Faculty Bookshelf

Geographies of Relation crosses disciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance. It offers a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support its argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

For more than three centuries, Americans have pursued strategies of security that routinely make them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability probes this paradox by examining American attachments to the terror of the sublime, the fear of uncertainty, and the anxieties produced by unending racial threat.

Challenging conventional approaches that leave questions of security to policy experts, Russ Castronovo turns to literature, philosophy, and political theory to show how security provides an organizing principle for collective life in ways that both enhance freedom and limit it. His incisive critique ranges from frontier violence and white racial anxiety to insurgent Black print culture and other forms of early American terror, uncovering the hidden logic of insecurity that structures modern approaches to national defense, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. Drawing on examples from fiction, journalism, tracts, and pamphlets, Castronovo uncovers the deep affective attachments that Americans have had since the founding to the sources of fear and insecurity that make them feel unsafe.

Timely and urgent, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability sheds critical light on how and why the fundamental political desire for security promotes unease alongside assurance and fixates on risk and danger while clamoring for safety.

An essential and field-defining resource, this volume brings fresh approaches to major US novels, poetry, and performance literature of the twentieth century. With sections on ‘structures’, ‘movements’, ‘attachments’, and ‘imaginaries’, this handbook brings a new set of tools and perspectives to the rich and diverse traditions of American literary production. The editors have turned to leading as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field to foreground methodological concerns that assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, critical race and indigenous studies, disability and care studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, media and sound studies, and other cutting-edge approaches. The 20 original chapters include the discussion of working-class literature, border narratives, children’s literature, novels of late-capitalism, nuclear poetry, fantasies of whiteness, and Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx creative texts.

In Racist Love, Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as repositories of seemingly positive feelings and attachment to Asianness. At the same time, Bow demonstrates that these Asianized proxies reveal how fetishistic attraction and pleasure serve as a source of anti-Asian bias and violence. By outlining how attraction to popular representations of Asianness cloaks racial resentment and fears of globalization, Bow provides a new means of understanding the ambivalence surrounding Asians in the United States while offering a theory of the psychological, affective, and symbolic dynamics of racist love in contemporary America.

Latina/o/x places exist as both tangible physical phenomena and gatherings created and maintained by creative cultural practices. In this collection, an interdisciplinary group of contributors critically examines the many ways that varied Latina/o/x communities cohere through cultural expression. Authors consider how our embodied experiences of place, together with our histories and knowledge, inform our imagination and reimagination of our surroundings in acts of placemaking. This placemaking often considers environmental sustainability as it helps to sustain communities in the face of xenophobia and racism through cultural expression ranging from festivals to zines to sanctuary movements. It emerges not only in specific locations but as movement within and between sites; not only as part of a built environment, but also as an aesthetic practice; and not only because of efforts by cultural, political, and institutional leaders, but through mass media and countless human interactions.

This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.

Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.

How do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual outlaw?

In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation—including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet—were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called “normal” gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments—from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth—and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind’s eye and interpreted by diverse publics.

Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1976–1983), Lizzy Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1989–1991), Fawaz shows how artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass audiences in the modern United States.

Against the ideal of ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity and attachments to rigidly defined identities, Queer Forms argues for the value of shapeshifting as the imaginative transformation of genders and sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility, but to be better understood in all our dimensions.​​

Discourse Syntax is the study of syntax that requires an understanding of the surrounding text and the overall discourse situation, including considerations of genre and modality. Using corpus data and insights from current research, this book is a comprehensive guide to this fast-developing field. It takes the reader ‘beyond the sentence’ to study grammatical phenomena, like word order variation, connectives, ellipsis, and complexity. It introduces core concepts of Discourse Syntax, integrating insights from corpus-based research and inviting the reader to reflect on research design decisions. Each chapter begins with a definition of learning outcomes, provides results from empirical articles, and enables readers to critically assess data visualization. Complete with helpful further reading recommendations as well as a range of exercises, it is geared towards intermediate to advanced students of English linguistics and it is also essential reading for anyone interested in this exciting, fast-moving discipline.

Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of the “Black world” paradigm and traces a literary and cultural cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permutations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric focus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving, multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural expression.

