The Wife of Martin Guerre
By Janet Lewis
·
Introduction by Kevin Haworth
·
Afterword by Larry McMurtry
The Wife of Martin Guerre—based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France—is “one of the most significant short novels in English” (Atlantic Monthly). Originally published in 1941, it still raises questions about identity, belonging, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Women Authors · American Literature · France · Literature
Reading Victorian Deafness
By Jennifer Esmail
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Disability Studies · History | Europe | Great Britain | Victorian Era · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
Dragging Wyatt Earp
A Personal History of Dodge City
By Robert Rebein
In Dragging Wyatt Earp essayist Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City, Kansas. In chapters ranging from memoir to reportage to revisionist history, Rebein contrasts his hometown’s Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.Along
Memoir · American Literature · Americas · North America · United States · Creative Nonfiction · Literature
Religious Imaginaries
The Liturgical and Poetic Practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter
By Karen Dieleman
Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Religion | Christianity · Religion · Poetry · Victorian Studies · Literature · Christina Rossetti
Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature
By Laura T. Murphy
Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the the transatlantic slave trade, Metaphor and the Slave Trade shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation and persist in West African discourse.
Literary Criticism, Africa · Slavery and Slave Trade · African Studies · Literature · Western Africa · African Literature
Doctoring the Novel
Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle
By Sylvia A. Pamboukian
If nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the rise of medical professionalism, it also witnessed rampant quackery. It is tempting to categorize historical practices as either orthodox or quack, but what did these terms really signify in medical and public circles at the time? How did they develop and evolve? What do they tell us about actual medical practices?Doctoring
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVII
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Ashby Bland Crowder and Allan C. Dooley
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.With
British Literature · Poetry · Victorian Studies · Literature
Literary Cincinnati
The Missing Chapter
By Dale Patrick Brown
The history of Cincinnati runs much deeper than the stories of hogs that once roamed downtown streets. In addition to hosting the nation’s first professional baseball team, the Tall Stacks riverboat celebration, and the May Festival, there’s another side to the city—one that includes some of the most famous names and organizations in American letters.Literary
Meter Matters
Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
Edited by Jason David Hall
Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered—in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period’s poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913
A Critical Anthology
Edited by Mary Ellis Gibson
Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh.
Poetry Anthology · British Literature · 19th century · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
In the Shadows of Romance
Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France
By Jeffrey N. Cox
In the Shadows of Romance examines the role of the tragedy in Germany, England and France during the romantic literary period. Cox responds to the prevailing dismissive view of the romantic tragic drama, effectively arguing for its place as expressions of the whole romantic movement and as a vital chapter in the history of Western literature.
Theater - History and Criticism · Literary Criticism · Literature
Indian Angles
English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore
By Mary Ellis Gibson
Indian Angles is a new historical approach to Indian English literature. It shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities—experienced.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Asia · Literary Criticism, Poetry · India · Literature · Victorian Studies
An Invisible Rope
Portraits of Czesław Miłosz
Edited by Cynthia L. Haven
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) often seemed austere and forbidding to Americans, but those who got to know him found him warm, witty, and endlessly enriching. An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz presents a collection of remembrances from his colleagues, his students, and his fellow writers and poets in America and Poland.
Memoir · Literary Criticism, Eastern Europe · Poland · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Literature
Lit from Within
Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing
Edited by Kevin Haworth and Dinty W. Moore
Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of some of America’s most celebrated contemporary authors. Witty, direct, and thought–provoking, these essays offer something to creative writers of all backgrounds and experience. With contributions from fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers, this is a collection of unusual breadth and quality.Contributors:
Amy Levy
Critical Essays
Edited by Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman
Amy Levy has risen to prominence in recent years as one of the most innovative and perplexing writers of her generation. Embraced by feminist scholars for her radical experimentation with queer poetic voice and her witty journalistic pieces on female independence, she remains controversial for her representations of London Jewry that draw unmistakably on contemporary antisemitic discourse.Amy
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Gender Studies · Jewish Studies · Victorian Studies · Literature
X Marks the Spot
Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895
By Megan A. Norcia
During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.Cross-disciplinary
Literary Criticism | Children's & Young Adult · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · United Kingdom · Literature · Victorian Studies
Dancing out of Line
Ballrooms, Ballets, and Mobility in Victorian Fiction and Culture
By Molly Engelhardt
Dancing out of Line transports readers back to the 1840s, when the craze for social and stage dancing forced Victorians into a complex relationship with the moving body in its most voluble, volatile form.By
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism · Victorian Studies · Literature
Making Words Matter
The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
By Ambreen Hai
Why should Salman Rushdie describe his truth telling as an act of swallowing impure “haram” flesh from which the blood has not been drained? Why should Rudyard Kipling cast Kim, the imperial child–agent, as a body/text written upon and damaged by empire? Why should E. M. Forster evoke through the Indian landscape the otherwise unspeakable racial or homosexual body in his writing?
