The Rumble Of A Distant Drum

The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw living in the area where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. In 1686 Henri de Tonti would found Arkansas Post in this same location. It was the first European settlement in this part of the country, established thirty years before New Orleans and eighty before St. Louis. Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways—through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur's point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists. Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception: a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness. Using Roman Jakobson's model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.

Collection of songs, poetry, stories and rhymes illustrated by different artists.

True story of ten year old Mihigo who traveled with the author on an expedition for the American Museum of Natural History.

"This book explores poetry of T. S. Eliot and three plays, Sweeney Agonistes, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party, in the light of his responses to his cultural tradition." "The concept of memory, as an acknowledgment both of a cultural heritage and of its availability for original works of mind and imagination, unifies this study by Grover Smith. Eliot was tradition-oriented, drawing upon various cultures - primitive, Indic, European, and American - for poetic inspiration and models. By education, he was multicultural in a thoroughly legitimate sense." "In separate chapters, Smith, though commenting on a few verbal sources of types familiar from Eliot's practice of stylistic borrowing, focuses on thematic concerns. Included are the psychological labyrinth of death-in-life of Poe's tales and poems; transfigurations of Hamlet from Shakespeare to Goethe, Coleridge, and Freud; popular stage entertainment in nineteenth-century America; poetic stimuli from James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, and Aldous Huxley; twentieth-century speculations on time and serialism; the world of occult phenomena in W. B. Yeats and, later, the novelist Charles Williams; and Eliot's obsessive critiques of primitive myth and ritual." "In various ways, all of these interests intersected. Smith shows in Eliot's dedication to diverse traditions a practical imperative, and to a great extent a moral one, for a poetic art grounded in traditional American reverence for inherited values."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book is a collection of studies providing a unique view on two central aspects of poetry: sounds and emotive qualities, with emphasis on their interactions. The book addresses various theoretical and methodological issues related to topics like sound symbolism, poetic prosody, and voice quality in recited poetry. The authors examine how these sound-related phenomena contribute to the generation of emotive qualities and how these qualities are perceived by readers and listeners. The book builds upon Reuven Tsur’s theoretical research and supplements it from an experimental angle. It also engages in methodological debates with prevalent scientific approaches. In particular, it emphasises the importance of proper theory in empirical literary studies and the role of the personal traits of the reader in literary analysis. The intended readership of this book consists mainly of literary scholars, but it might also appeal to researchers from disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and brain science.

The impact of Persian life and literature upon Victorian England was tremendous. It found its public demonstration in the visit of the Shah, but the number of men of letters who turned to the Persian classics for inspiration were as numerous as they were great: William Jones, Charles Murray, Edward Browne, George Borrow, Richard Burton, Edward Palmer and, of course, Fitzgerald, translator of the Rubaiyat.