Spanning the 1830s to the twenty-first century, Afrodiasporic Forms traverses national, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries as it investigates how cultural products of slavery’s afterlife—including poetry, prose, painting, television, sculpture, and song—shape understandings of the African diaspora. Each chapter uncovers multidirectional pathways for exploring representations of slavery, considering works such as a Brazilian telenovela based on Bernardo Guimarães’s novel A Escrava Isaura, Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage,” Kara Walker’s sculpture A Subtlety, and Juan Francisco Manzano’s Autobiografía de un esclavo. Kennon’s expansive method of comparative reading across the diaspora uses eclectic pairings of canonical and popular textual and artistic sources to stretch beyond disciplinary and national borders, promoting expansive diasporic literacies.

Across more than fifty original essays, Keywords for Comics Studies provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for comics and sequential art. The essays also identify new avenues of research into one of the most popular and diverse visual media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Keywords for Comics Studies presents an array of inventive analyses of terms central to the study of comics and sequential art that are traditionally siloed in distinct lexicons: these include creative and aesthetic terms like Ink, Creator, Border, and Panel; conceptual terms such as Trans*, Disability, Universe, and Fantasy; genre terms like Zine, Pornography, Superhero, and Manga; and canonical terms like X-Men, Archie, Watchmen, and Love and Rockets.

This volume ties each specific comic studies keyword to the larger context of the term within the humanities. Essays demonstrate how scholars, cultural critics, and comics artists from a range of fields take up sequential art as both an object of analysis and a medium for developing new theories about embodiment, identity, literacy, audience reception, genre, cultural politics, and more. Keywords for Comics Studies revivifies the fantasy and magic of reading comics in its kaleidoscopic view of the field’s most compelling and imaginative ideas.

A livewire debut from Dantiel W. Moniz, one of the most exciting discoveries in today’s literary landscape, Milk Blood Heat depicts the sultry lives of Floridians in intergenerational tales that contemplate human connection, race, womanhood, inheritance, and the elemental darkness in us all. Set among the cities and suburbs of Florida, each story delves into the ordinary worlds of young girls, women, and men who find themselves confronted by extraordinary moments of violent personal reckoning. These intimate portraits of people and relationships scour and soothe and blast a light on the nature of family, faith, forgiveness, consumption, and what we may, or may not, owe one another.

A thirteen-year-old meditates on her sadness and the difference between herself and her white best friend when an unexpected tragedy occurs; a woman recovering from a miscarriage finds herself unable to let go of her daughter—whose body parts she sees throughout her daily life; a teenager resists her family’s church and is accused of courting the devil; servers at a supper club cater to the insatiable cravings of their wealthy clientele; and two estranged siblings take a road-trip with their father’s ashes and are forced to face the troubling reality of how he continues to shape them.

Wise and subversive, spiritual and seductive, Milk Blood Heat forms an ouroboros of stories that bewitch with their truth, announcing the arrival of a bright new literary star.

In the town of Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the original 1692 witch trials, the 1989 Danvers Falcons will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. Against a background of irresistible 1980s iconography, Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.

Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity. Through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship, this comic tour de female force chronicles Barry’s glorious cast of characters as they charge past every obstacle on the path to finding their glorious true selves.

Hypermobilities is a verse-memoir in haiku, written over two years of intense engagement with the medical system. Samuels composed these poems in her head while strapped down within MRI machines, in the infusion center with IV needles snaking her arms, waiting and waiting in white-walled rooms. They are necessarily short, to be written by memory without pen or screen. A selection of these poems eventually formed into this collection, named after the hallmark sign of her genetic condition: joint hypermobility.

This book advances a new concept of the “Asian diaspora” that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets’ thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations. Diasporic Poetics argues that racialized and nationally bounded “Asian” identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from “Third World” struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement. Indeed, this volume shows that Asian writers disclaim national belonging as often as they claim it, placing Asian diasporic writers at a critical distance from the national spaces within which they write. As the first full-length study to compare Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian writers, the book offers the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the distinctive development of Asian writing in each country, while also offering close analysis of the work of writers such as Janice Mirikitani, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Park Hong.