Making a Man
Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
By Gwen Hyman
Gruel and truffles, wine and gin, opium and cocaine. Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses the role of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what makes a man of a certain class in novels of the period.
Electric Meters
Victorian Physiological Poetics
By Jason R. Rudy
Victorian poetry shocks with the physicality of its formal effects, linking the rhythms of the human body to the natural pulsation of the universe.
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture
The Making of a Legend
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend explores the meteoric rise, sudden fall, and legendary resurgence of an immensely influential writer’s reputation from his hectic 1881 American lecture tour to recent Hollywood adaptations of his dramas. Always renowned—if not notorious—for his fashionable persona, Wilde courted celebrity at an early age. Later, he came to prominence as one of the most talented essayists and fiction writers of his time.In
Literary Criticism · Victorian Studies · Literature · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XI
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Michael Bright
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.Volume XI of The Complete Works of Robert Browning contains two strikingly disparate long poems from the 1870s, Fifine at the Fair and Red Cotton Night-Cap Country.
British Literature · Poetry · Victorian Studies · Literature
Heretical Hellenism
Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination
By Shanyn Fiske
Heretical Hellenism examines sources such as theater history and popular journals to uncover the ways women acquired knowledge of Greek literature, history, and philosophy and challenged traditional humanist assumptions about the uniformity of classical knowledge and about women’s place in literary history.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s Studies · 19th century · United Kingdom · Victorian Studies · Victorian Era · Literature
Praising It New
The Best of the New Criticism
Edited by Garrick Davis
·
Foreword by William Logan
Marked by a rigorously close textual reading, detached frombiographical or other extratextual material, New Criticism was thedominant literary theory of the mid-twentieth century. Since thattime, schools of literary criticism have arisen in support of or in opposition tothe approach advocated by the New Critics. Nonetheless, the theory remainsone of the most important sources for groundbreaking criticism and continuesto be a controversial approach to reading literature.Praising
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror
By Simon Joyce
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · Literature
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by Allan C. Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring, and Paul D. L. Turner
In seventeen volumes, copublished with Baylor University, this acclaimed series features annotated texts of all of Robert Browning’s known writing. The series encompasses autobiography as well as influences bearing on Browning’s life and career and aspects of Victorian thought and culture.In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents.
Poetry · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
Updike in Cincinnati
A Literary Performance
Edited by James Schiff
·
Photography by Jon Hughes
For two spring days in 2001, John Updike visited Cincinnati, Ohio, engaging and charming his audiences, reading from his fiction, fielding questions, sitting for an interview, participating in a panel discussion, and touring the Queen City.Successful writers typically spend a portion of their lives traveling the country to give readings and lectures.
The Armillary Sphere
Poems
By Ann Hudson
Taking the warp of dream, sometimes nightmare, and weaving it with the ordinary world, the poems of The Armillary Sphere, Ann Hudson’s award-winning debut collection, do not simplify the mystery but deepen it.
Sarah’s Girls
A Chronicle of Big Ugly Creek
By Lenore McComas Coberly
Situated in a remote outpost in West Virginia at the turn of the last century, the story that Lenore McComas Coberly tells in Sarah’s Girls is one of place, people, and unquenchable spirit. In this fictionalized account of her recent ancestors, Coberly masterfully traces the journeys of their lives, their dreams, and their hardships over the course of the twentieth century.At
Fiction | Small Town & Rural · Appalachia · Literature · Ohio and Regional
The Quick-Change Artist
Stories
By Cary Holladay
In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.Romance,
Rewriting Modernity
Studies in Black South African Literary History
By David Attwell
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.
Literary Criticism, Africa · South Africa · Literature · African Studies
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Edited by Jane Poyner
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.
Literary Criticism, Africa · South Africa · Literature · African Studies · African Literature
A Trick of Sunlight
Poems
By Dick Davis
In his new collection of poems, Dick Davis, the acclaimed author of Belonging, addresses themes that he has long worked with—travel, the experience of being a stranger, the clash of cultures, the vagaries of love, the pleasures and epiphanies of meaning that art allows us.
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A Dual-Text Critical Edition
Edited by Shawn St. Jean
Scholars have argued for decades over which constitutes the best possible version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s frequently anthologized story “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”Most editions have been based on the 1892 New England Magazine publication rather than the handwritten manuscript at Radcliffe College. Publication of the unedited manuscript in 1994 sparked controversy over which of the two was definitive.
