happiness. Berndt's analyses of genre-defining novels by Frances Brooke, Mary Shelley, Sarah Scott, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth show that the significance of friendship and the increasing variety of novelistic forms and topics represent an overlooked dynamic in the novel's literary history. Contributing to our understanding of the complex interplay of philosophical, socio-cultural and literary discourses that shaped British fiction in the later Hanoverian decades, Berndt's book demonstrates that novels have conceived the modern individual not in opposition to, but in interaction with society, continuing Enlightenment debates about how to share the lives and the experiences of others.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9781472463753 20170123

• Preface-- Introduction: the emergence of discourses: early modern friendship, Daniel Lochman and Maritere Lopez-- Part I Conventional Discourses Re-Imagined: Bound by likeness: Vives and Erasmus on marriage and friendship, Constance M. Furey-- Triangulating humanist friendship: More, Gile, Erasmus and the making of the Utopia, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski-- Friendship's passion: love-fellowship in Sidney's new Arcadia, Daniel Lochman.-- Part II Alternative Discourses: Friendship in the Margins: Guzman de Alfarache's 'other self': the limits of friendship in Spanish picaresque fiction, Donald Gilbert-Santamaria-- The courtesan's gift: reciprocity and friendship in the letters of Camilla Pisana and Tullia D'Aragona, Maritere Lopez-- The 'single lyfe' of Isabella Whitney: love, friendship and the single woman writer, Allison Johnson-- 'Friendship multiplyed': Royalist and Republican friendship in Katherine Philips's coterie, Penelope Anderson.-- Part III Friendship in Ethics and politics: From civic friendship to communities of believers: Anabaptist challenges to Lutheran and Calvinist discourses, Thomas Heilke-- The friendship of the wicked in Novella 12 of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, Marc D. Schachter-- 'To plainness is honour bound': disguises of friendship in King Lear, Wendy Olmstead-- 'My foule, faulce brest': friendship and betrayal in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, Sheila T. Cavanagh-- Politics and friendship in William Cartwright's The Lady-Errant, Christopher Marlow-- Milton against servitude: classical friendship, tyranny, and the law of nature, Gregory Chaplin-- Afterword, Lorna Hutson-- Works cited-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)9780754669036 20160602

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. "Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700" lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)9780754669036 20160602

• The politics of friendship
• Mourning becomes friendship
• Duty and desire
• Friends and lovers
• Afterword: digital friends.