At a moment in US politics when racially motivated nationalism, shifting relations with Latin America, and anxiety over national futures intertwine, understanding the long history of American preoccupation with magnitude and how it underpins national identity is vitally important. In American Magnitude, Christa J. Olson tracks the visual history of US appeals to grandeur, import, and consequence (megethos), focusing on images that use the wider Americas to establish US character. Her sources—including lithographs from the US-Mexican War, pre–Civil War paintings of the Andes, photo essays of Machu Picchu, and WWII-era films promoting hemispheric unity—span from 1845 to 1950 but resonate into the present.

Olson demonstrates how those crafting the appeals that feed the US national imaginary—artists, scientists, journalists, diplomats, and others—have invited US audiences to view Latin America as a foil for the greatness of their own nation and encouraged white US publics in particular to see themselves as especially American among Americans. She reveals how each instance of visual rhetoric relies upon the eyes of others to instantiate its magnitude—and falters as some viewers look askance instead. The result is the possibility of a post-magnitude United States: neither great nor failed, but modest, partial, and imperfect.

Analyzing Afrofuturist music, literature, and painting (Sun Ra, P-Funk, Wangechi Mutu), this book (which translates to The Black Angel of History: Cosmos and Technics of Afrofuturism) shows how Afrofuturism can cure us of the triple rejection constitutive of the Anthropocene. This book is related to topics discussed in Alienocene, a journal that Neyrat edits.

With language we name and define all things, and by studying our use of language, rhetoricians can provide an account of these things and thus of our lived experience. The concept of the sacred, however, raises the prospect of the existence of phenomena that transcend the human and physical and cannot be expressed fully by language. The sacred thus reveals limitations to rhetoric.

Featuring essays by some of the foremost scholars of rhetoric working today, this wide-ranging collection of theoretical and methodological studies takes seriously the possibility of the sacred and the challenge it poses to rhetorical inquiry. The contributors engage with religious rhetorics—Jewish, Jesuit, Buddhist, pagan—as well as rationalist, scientific, and postmodern rhetorics, studying, for example, divination in the Platonic tradition, Thomas Hobbes’s and Walter Benjamin’s accounts of sacred texts, the uncanny algorithms of Big Data, and Hélène Cixous’s sacred passages and passwords. From these studies, new definitions of the sacred emerge—along with new rhetorical practices for engaging with the sacred.

This book provides insight into the relation of rhetoric and the sacred, showing the capacity of rhetoric to study the ineffable but also shedding light on the boundaries between them.

Literature and Materialisms sheds light on the current new wave of materialisms and assesses the impact on literary theory and criticism. It maps the similarities and differences between speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and vitalism. A genealogy of materialisms, vitalisms, empiricisms, and realist approaches – from Heraclitus to Badiou, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Marx, Althusser, Barad, Spivak, Deleuze, Bennett, Harman, and other contemporary thinkers – puts these new trends into perspective.

This book investigates the relations between literature – from Marquis de Sade to objectivist poetry – and materialism and analyses the material aspects of literature, its structure and texture, its commodification and its capacity to resist market imperatives. It explores how literary style might be understood as a mediation between the ‘immaterial’ and the concrete features of a text.

This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of the study of literature and materialism.

Webster’s play is a classroom favorite, with its heroine, the Duchess of Malfi, standing out as one of the most compelling female characters on the early modern stage. This macabre masterpiece, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, muses on the nature of the human condition, asking what, if anything, differentiates humankind from beasts; what drives some people to murder; and what comes after death. As in Hamlet, the dramatic strength of the play’s protagonist overwhelms the action; in this case, however, that protagonist is a powerful and compelling woman.

Heather Swan is a poet, nonfiction writer, and teacher. Her chapbook The Edge of Damage won the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Award. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Cold Mountain Review, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt Magazine, Catapult, Edge Effects, ISLE, and Minding Nature. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She has been the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award, the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship, and the August Derleth Award for Poetry. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she is also a beekeeper. A Kinship with Ash is her debut full-length collection.

It’s difficult to accept that shadows, too, are products of the natural world. Often we hold what’s beautiful next to what we fear. As much as we want to appeal to our better angels, cruelty hovers and haunts our hearts. In Heather Swan’s A Kinship with Ash, wisdom is hard won. Elegant, image rich, and full of birdsong, these poems question and delight. But what is poetry if not the mind’s silhouette? In the pastoral tradition we confront our reflection, and here, Swan uses nature to look inward. As if negotiating the cliff’s edge, or wading into open water, her speakers are at the mercy of currents. We are left with faith. Reading these poems is an act of surveying light.