The Komedie Stamboel
Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903
By Matthew Isaac Cohen
Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights and European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories.
History · World and Comparative History · Asian History · Theater - History and Criticism · Colonialism and Decolonization · Asian Studies · Literature
Toward the Winter Solstice
New Poems
By Timothy Steele
Since the appearance of Timothy Steele’s first collection of poems in 1979, growing numbers of readers and critics have recognized him as one of the best and most significant poets of his generation. Widely credited with anticipating and encouraging the revival of poetry in traditional form, Steele has produced a body of work praised for its technical accomplishment, its intellectual breadth, and its emotional energy.Toward
The Midwestern Pastoral
Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland
By William Barillas
The midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical. It is exemplified in the poetry, fiction, and essays of writers who express an informed love of the nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest.
Hometown for an Hour
Poems
By Jennifer Rose
In her second collection of poems, Jennifer Rose writes primarily of places and displacement. Using the postcard’s conventions of brevity, immediacy, and, in some instances, humor, these poems are greetings from destinations as disparate as Cape Cod, Kentuckiana, and Croatia. Rich in imagery, deftly crafted, and imbued with a lightness of voice, these poems are also postmarked from poetry’s more familiar provinces of love, nature, and loss.
Lee Gerlach’s Selected Poems is a rigorous culling from the life’s work of a remarkable and prolific poet. Written over a period of fifty years, the poetry of Lee Gerlach is a full spectrum of human expression, vision, and experience. It reflects a wisdom and maturity of character that has been constant during the entire span of Gerlach’s writing career. This selection, chosen by the poet, is the retrospective of a true twentieth-century American original.
Loving Mountains, Loving Men
By Jeff Mann
Loving Mountains, Loving Men is the first book-length treatment of a topic rarely discussed or examined: gay life in Appalachia. Appalachians are known for their love of place, yet many gays and lesbians from the mountains flee to urban areas. Jeff Mann tells the story of one who left and then returned, who insists on claiming and celebrating both regional and erotic identities.
Memoir, LGBT · Social Science | Regional Studies · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Literature
Graham R.
Rosamund Marriot Watson, Woman of Letters
By Linda K. Hughes
Rosamund Marriott Watson was a gifted poet, an erudite literary and art critic, and a daring beauty whose life illuminates fin-de-siècle London. In Graham R., Linda K. Hughes traces the poet’s development from accomplished ballads and sonnets, to avant-garde urban impressionism and New Woman poetry, to her anticipation of literary modernism.
Biography, Literary Figures · Biography & Autobiography | Women · 19th century · Literature · Victorian Studies
On the Fringes of History
A Memoir
By Philip D. Curtin
In the 1950s, professional historians claiming to specialize in tropical Africa were no more than a handful. The teaching of world history was confined to high school courses, and even those were focused on European history, with a chapter added to account for the history of East and South Asia. The change over the ensuing decades was revolutionary.Philip D. Curtin was a leader among a new generation of historians that emerged after the Second World War.
Zane Grey
Romancing the West
By Stephen J. May
One of the century’s most enduring American writers, Zane Grey left a legacy to our national consciousness that far outstrips the literary contribution of his often predictable plots and recurring themes. How did Grey capture the attention of millions of readers and promote the Western fantasy that continues to occupy many of the world’s leisure hours? This study assesses the Zane Grey phenomenon by examining Grey’s romantic novels in the context of his life and era.Grey,
Biography, Literary Figures · Literature · Literary Criticism, US · Western and Pacific States
Closing Arguments
Clarence Darrow on Religion, Law, and Society
By Clarence Darrow
·
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Clarence Darrow, son of a village undertaker and coffinmaker, rose to become one of America’s greatest attorneys—and surely its most famous. The Ohio native gained renown for his central role in momentous trials, including his 1924 defense of Leopold and Loeb and his defense of Darwinian principles in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.”
Biography & Autobiography | General · History · American History · Legal and Constitutional History · Memoir · Law · Religion · Literature
The Fin-de-Siècle Poem
English Literary Culture and the 1890s
Edited by Joseph Bristow
Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that explains why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siècle poetry, the collection shows how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Poetry · Literature · Victorian Studies
Disarming Manhood
Roots of Ethical Resistance
By David A. J. Richards
Masculine codes of honor and dominance often are expressed in acts of violence, including war and terrorism. In Disarming Manhood: Roots of Ethical Resistance, David A. J. Richards examines the lives of five famous men—great leaders and crusaders—who actively resisted violence and presented more humane alternatives to further their causes.Richards argues that William Lloyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Gender Studies · Biography & Autobiography | General · Political Science · Psychology · Sociology · Global Issues · Literature
Testaments
Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile
By Danuta Mostwin
Polish émigrés have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin’s fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration.Mostwin and her husband survived the ravages of World War II, traveled to Britain, and then emigrated to the United States.
