New Releases - Ohio University Press

Praising It New

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Praising It New
The Best of the New Criticism

Edited by Garrick Davis

Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached from biographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was the dominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since that time, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition to the approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remains one of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continues to be a controversial approach to reading literature.

Praising It New is the first anthology of New Criticism to be printed in fifty years. It includes important essays by such influential poets and critics as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Together, these authors ushered in the modernist age of poetry and criticism and transformed the teaching of literature in the schools. As the American poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted: “I do not believe there has been another age in which so much extraordinarily good criticism of poetry has been written.”

This anthology now makes much of the best American poetry criticism available again, and includes short biographies and selected bibliographies of its chief figures. Praising It New is the perfect introduction for students to the best American poetry criticism of the twentieth century.

Madness in Buenos Aires

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Madness in Buenos Aires
Patients, Psychiatrists and the Argentine State, 1880–1983

By Jonathan Ablard

Madness in Buenos Aires examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state’s relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.

Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems.

Myth of Iron

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Myth of Iron
Shaka in History

By Dan Wylie

Over the decades we have heard a great deal about Shaka, the most famous—or infamous—of Zulu leaders. It may come as a surprise, therefore, that we do not know when he was born, nor what he looked like, nor precisely when or why he was assassinated. In Shaka’s case, even these most basic facts of any person’s biography remain locked in obscurity.

Meanwhile the public image, sometimes monstrous, sometimes heroic, juggernauts on—truly a “myth of iron” that is so intriguing, so dramatic, so archetypal, and sometimes so politically useful, that few have subjected it to proper scrutiny.

Myth of Iron: Shaka in History is the first book-length scholarly study of Shaka to be published. It lays out, as far as possible, all the available evidence—mainly hitherto underutilized Zulu oral testimonies, supported by other documentary sources—and decides, item by item, legend by legend, what exactly we can know about Shaka’s reign. The picture that emerges in this meticulously researched and absorbing “anti-biography” is very different from the popular narrative we are used to.

The Carnivalesque Defunto

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Carnivalesque Defunto
Death and the Dead in Modern Brazilian Literature

By Robert H. Moser

The Carnivalesque Defunto explores the representations of death and the dead in Brazil’s collective and literary imagination. The recurring stereotype of Brazil as the land of samba, soccer, and sandy beaches overlooks a more complex cultural heritage in which, since colonial times, a relationship of proximity and reciprocity has been cultivated between the living and the dead.

Robert H. Moser details the emergence of a prominent motif in modern Brazilian literature, namely the carnivalesque defunto (the dead) that, in the form of a protagonist or narrator, returns to beseech, instruct, chastise, or even seduce the living. Drawing upon the works of esteemed Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Érico Veríssimo, and Jorge Amado, Moser demonstrates how the defunto, through its mocking laughter and Dionysian resurrection, simultaneously subverts and inverts the status quo, thereby exposing underlying points of tension within Brazilian social and political history.

Incorporating elements of both a celestial advocate and an untrustworthy specter, the defunto also serves as a metaphor for one of modern Brazil’s greatest dilemmas: reconciling the past with the present.

The Carnivalesque Defunto offers a comparative framework by juxtaposing the Brazilian literary ghost with other Latin American, Caribbean, and North American examples. It also presents a cross-disciplinary approach toward understanding the complex relationship forged between Brazil’s spiritual traditions and literary expressions.

Come Buy, Come Buy

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Come Buy, Come Buy
Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing

By Krista Lysack

From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragist newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.

Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). This wealth of sources reveals unexpected relationships between consumption, identity, and citizenship, as Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.

Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry

Edited by Andrea R. Lewis

This unique book combines two catalogs in one. Bead International 2008 & Beyond Basketry represents the best of two juried exhibitions held at the Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio.

Beads have long been worn as jewelry, but in Bead International 2008 contemporary bead artists are shaking things up. From fine jewelry to loom weaving to sculpture, the sixty-eight pieces by fifty-one artists in this collection represent some of the most innovative and well-executed art in the modern beading world. Considering any pierced object to be a bead, pieces range in style from the traditional to the whimsical as they incorporate a variety of colors and materials. This vibrant collection will spark the reader’s creativity and broaden his or her perspective.

When the age-old art form of basketry is combined with contemporary visions and techniques, the result is the striking Beyond Basketry, a collection of sixty-five artworks created by forty-two artists from across the United States. The artworks represented in these beautiful color photographs will challenge the reader’s ideas of what constitutes a basket. All artworks are vessels made of woven materials, but the pieces explore a variety of sizes, colors, shapes, and techniques.

Human Rights in African Prisons

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Human Rights in African Prisons

Edited by Jeremy Sarkin

Prisons are always a key focus of those interested in human rights and the rule of law. Human Rights in African Prisons looks at the challenges African governments face in dealing with these issues.

Written by some of the most eminent researchers from and on Africa, including the former chairperson of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. This collection provides a current analysis of the situation in African prisons and examines how regional and international legal instruments have dealt with human rights concerns such as overcrowding, healthcare, pretrial detention, and the treatment of women and children.

Human Rights in African Prisons reveals that there are reforms under way across nations in Africa and makes recommendations for strengthening and building on them.

Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism
From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson

Edited by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon

In 1815 the United States was a proud and confident nation. Its second war with England had come to a successful conclusion, and Americans seemed united as never before. The collapse of the Federalist party left the Jeffersonian Republicans in control of virtually all important governmental offices. This period of harmony—what historians once called the Era of Good Feeling—was not illusory, but it was far from stable. One-party government could not persist for long in a vibrant democracy full of ambitious politicians, and sectional harmony was possible only as long as no one addressed the hard issues: slavery, race, western expansion, and economic development.

Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson inaugurates a new series for the United States Capitol Historical Society, one that will focus on issues that led to the secession crisis and the Civil War. This first volume examines controversies surrounding sectionalism and the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, placing these sources of conflict in the context of congressional action in the 1820s and 1830s. The essays in this volume consider the plight of American Indians, sectional strife over banking and commerce, emerging issues involving slavery, and the very nature of American democracy.

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. . . . There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.” —Andrew Jackson, Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States, July 10, 1832

“I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” —Andrew Jackson, Proclamation Regarding Nullification to the People of South Carolina, December 10, 1832

Separate from the World

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Separate from the World
An Ohio Amish Mystery

By P. L. Gaus

As another college year draws to an end, Professor Michael Branden is weary after nearly thirty years of teaching. Sitting in his office on a warm spring day, he receives an unexpected visit from an Amish man who claims his brother, a dwarf like himself, has been murdered. Their discussion of the odd details of the case is interrupted by a commotion on campus, which turns out to be the apparent suicide of a young woman, who, it seems, has leapt to her death from the college bell tower.

The investigations of these two deaths become intertwined as Professor Branden again teams up with his colleagues Pastor Cal Troyer and Sheriff Bruce Robertson to seek explanations for these bizarre events.

Separate from the World is a story of a rift between two Amish factions, one that favors the use of medicine and that participates in a college study of genetic traits particular to the Amish community, and the other that rejects any outside influence.

Once more, P. L. Gaus takes us inside a separate culture and, in a manner both gentle and grim, highlights the complex relationship of the Amish and the “English” as they live inside or outside each other’s orbits.