            —Amaud Jamaul Johnson

In The Nature of the Page, Joshua Calhoun tells the story of handmade paper in Renaissance England and beyond. For most of the history of printing, paper was made primarily from recycled rags, so this is a story about using old clothes to tell new stories, about plants used to make clothes, and about plants that frustrated papermakers’ best attempts to replace scarce natural resources with abundant ones. Because plants, like humans, are susceptible to the ravages of time, it is also a story of corruption and the hope that we can preserve the things we love from decay.

Combining environmental and bibliographical research with deft literary analysis, Calhoun reveals how much we have left to discover in familiar texts. He describes the transformation of plant material into a sheet of paper, details how ecological availability or scarcity influenced literary output in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and examines the impact of the various colors and qualities of paper on early modern reading practices. Through a discussion of sizing—the mixture used to coat the surface of paper so that ink would not blot into its fibers—he reveals a surprising textual interaction between animals and readers. He shows how we might read an indistinct stain on the page of an early modern book to better understand the mixed media surfaces on which readers, writers, and printers recorded and revised history. Lastly, Calhoun considers how early modern writers imagined paper decay and how modern scholars grapple with biodeterioration today.

Exploring the poetic interplay between human ideas and the plant, animal, and mineral forms through which they are mediated, The Nature of the Page prompts readers to reconsider the role of the natural world in everything from old books to new smartphones.

Shakespeare’s King Lear is as significant in Western literature as the Oresteia, the Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote. Everything about it is unforgettable: Cordelia’s honest answers to her deluded and raging father, Regan and Goneril’s cruelty, Lear on the heath, the blinding of Gloucester, Edgar’s feigned madness, and the meaningful nonsense of the Fool. The subject of intense literary and cultural critical attention, the play exists in different versions and has been adapted and changed countless times. Richard Knowles’s edition, the product of more than twenty years of labor, records every important variant, discusses the critical controversies, provides the work’s sources, and guides readers through four hundred years of stage history and adaptations. A compendium of information and scholarship, this New Variorum Edition is a milestone and will be invaluable to scholars, directors, and actors for decades to come.

Winner of the prestigious Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Drama and Theatre (2020); Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)

A Poetics of Modernity is a scholarly edition of theoretically significant writing on theatre by modern Indian theatre practitioners, in English and in English translation from nine other languages. The selections are drawn from book-length works, essays, lectures, prefatory materials, letters, autobiographies, interviews, and memoirs by playwrights, directors, actors, designers, activists, and policy-makers. A significant proportion of the primary materials included in the volume have been translated into English for the first time, creating an archive of theory and criticism that has not been available earlier to scholars, teachers, students, or general readers interested in modern Indian theatre.

A comprehensive Introduction to the selection brings new precision to the concept of “modernity” in Indian theatre by defining it in relation to historically unprecedented processes and conditions that first emerged around the mid-nineteenth century, and have continued into the early-twenty first century. The primary materials are arranged chronologically, and each entry includes a headnote on the author and work as well as annotations and explanatory notes.

The troubled reign of a fourteenth-century sultan of Delhi helps dramatize
the crisis of secular nationhood in post-Independence India. A twelfthcentury
folktale about ‘transposed heads’ offers a path-breaking model for
a quintessentially ‘Indian’ theatre in postcolonial times. The folktale about
a woman with a snake lover explores gender relations within marriage.
Individual human sexuality meets the historical debate on violence in Indian
culture. The plays in this volume span roughly the first half of the career of
Girish Karnad, one of India’s pre-eminent playwrights.

The three-volume set of Karnad’s Collected Plays brings together English
versions of his important works. Each volume contains an extensive
introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professor
of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin,
Madison. The introductions trace the literary and theatrical evolution of
Karnad’s work over six decades and position it in the larger context of
modern Indian drama. In addition, they comment on Karnad’s place as author
and translator in a multilingual performance culture and the relation of his
playwriting to his work in the popular media.

Each of these volumes serves as a collector’s item, making Karnad’s works
accessible to theatre lovers worldwide.

