{"title":"Rachel Eisendrath","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"gallery-of-clouds-book-rachel-eisendrath-9781681375434","title":"Gallery of Clouds","description":"\u003cb\u003eA personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eLargely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney's sixteenth-century pastoral romance \u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for \u003ci\u003eKing Lear\u003c\/i\u003e; Virginia Woolf saw it as some luminous globe wherein all the seeds of English fiction lie latent. In \u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to \u003ci\u003eArcadia\u003c\/i\u003e in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing clouds: The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other things: a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at proud sail, my mother. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eGallery of Clouds\u003c\/i\u003e opens in New York City with a vision of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript, an infinite moment passes, and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces connected through an association of metaphors and ideas. A rupture of time in a Pisanello painting links to Montaigne's practice of revision in his essays; a brief history of prose style segues through the Chicago public library system's first African-American head branch librarian. Eisendrath's wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading with wild leaps and delight.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49532253045009,"sku":"GOR013328546","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49533636804881,"sku":"GOR013449099","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49764022518033,"sku":"CIN1681375435VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49809404199185,"sku":"NGR9781681375434","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50264785551633,"sku":"CIN1681375435G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1681375435.jpg?v=1751410463"},{"product_id":"poetry-in-a-world-of-things-book-rachel-eisendrath-9780226516615","title":"Poetry in a World of Things","description":"We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a “mental space” between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as “things in themselves”—things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance “discovery” of the observable world.   In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000309285137,"sku":"NIN9780226516615","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022651661X_5b49f039-53e2-4264-bb89-f9c3bdfc4f14.jpg?v=1762338141"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-rachel-eisendrath.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}