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
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
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
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
Mencken’s America
H. L. Mencken
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Long famous as a political, social, and cultural gadfly, journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken was unafraid to speak his mind on controversial topics and to express his views in a deliberately provocative manner.Mencken was prolific; much of his best work lies buried in the newspapers and magazines in which it originally appeared. Mencken’s America is a sampling of this uncollected work, arranged to present the wide-ranging treatise on American culture that Mencken himself never wrote.
The Quarry
Poems
By Dan Lechay
Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.The
Red, White, Black, and Blue
A Dual Memoir of Race and Class in Appalachia
By William M. Drennen Jr. and Kojo (William T.) Jones Jr.
·
Edited by Dolores Johnson
A groundbreaking approach to studying not only cultural linguistics but also the cultural heritage of a historic time and place in America. It gives witness to the issues of race and class inherent in the way we write, speak, and think.
Memoir · African American Studies · Social Science | Regional Studies · Gender Studies · Appalachia · Ohio and Regional · Creative Nonfiction · Literature · Appalachia
Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation
By Julia M. Wright
William Blake’s reputation as a staunch individualist is based in large measure on his repeated attacks on institutions and belief systems that constrain the individual’s imagination. Blake, however, rarely represents isolation positively, suggesting that the individual’s absolute freedom from communal pressures is not the ideal.
Fortune’s Wheel
Dickens and the Iconography of Women’s Time
By Elizabeth A. Campbell
In the first half of the nineteenth century, England became quite literally a world on wheels. The sweeping technological changes wrought by the railways, steam-powered factory engines, and progressively more sophisticated wheeled conveyances of all types produced a corresponding revolution in Victorian iconography: the image of the wheel emerged as a dominant trope for power, modernity, and progress.In
Gender Studies · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
In the Work of Their Hands Is Their Prayer
Cultural Narrative and Redemption on the American Frontiers, 1830-1930
By Joel Daehnke
Westward expansion on the North American continent by European settlers generated a flurry of writings on the frontier experience over the course of a hundred years.
American Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Western Americana
Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
By Laura Barbas-Rhoden
What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures.
Literary Criticism, Latin America · Central America · Latin American Studies · Literature · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literary Criticism | Feminist
The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
By Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women’s rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry.
American Literature · Women’s Studies · Social Science | Regional Studies · Gender Studies · Ohio and Regional · Literature · Appalachia
One-Smoke Stories
By Mary Austin
·
Edited by Noreen Groover Lape
One-Smoke Stories is a collection of folk tales from Native American, Spanish Colonial, mestizo, and European American peoples of the Southwest retold in the enthralling words of one of the bestselling writers of her day, Mary Austin. One-Smoke Stories introduces us to a multicultural treasury of character types: lovers, hunters, bandits, shepherds, miners, ranchers, homesteaders, missionaries, government offcials, and supernatural beings.Through
Legends, Myths, and Folk Tales · American Literature · Literature · Western Americana
Writing Women in Central America
Gender and the Fictionalization of History
By Laura Barbas-Rhoden
What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about that past?Writing Women in Central America explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts. This study analyzes how authors appropriate history to confront the rhetoric of the state, global economic powers, and even dissident groups within their own cultures.
Literary Criticism, Latin America · Central America · Latin American Studies · Literature · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literary Criticism | Feminist
Wyeth People is the story of one writer’s search for the meaning of artistic creativity, approached from personal contact with the work of one of the world’s great artists, Andrew Wyeth.
Art | Individual Artists | General · Biography, Artists and Architects · Literature · Creative Nonfiction
Seeking the One Great Remedy
Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform
By Lorien Foote
A radical abolitionist and early feminist, Francis George Shaw (1809–1882) was a prominent figure in American reform and intellectual circles for five decades. He rejected capitalism in favor of a popular utopian socialist movement; during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he applied his radical principles to the Northern war effort and to freedmen’s organizations.A partnership with Henry George in the late 1870s provided an international audience for Shaw’s alternative vision of society.
Biography, Activists · History | United States | 19th Century · Literature
Gabriela Mistral
The Audacious Traveler
Edited by Marjorie Agosín
Gabriela Mistral is the only Latin American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even so, her extraordinary achievements in poetry, narrative, and political essays remain largely untold. Gabriela Mistral: The Audacious Traveler explores boldly and thoughtfully the complex legacy of Mistral and the way in which her work continues to define Latin America.Edited
Gender Studies · History | Modern | 20th Century · Chile · Americas · South America · Brazil · International Studies · Women’s Studies · Biography & Autobiography | General · Literature · Latin American Studies · Latin American Literature
Shakespeare at the Cineplex
The Kenneth Branagh Era
By Samuel Crowl
Samuel Crowl’s Shakespeare at the Cineplex: The Kenneth Branagh Era is the first thorough exploration of the fifteen major Shakespeare films released since the surprising success of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989). Crowl presents the rich variety of these films in the “long decade: between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”
Film and Video - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Literature · Shakespeare · Theater - History and Criticism · British Literature
Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies
Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market
By Mary Wilson Carpenter
Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.” Published in serial parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family’s status and sense of national and imperial identity.Imperial
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
Broken Lives and Other Stories
By Anthonia C. Kalu
·
Foreword by Emmanuel N. Obiechina
In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland.