A violent history of the anti-caste movement in twelfth-century Karnataka. A myth from the Mahabharata depicted as a narrative of passion, betrayal, and parricide. The inner world of a man whose public life was a continual war against British colonialism. A reflection on the opposition between the spiritual and the erotic. The confrontation between a writer and her electronic image. The plays and monologues in this volume span the latter half of the career of Girish Karnad, one of India’s pre-eminent contemporary playwrights.

The three-volume set of Karnad’s Collected Plays brings together English versions of his s important works. Each volume contains an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin. The introductions trace the literary and theatrical evolution of Karnad’s work over six decades and position it in the larger context of modern Indian drama. In addition, they comment on Karnad’s place as author and translator in a multilingual performance culture, the relation of his playwriting to his work in the popular media, and his and his larger-than-life presence as an engaged intellectual in the Indian public sphere.

Each of these volumes serves as a collector’s item, making Karnad’s works accessible to theatre lovers worldwide.

The tale of a mythic king’s aggression against his offspring, and his desperation to escape the curse of old age laid upon him in the prime of life. The anxieties that torment a middle-class family as their daughter awaits the arrival of the ‘suitable boy’ from abroad whom she has never met. The morphing of the city of Bangalore, whose founding myth celebrates its human ambience, into India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ where strangers are thrown together, get entangled, and are violently pulled apart. This volume contains the very first play, as well as the two most recent works, by Girish Karnad, one of India’s pre-eminent contemporary playwrights.

The three-volume set of Karnad’s Collected Plays brings together English versions of his important works. Each volume contains an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin. The introductions trace the literary and theatrical evolution of Karnad’s work over six decades and position it in the larger context of modern Indian drama. In addition, they comment on Karnad’s place as author and translator in a multilingual performance culture, the relation of his playwriting to his work in the popular media, and his and his larger-than-life presence as an engaged intellectual in the Indian public sphere.

Each of these volumes serves as a collector’s item, making Karnad’s works accessible to theatre lovers worldwide.

As England withdrew from its empire after World War II, how did writers living outside the United Kingdom respond to the history of colonialism and the aesthetics of modernism within a global context? In fourteen original essays, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, a distinguished group of scholars considers these questions in relation to novelists, playwrights, and poets living in English-speaking countries around the world. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism not only examines how modernism and postcolonialism evolved over several generations, but also situates the writers analyzed in terms of canonical realignments inspired by the New Modernist Studies and an array of emerging methodologies and approaches.

While this volume highlights social and political questions connected with the end of empire, it also considers the aesthetics of postcolonialism, detailing how writers drew upon, responded to and, sometimes reacted against, the formal innovations of modernism. Many of the essays consider the influence modernist artists and movements exercised on postcolonial writers, from W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf to Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstractionism. Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism is organized around six geographic locales and includes essays on Africa (Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee), Asia (Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy), the Caribbean (Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul), Ireland (Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney), Australia/New Zealand (David Malouf, Keri Hulme) and Canada (Michael Ondaatje). Examining how Anglophone writers engaged with the literary, intellectual, and cultural heritage of modernism, this volume offers a vital and distinctive intervention in ongoing discussions of modern and contemporary literature.

Contributors include: Genevieve Abravanel, Nicholas Allen, Deepika Bahri, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Alice Brittan, Simon During, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Nico Israel, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Brigid Rooney, Philip Steer and Mark Wollaeger.

Corporealities: Discourses of Disability series, Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-472-13112-9

Winner of the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.

This project examines disability in the Renaissance in conduct books and treatises, travel writing, and wonder books. The cross-section of texts is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Its methodology takes a formal and philosophical approach to pre-modern formulations of monstrous bodies, spaces, and narratives, which continue to shape our understandings of disability today. Bearden’s work discerns the norming of early modern bodies in the discourse of the ideal and the natural, and it discovers alternative representations of embodiment that allow for variation and vulnerability. It overturns the assumption that “monstrosity” was relegated to the margins of the world from antiquity to the Renaissance, and it questions grand narratives propounding a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen. I contend that these categories coexist and intersect, and that we can better understand early modern productions of disability by attending to the rich variety of monstrous bodies, spaces, and narratives that populate Renaissance texts.