Fiction · American Literature · Polish and Polish-American Studies · Literature
Ohio Volunteer
The Childhood and Civil War Memoirs of Captain John Calvin Hartzell, OVI
Edited by Charles I. Switzer
When his captain was killed during the Battle of Perryville, John Calvin Hartzell was made commander of Company H, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He led his men during the Battle of Chickamauga, the siege of Chattanooga, and the Battle of Missionary Ridge.
American Civil War · Memoir · Military History · Ohio · Midwest · Literature · Ohio and Regional
A Poet’s Prose
Selected Writings of Louise Bogan
By Louise Bogan
·
Edited by Mary Kinzie
Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897–1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect.
An American Vein
Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature
Edited by Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield, and Gurney Norman
An American Vein is an anthology of literary criticism of Appalachian novelists, poets, and playwrights. The book reprises critical writing of influential authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Cratis Williams, and Jim Wayne Miller. It introduces new writing by Rodger Cunningham, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and others.
Literary Criticism, US · Social Science | Regional Studies · Appalachia · Literature · Ohio and Regional
Beyond Hill and Hollow
Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies
Edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Women’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.The
Women’s Studies · Social Science | Regional Studies · Literary Criticism, Women · Women’s History · Appalachia · Literature · Ohio and Regional
The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories
By Natalie L. M. Petesch
“Memory, of course, is sometimes like a bucking horse, sometimes a runaway one, and one must control the reins until finally it stops, snorting with exhausted relief,” writes Natalie L. M. Petesch in her haunting new collection, The Confessions of Señora Francesca Navarro and Other Stories.Petesch immerses readers in the lives of people caught up in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, which left more than five hundred thousand dead.
The Practical Shakespeare
The Plays in Practice and on the Page
By Colin Butler
A comprehensive treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, The Practical Shakespeare: The Plays in Practice and on the Page illuminates for a general audience how and why the plays work so well.Noting
DeVoto’s West
History, Conservation, and the Public Good
By Bernard DeVoto
·
Edited by Edward K. Muller
Social commentator and preeminent western historian Bernard DeVoto vigorously defended public lands in the West against commercial interests. By the time of his death in 1955, DeVoto had published criticism, history, and fiction. He had won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. But his most passionate writing—at once incisive and eloquent—advocated conservation of America’s prairies, rangeland, forests, mountains, canyons, and deserts.DeVoto’s
Environmental Policy · History · American History · Journalism · Literature · Letters · Political Science · Western Americana
Raising the Dust
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
By Beth Sutton-Ramspeck
Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls “literary housekeeping.” The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to “set the human household in order.”To
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies
Inaugural Wounds
The Shaping of Desire in Five Nineteenth-Century English Narratives
By Robert E. Lougy
Desire, Jacques Lacan suggests, is a condition or expression of our wounded nature. But because such desire is also unconscious, it can be expressed only indirectly, for what we consciously desire is hardly ever what we really want. Desire makes itself known, but disguises its presence—appearing, for example, in unconscious but repetitive, and sometimes even self-destructive, patterns of behavior.Informed
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
Switzerland
A Village History
By David Birmingham
Switzerland: A Village History is an account of an Alpine village that illuminates the broader history of Switzerland and its rural, local underpinnings. It begins with the colonization of the Alps by Romanized Celtic peoples who came from the plain to clear the wilderness, establish a tiny monastic house, and create a dairy economy that became famous for its cheeses.
Social History · Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social · Switzerland · Literature
Then and Now
Poems
By James Cummins
This collection of poems by James Cummins has the same inventiveness and wit of his earlier books and adds a deepening of tone and spirit filled with feeling and with Cummins’s signature anguished humor.
Subjects on Display
Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity
By Beth Newman
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women.
Gender Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Psychology · Women’s Studies
Directing Shakespeare
A Scholar Onstage
By Sidney Homan
An impossible question from a Chinese actor—“Why is Shakespeare eternal?”—drove Sidney Homan after fifty years in the theater to ponder just what makes Shakespeare…well, Shakespeare. The result, Directing Shakespeare, reflects the two worlds in which Homan operates—as a scholar and teacher on campus, and as a director and actor in professional and university theaters.
Education · Shakespeare · Theater - History and Criticism · Literature