Fiction · Literary Collections | African · Women Authors · Western Africa · Nigeria · Literature · African Literature · Childhood
Vernon Lee
Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual
By Christa Zorn
A startlingly original study, Vernon Lee adds new dimensions to the legacy of this woman of letters whose career spans the transition from the late Victorian to the modernist period. Christa Zorn draws on archival materials to discuss Lee’s work in terms of British aestheticism and in the context of the Western European history of ideas.
Gender Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism · Women’s Studies
Women, Work, and Representation
Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature
By Lynn M. Alexander
In Victorian England, virtually all women were taught to sew; needlework was allied with images of domestic economy and with traditional female roles of wife and mother- with home rather than factory. The professional seamstress, however, labored long hours for very small wages creating gowns for the upper and middle classes.
Literary Criticism, Women · Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Women’s History · Women’s Studies · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov
By Howard Nemerov
·
Edited by Daniel Anderson
·
Foreword by Wyatt Prunty
Judiciously selected and introduced by poet Daniel Anderson, The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov represents the broad spectrum of Nemerov’s virtues as a poet—his intelligence, his wit, his compassion, and his irreverence. It stands as the retrospective collection of the best of what Nemerov left behind, which is some of the finest poetry that the twentieth century produced.
Signs of Their Times
History, Labor, and the Body in Cobbett, Carlyle, and Disraeli
By John M. Ulrich
From the 1820s through the 1840s, debate raged over what Thomas Carlyle famously termed “the Condition of England Question.” While much of the debate focused on how to remedy the material sufferings of the rural and urban working classes, for three writers in particular—William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and Benjamin Disraeli–the times were marked by an even more pervasive crisis that threatened not only the material lives of workers, but also the very stability of meaning itself.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
One Unblinking Eye
Poems
By Norman Williams
The poems in One Unblinking Eye cast a steady and serious gaze at life outside the beltways. Whether testifying at a prayer meeting in Indiana, tramping the backwoods of northern New England, or working on an oil derrick in the Gulf, the inhabitants of these poems live on the margins of society. “They are the left-behind, odd-manneredones/Who speak in starts,” Norman Williams writes of the last residents of a West Virginia mining town.
The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV
With Variant Readings and Annotations
By Robert Browning
·
Edited by John Berkey, Paul Turner, Michael Bright, and David Ewbank
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 XIV of The Complete Works of Robert Browning records a transition in the poet’s career.
Poetry · British Literature · Literature · Victorian Studies
Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space
By Peter I. Rose
Peter Rose has spent a lifetime exploring patterns of culture, examining issues of race and ethnicity, working with refugees, teaching sociology, and roaming the world. In Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space, he reflects on his adventures and the formative experiences that led him to a fascination with lives that seem quite unlike our own.Guest
Education · Literature · Biography & Autobiography | General · Memoir · American Literature
Voices from Madagascar Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine
Edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa
There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.With
Literary Collections | African · Madagascar · African Studies · Literature
Dark Smiles
Race and Desire in George Eliot
By Alicia Carroll
Although George Eliot has long been described as “the novelist of the Midlands,” she often brought the outer reaches of the empire home in her work. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot studies Eliot’s problematic, career-long interest in representing racial and ethnic Otherness.Placing
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literary Criticism, Women Authors · Literature · Victorian Studies · Race and Ethnicity
John Reed and the Writing of Revolution
By Daniel W. Lehman
John Reed (1887-1920) is best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World and as champion of the communist movement in the United States. Still, Reed remains a writer almost systematically ignored by the literary critical establishment, even if alternately vilified and lionized by historians and by films like Warren Beatty’s Reds.John
Journalism · American Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature
Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time
Edited by Christine L. Krueger
We are a century removed from Queen Victoria’s death, yet the culture that bears her name is alive and well across the globe. Not only is Victorian culture the subject of lively critical debate, but it draws widespread interest from popular audiences and consumers.Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time addresses the theme of the Victorians’ continuing legacy and its effect on our own culture and perception of the world.
Literature · Victorian Studies · British Literature · Literary Criticism
Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs
Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
By Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills.
British Literature · Literary Criticism · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree
Stories
By Helen Papanikolas
The title of Helen Papanikolas’ second collection of short stories, The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree, is taken from an old Greek proverb and speaks of the new generation’s struggle with the vestiges of Greek customs. Gone are the raw, overt emotions of the pioneers, their bold prejudices, and, especially, the haunting black fatalism of funerals. Yet their children retain much of their parents’ culture.
Fiction · American Literature · Literature · Western Americana
No Second Eden
Poems
By Turner Cassity
If you think that Turner Cassity has mellowed or slowed down since the 1998 release of his selected poems, The Destructive Element, think again. In No Second Eden Cassity is back more Swiftian than ever. Among the targets reduced to ruin are countertenors, parole boards, the French Symbolists, calendar reformers, the Yale Divinity School, and the cult of Elvis. Without turning a blind eye, he even extends a toast to Wernher von Braun.Surprisingly,