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco’s Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a Chinese woman. Originally published in 1950, Fifth Chinese Daughter was one of the most widely read works by an Asian American author in the twentieth century. The US State Department even sent its charismatic young author on a four-month speaking tour throughout Asia.

Cited as an influence by prominent Chinese American writers such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, Fifth Chinese Daughter is a foundational work in Asian American literature. It was written at a time when few portraits of Asian American life were available, and no similar works were as popular and broadly appealing. This new edition includes the original illustrations by Kathryn Uhl and features an introduction by Leslie Bow, who critically examines the changing reception and enduring legacy of the book and offers insight into Wong’s life as an artist and an ambassador of Chinese American culture.

Colony Collapse Disorder, ubiquitous pesticide use, industrial agriculture, habitat reduction—these are just a few of the issues causing unprecedented trauma in honeybee populations worldwide. In this artfully illustrated book, UW PhD alum Heather Swan embarks on a narrative voyage to discover solutions to—and understand the sources of—the plight of honeybees.

Through a lyrical combination of creative nonfiction and visual imagery, Where Honeybees Thrive tells the stories of the beekeepers, farmers, artists, entomologists, ecologists, and other advocates working to stem the damage and reverse course for this critical pollinator. Using her own quest for understanding as a starting point, Swan highlights the innovative projects and strategies these groups employ. Her mosaic approach to engaging with the environment not only reveals the incredibly complex political ecology in which bees live—which includes human and nonhuman actors alike—but also suggests ways of comprehending and tackling a host of other conflicts between postindustrial society and the natural world. Each chapter closes with an illustrative full-color gallery of bee-related artwork.

A luminous journey from the worlds of honey producers, urban farmers, and mead makers of the United States to those of beekeepers of Sichuan, China, and researchers in southern Africa, Where Honeybees Thrive traces the global web of efforts to secure a sustainable future for honeybees—and ourselves.

As challenging as it is to imagine how an educated cleric or wealthy lay person in the early Middle Ages would have understood a letter (especially one from God), it is even harder to understand why letters would have so captured the imagination of people who might never have produced, sent, or received letters themselves.

In Epistolary Acts, Jordan Zweck examines the presentation of letters in early medieval vernacular literature, including hagiography, prose romance, poetry, and sermons on letters from heaven, moving beyond traditional genre study to offer a radically new way of conceptualizing Anglo-Saxon epistolarity. Zweck argues that what makes early medieval English epistolarity unique is the performance of what she calls “epistolary acts,” the moments when authors represent or embed letters within vernacular texts. The book contributes to a growing interest in the intersections between medieval studies and media studies, blending traditional book history and manuscript studies with affect theory, media studies, and archive studies.

Returning to revolution’s original meaning of ‘cycle’, Contemporary Revolutions explores how 21st-century writers, artists, and performers re-engage the arts of the past to reimagine a present and future encompassing revolutionary commitments to justice and freedom. Dealing with histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, civil war, and gender and class inequities, essays examine literature and arts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and the United States.

The broad range of contemporary writers and artists considered include fabric artist Ellen Bell; poets Selena Tusitala Marsh and Antje Krog; Syrian artists of the civil war and Sana Yazigi’s creative memory web site about the war; street artist Bahia Shehab; theatre installation artist William Kentridge; and the recycles of Virginia Woolf by multi-media artist Kabe Wilson, novelist W. G. Sebald, and the contemporary trans movement.

Everywhere and Nowhere considers the ubiquity of anonymity and mediation in the publication and circulation of eighteenth-century British literature—before the Romantic creation of the “author”—and what this means for literary criticism. Drawing on quantitative analysis and robust archival work, it reveals the long history of print anonymity so central to the risks and benefits of the digital culture.

In the cultural imaginary of Paris, there is little room for the working class multi-racial outskirts, unless the subject is Islamic culture and the subjection of women and queer subjects. The Paris imagined in Maghrebi, African American and French immigrant cultures was both invisible in the scholarship and hypervisible as the “Badlands of the Republic” in French mainstream media. Like the city of the Francophile tourists, this other Paris is largely an imagined territory, albeit associated with crime, unbridled patriarchy, and violence.

