Filozof Çocuk Çocuklarla Felsefe Konuşmaları - Nuran Direk itibaren Pan Kitabevi içinde LIT biçim

Yusuf Lokhandwala yusuflokhandwala — As with all of the Sookie Stackhouse books, I find the wit and humor of the books delightful. I am an Eric fan so I wanted him to be in it a bit more. Am anxiously awaiting Book 9 Dead and Gone due out this May.

людмила григорьева milagri_ — I really enjoyed this book. The ending part of the story made me cry. It's sad to know that things and lives don't last forever and eventually each of us has to move on. I think this is a sad but beautiful story of love, friendship and loss.

Kelsey Sugg kelseysugg — Once again, Broadview has produced a well-annotated edition of an important but difficult to find text that should appeal to scholars and students, as well as those with a taste for social satire and ambiguous morality. This second novel by Cleland is not as graphic as his first, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749): rather than landing its author in prison on obscenity charges, this novel received some commercial and critical success. The similar titles of Cleland’s first two books invite comparison, and may mislead readers into assuming it’s a rewriting of Fanny’s story from an aristocratic male perspective. Approaching the text from this point of view will lead to disappointment: it does not hold copious references to penises and there are no orgies or same-sex relations. What Coxcomb does offer is a study in eighteenth-century English masculinity as it is invented, challenged and repeatedly undone throughout the adventures of nineteen-year old Sir William Delamore. It is a comedy of manners that takes the conventions of romances and amatory fiction only to make them the vessel carrying a larger social critique. Editor Gladfelder does an excellent job of illustrating through his introduction, annotations and appendices that the reader is meant to see the hollowness the narrator’s attempts at asserting masculine dominance. As he points out, Delamore’s terror of being dominated by women is projected onto other emasculated men: "There is, in fact, a near total absence of strong figures of male authority, in either the public or private spheres" (31). In my opinion, this lack of real male authority gives an aura of sexual failure to the anti-climatic ending. Lydia has been found, her story revealed, Merville (Delamore’s sketchly drawn “mentor”) quickly steps aside as our hero’s romantic rival (he often does this, making one wonder if, despite Delamore’s insistance on Merville’s success with women, their relationship should be read as more homoerotic than homosocial). Supposedly, like Tom Jones (watch out for a Mrs. Rivers in a role I found reminiscent of Mrs. Waters), Delamore’s sexual adventures have prepared him to return to his destined, chaste first love. But we leave the text with him awaiting a response from his beloved or her family. What should have ended in a climatic satisfaction of the hero’s desires ends abruptly as he waits for female position. The last sentence mentions that his aunt and guardian, Lady Bellinger, whom he spent his young life tyrannizing, is quite happy that he has given up his plans to go abroad, which she opposed earlier in the novel. Fanny’s adventures as a prostitute provided an excellent education for her to become a wife, but it is unclear for what role Delamore’s life as a coxcomb has prepared him. It is even doubtful that he truly is a coxcomb or merely a fop. Despite the power Delamore sees and fears in his “conquests,” the plight of women due to their lack of political, social and economic power is shown through the theme of prostitution: the seduced housemaid, Diana, is later found in a brothel (the humor of her chaste name and early similarities to Richardson’s Pamela do not entirely undermine her demise), Agnes is an unwitting commodity as she is the bait to help fulfill her guardian’s sexual desires, and even the pure Lydia, Delamore’s supposedly “true” love, is revealed at the end to have been in hiding because her father wanted to sell her in marriage to an inappropriately old Lord in exchange for social advancement. Items also of interest: the Appendices contain selections from Cleland’s 1753 translation of J.F. Dreux du Radier’s Dictionnaire d’Amour (1741), offering the best definition of a fop I have come across and an intriguing view of submission.