Black Lamb And Grey Falcon

Widely recognized as West's most distinguished nonfiction work, this book describes the author's travels to Yugoslavia with her husband in 1937--a journey overshadowed by the growing inevitability of the Second World War.

“Rebecca West’s magnum opus . . . one of the great books of our time.” —The New Yorker Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West’s classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country’s history as well as its daily life. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Revised and Updated with a New Introduction During the 19th century the Balkan countries became the subject of a rather romantic fascination for the public at large. This vision of the area has been created in large measure by the writing of women travelers such as those represented in this volume. The achievements of these women are quite remarkable: in many cases their travels were adventurous, and even dangerous, reaching into parts of the countryside which were remote and hardly known to outsiders. Not only as travelers but also in the fields of medical and military service, scholarship and education, journalism and literature, did these women contribute in very significant ways to the expansion of women's horizons and to the attempt to gain greater freedom for women in society in general. Contents: Editorial Introduction: Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Outward and Inward Frontiers - Two Victorian Ladies and Bosnian Realities, 1861-1875: G.M. MacKenzie and A.P. Irby - Edith Durham, Traveller and Publicist - Edith Durham as a Collector - Emily Balch: Balkan Traveller, Peace Worker and Nobel Laureate - The Work of British Medical Women in Serbia during and after the First World War - Captain Flora Sandes: A Case Study in the Social Construction of Gender in a Serbian Context - Rose Wilder Lane: 1886-1968 - Rebecca West, Gerda and the Sense of Process - Margaret Masson Hasluck - Louisa Rayner: An Englishwoman's Experiences in Wartime Yugoslavia - Mercia MacDermott: A Woman of the Frontier - An Anthropologist in the Village - Bucks, Brides and Useless Baggage: Women's Quest for a Role in their Balkan Travels - Constructing 'the Balkans' - Women Travellers in the Balkans: A Bibliographical Guide. John B. Allcock is head of the Research Unit in South East European Studies and is based in the Interdisciplinary Human Studies department at the University of Bradford; Antonia Young is a member of the Department for Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate University, New York

With an introduction by Geoff Dyer First published in 1942, Rebecca West’s epic masterpiece is widely regarded as the most illuminating book to have been written on what was once Yugoslavia, essential for anyone attempting to understand the enigmatic history of the Balkan states. ‘West’s masterpiece [is] one of the great twentieth-century books of any genre.’ Independent ‘Impossible to put down, both timeless and of its time—a travel book and epic narrative history brimming with passion, anger, scholarship and intuition, hatred and love.’ Observer ‘Such incandescent writing—you find yourself wanting to mark every sentence in order to go back and relish it again.’ Brian Eno ‘One of the supreme masterpieces of the twentieth century . . . As a book about Yugoslavia it’s a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating . . . this is history as it might have been written by Ryszard Kapuscinski or Gabriel García Márquez .’ Geoff Dyer, from his introduction ‘It is hard to convey the flavour of a book so rich in observation, history, philosophy, political ideas and ironic humour. West is full of digressions which are extraordinary, but never boring.’ The Times ‘The sheer quality and depth of the writing make it one of the great books of the century.’ Times Literary Supplement

Hailed as among the most important books of the twentieth century, Rebecca West’s magnum opus is a history, a travelogue, and a sociological study of Yugoslavia that examines how the past shapes the present In a breathtakingly wide-ranging journalistic work, West richly chronicles her travels throughout Yugoslavia in the 1930s, introducing vivid characters and illuminating details. More than a travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon connects the people and places West encounters to the long history of conflict that has formed national identities in the Balkans across a millennium of shifting alliances. West writes, “I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works.” As profound, sad, and funny as when it was first published in 1941, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon interrogates the forces that continue to shape our modern world.

A Study Guide for Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

After completing his biography of Rebecca West in 1995, Carl Rollyson felt bereft. As his wife said, "Rebecca was such good company." He had already embarked on another biography, but Rebecca kept beckoning him. He felt there was more to say about her politics-a misunderstood part of her repertoire as reporter and novelist. And had he done justice to her enormous sense of fun and humor? He regretted excising the portrait of her he wanted to put at the beginning of his biography. His editor kept cutting away at what he called Rollyson's doorstop of a book. And then after years of waiting, Rollyson received her FBI file. He kept running into Rebecca, so to speak, when he was working on his biographies of Martha Gellhorn and Jill Craigie. Interviews in London often turned up people who had known West as well. Thus piece by piece, Rollyson accumulated what is now another book about Rebecca West. This new collection tells the story of how his biography got written, of what it means to think like a biographer, and why West's vision remains relevant. She is one of the great personalities and writers of the modern age, and one that we are just beginning to comprehend.

Epic has long been regarded as the exclusive domain of the male literary genius and as an incarnation of patriarchal values. This provocative collection of essays challenges such a hegemonic stereotype by demonstrating the ways in which women writers have successfully adapted the masculine epic tradition to suit their own aesthetic needs and to express their own heroic literary, social, and historical visions. Bringing the female epic out of the shadows, the contributors rethink generic boundaries to illuminate this heretofore hidden literary practice. The essays range from Mary Tighe to Rebecca West from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Gwendolyn Brooks, and from Frances Burney to Virginia Woolf. Bernard Schweizer's introduction, titled 'Muses with Pens,' connects the trajectory of ideas and influences in the individual essays to demonstrate how each participates in reclaiming for women writers a place in the development of a female epic tradition. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars working on issues related to genre, canon formation, and the evolution of female literary authority.

A Study Guide for Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

A fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century politics and the modernist literary period. The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights and expressions of gender and sexuality. Yet writers and cultural critics shared a sense that modern life reduced citizens to automatons capable of interacting with the world in only the most reflexive ways. In Automatic, Timothy Wientzen asks why modernists were deeply anxious about the role of reflexive behaviors—and the susceptibility of bodies to physical stimuli—in the new political structures of the twentieth century. Engaging with historical thinking about human behaviors that fundamentally changed the nature of political and literary practice, Wientzen demonstrates the ways in which a "politics of reflex" came to shape the intellectual and cultural life of the modernist era. Documenting some of the ways that modernist writers and their contemporaries mapped, harnessed, and intervened in a political sphere dominated by conditioned reflexes, Wientzen reads writers like D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, Wyndham Lewis, and Samuel Beckett in conversation with fields that include public relations, physiology, sociology, and vitalism. Ultimately, he justifies a reckoning with some of the most enduring preoccupations of modernist studies. Automatic further emphasizes the role of politics and science in the aesthetic projects of modernist writers. At a moment when political enfranchisement and the mass media promised new modes of freedom, agency, and choice, Wientzen argues that the modernist era was beset by apprehension about the conscription of liberty through the conditioning force of everyday life. Analyzing such thinking through a neglected archive about embodiment and reflex reveals modernists responding to the historically novel conditions of political life in the twentieth century—conditions that have become entrenched in the politics of our own century.