Un-shackling the sensational and the Paris outskirts, this book chronicles everyday life in the impoverished sectors of the French capital in various contexts and cultural traditions. We find versions of Postcolonial Paris in post-World War II Maghrebi and African American expatriate fiction, 1980s beur fiction and cinema, and contemporary French immigrant cultures. Together, works by Driss Chraïbi, Mehdi Charef, William Gardner Smith, Faïza Guène, J.R., and Princess Hijab register the shifting politics and grammars of race in a nation where it does not appear on the census and where the public overwhelmingly condemns it as an Anglo-Saxon importation.

Spanning 1955 to 2015, authors of African descent have pondered the French tyranny of universalism and interrogated the myth of Paris as a space of liberation for the African diaspora. Some of the most well-known Francophiles such as James Baldwin also wrote about a French capital marred by colonial exclusion. By desegregating the cultural study of Paris to include its impoverished outskirts, the book reveals that writers and filmmakers have deployed Franco-African intimate encounters to articulate the political exclusion of racialized subjects. In the colonial and contemporary eras, their narratives of intimacy can help us better understand the ways in which gender and sexual difference work(ed) to construct, maintain, or challenge racial boundaries.

Praise for Postcolonial Paris:
“Provides unique ways to reread, re-portray the outskirts of Paris, successfully and creatively showing how they reveal France’s history of colonization and continued oppression of racially, sexually, and religiously excluded groups of people”
—Public books

“Present[s] a compelling reading of several classic works of French and francophone literature, and deepens readers’ understanding of the social dynamics shaping lived experiences in Paris today.”
—French Studies

“Amine’s work is impressive in the temporal ground it covers, and the theorisation is supported by very thoughtful in-depth analyses of the works at play. Overall the book provides a cohesive argument and brilliant analyses on the role of spatiality in colonial and postcolonial intimacies in the French capital”
—Postcolonial Studies

“A powerful, highly relevant, and innovative study of the cultural and political role of France’s largest ethnic and religious minority”
—Jarrod Hayes, author of Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb

“Effectively demonstrates how racialized stereotyping and ethnocultural marginalization of citizens of North African descent have long betrayed the French idyll of equality and integration. Perceptive and groundbreaking”
—Adlai Murdoch, author of Creolizing the Metropole

Winner, Grand Prize, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and Translation

The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—that takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. In short, our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology.

A survey of the innovative scholarship emerging at the intersections of rhetoric, and fieldwork

A variety of research areas within rhetorical studies—including everyday and public rhetorics, space and place-based work, material and ecological approaches, environmental communication, technical communication, and critical and participatory action research, among others—have increasingly called for ethnographic fieldwork that grounds the study of rhetoric within the contexts of its use and circulation. Employing field methods more commonly used by ethnographers allows researchers to capture rhetoric in action and to observe the dynamic circumstances that shape persuasion in ordinary life.

The Dutch Courtesan is a riotous tragicomedy that explores the delights and perils afforded by Jacobean London. While Freevill, the play’s nominal hero, frolics in the city, Franceschina, his cast-off mistress and the Dutch courtesan of the play’s title, laments his betrayal and plots revenge. Juxtaposing Franceschina’s vulnerable financial position against the unappealing marital prospects available to gentry women, the play undermines the language of romance, revealing it to be rooted in commerce and commodification. Marston’s commentary on financial insecurity and the hypocritical repudiation of foreignness makes The Dutch Courtesan truly a document for our time.

This volume offers a thought-provoking guide to King Henry V, surveying the play’s rich critical and performance history, with a particular emphasis on its reputation in France as well as Britain and the US. A chapter on non-Anglophone reactions to the play, alongside new essays on British identity, religion, medieval warfare and the questioning of Henry V’s heroism, open up ground-breaking perspectives on the play. The volume also includes discussions of King Henry V’s rich theatrical and filmic heritage, and a guide to learning and teaching resources and how these might be integrated into effective pedagogic strategies in the classroom.

Media Laboratories explores a pivotal time for South American literature of the 1930s and ’40s. Cinema, radio, and the typewriter, once seen as promising catalysts for new kinds of writing, began to be challenged by authors, workers, and the public. What happens when media no longer seem novel and potentially democratic but rather consolidated and dominant?

