Marguerite Holloway, who visits us on Thursday, is interviewed in the Times Union about her new book on Albany native and mad genius of the 19th century, John Randel, Jr. The book's title is The Measure of Manhattan.
"Randel's a window into an incredible era in American history.... He's also a fascinating character. He has this precise and careful mathematic rigor, but he's also mercurial and passionate, even irrational — getting involved in all sorts of lawsuits and losing tons of money."
Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Manhattan-matrix-4410267.php#ixzz2PtXy0OcF
More about her visit this coming Thursday: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/holloway_marguerite13.html
Showing posts with label 19th century. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 19th century. Show all posts
Monday, April 8, 2013
Marguerite Holloway Interviewed in the TU
Friday, August 17, 2012
Playing Dress Up at Edith Wharton's "The Mount"
Among the writers were Junot Diaz (who will visit us in October 2012) as Walter Berry; Jonathan Safran Foer as architect Ogden Codman, Jr.; and Jeffery Eugenides as Henry James. The issue also features an essay by past Institute visitor Colm Toibin about Edith Wharton and her complicated love triangle with Morton Fullerton and Henry James.
Photo: supermodel Natalia Vodianova as Edith Wharton. Read More......
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Neither Male Nor Female
"Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman."
--Margaret Fuller, Woman in the 19th Century (1845)
Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson will visit today to discuss his new biography of radical 19th century thinker Margaret Fuller who died in a shipwreck off Fire Island at the height of her powers at the age of 40.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Beginning with the End-- Biographer John Matteson
Joanna Scutts of the Washington Post writes about John Matteson's choice, as a biographer, to begin his new book with Fuller's death. Matteson visits UAlbany and the NYS Museum tomorrow.
"Matteson begins his story of Fuller’s 'lives' at the premature end. Along with her 1-year-old son and his Italian father, she was killed in a shipwreck off Fire Island, N.Y., during a freak hurricane in July 1850. She was 40 years old. By beginning with Fuller’s death — as he puts it, “Think first of endings” — Matteson purposely overshadows the book with a sense of loss. It works to subtly emphasize Fuller’s own most passionate and important theme, that human potential wasted by social injustice is no less a tragedy than death. Lost in the wreck was the manuscript of a book that might have transformed her legacy: her eyewitness account of the failed revolution in Rome in 1848-49." More.
Picture: Memorial marker for Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and their son. Located at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In Celebration of "Difficult Women"
Pulitzer-winning biographer John Matteson comes tomorrow to discuss Margaret Fuller, one of the great "difficult women" of the 19th century.
"Arrogant, condescending and vain, Fuller was (as she knew altogether too well) the best-educated American woman of her time. In The Lives of Margaret Fuller, John Matteson tells us that Ralph Waldo Emerson thought she exhibited 'an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others'; Nathaniel Hawthorne found her, as Matteson puts it, 'exquisitely irritating'; and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed her acidly. Habituated to deference from others, she was unaccustomed to dealing with people on an equal footing, and she bristled when she did not receive the respect she thought was her due."
Read more in Mary Beth Norton's review of Matteson's new book in the New York Times.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Great Expectations at the PAC
In celebration of Charles Dickens's 200th birthday, the UAlbany Performing Arts Center will host the world premiere of a new theatrical adaptation of Great Expectations.
Opening Thursday, February 23 at 8pm February 24, 25, 29 March 1, 2 at 8pmFebruary 25, 26*, March 3 at 2pm
New adaptation by Chad LarabeeBased on the novel by Charles DickensDirected by Chad LarabeeThis world premiere production celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth. Orphaned as an infant and thrust into a childhood of cruel poverty, Pip clings to the hope of a brighter life. A chance meeting with a prisoner and an eccentric old woman sets into motion a life's journey beyond his wildest imaginings as he struggles to realize the American Dream.
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