Why do animals talk in literature? In this provocative book, Mario Ortiz Robles tracks the presence of animals across an expansive literary archive to argue that literature cannot be understood as a human endeavor apart from its capacity to represent animals. Focusing on the literary representation of familiar animals, including horses, dogs, cats, and songbirds, Ortiz Robles examines the various tropes literature has historically employed to give meaning to our fraught relations with other animals. Beyond allowing us to imagine the lives of non-humans, literature can make a lasting contribution to Animal Studies, an emerging discipline within the humanities, by showing us that there is something fictional about our relation to animals.

Literature and Animal Studies combines a broad mapping of literary animals with detailed readings of key animal texts to offer a new way of organizing literary history that emphasizes genera over genres and a new way of classifying animals that is premised on tropes rather than taxa. The book makes us see animals and our relation to them with fresh eyes and, in doing so, prompts us to review the role of literature in a culture that considers it an endangered art form.

In 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as “new mutants,” social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and “freaks” soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America’s most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes.

In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

At first glance, modernism and opera may seem like strange bedfellows—the former hostile to sentiment, the latter wearing its heart on its sleeve. And yet these apparent opposites attract: many operas are aesthetically avant-garde, politically subversive, and socially transgressive. From the proto-modernist strains of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal through the twenty-first-century modernism of Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, the duet between modernism and opera, at turns harmonious and dissonant, has been one of the central artistic events of modernity. Despite this centrality, scholars of modernist literature only rarely venture into opera, and music scholars generally return the favor by leaving literature to one side. But opera, that grand cauldron of the arts, demands that scholars, too, share the stage with one another.

In Modernism and Opera, Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith bring together musicologists, literary critics, and theater scholars for the first time in a mutual endeavor to trace certain key moments in the history of modernism and opera. This innovative volume includes essays from some of the most notable scholars in their fields and covers works as diverse as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Berg’s Wozzeck, Janáček’sMakropulos Case, Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, Strauss’sArabella, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Britten’s Gloriana, and Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise.

A collaborative study of the ultimate collaborative art form,Modernism and Opera reveals how modernism and opera illuminate each other and, more generally, the culture of the twentieth century. It also addresses a number of issues crucial for understanding the relation between modernism and opera, focusing in particular on intermediality (how modernism integrates music, literature, and drama into opera) and anti-theatricality (how opera responds to modernism’s apparent antipathy to theatricality). This captivating book—the first of its kind—will appeal to scholars of literature, music, theater, and modernity as well as to sophisticated opera lovers everywhere.

Explores how the USHMM and other museums and memorials both displace and disturb the memories that they are trying to commemorate.

Figures of Memory examines how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, uses its space and the design of its exhibits to “move” its visitors to memory. From the objects and their placement to the architectural design of the building and the floor plan, the USHMM was meant to teach visitors about the Holocaust. But what Michael Bernard-Donals found is that while they learn, and remember, the Holocaust, visitors also call to mind other, sometimes unrelated memories. Partly this is because memory itself works in multidirectional ways, but partly it’s because of decisions made in the planning that led to the creation of the museum.

Drawing on material from the USHMM’s institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory—its relation to identity, space, and ethics—and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don’t so much “make a case for” events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it—and the museum visitor—so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate.

From Les Figues Press:

There are one hundred kinds of Chinese silence: the silence of unknown grandfathers; the silence of borrowed Buddha and rebranded Confucius; the silence of alluring stereotypes and exotic reticence. These poems make those silences heard. Writing back to an orientalist tradition that has defined modern American poetry, these 100 Chinese silences unmask the imagined Asias of American literature, revealing the spectral Asian presence that haunts our most eloquent lyrics and self-satisfied wisdom. Rewriting poets from Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore to Gary Snyder and Billy Collins, this book is a sharply critical and wickedly humorous travesty of the modern canon, excavating the Asian (American) bones buried in our poetic language.

In Platonic Occasions, Richard Begam & James Soderholm reflect upon a wide range of thinkers, writers and ideas from Plato, Descartes and Nietzsche to Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Moderns—from Evil, Love and Death to Art, Memory and Mimesis. The dialogues suggest that Percy Shelley was right when he claimed “We are all Greeks,” and yet what have we learned about the initiatives of culture and literature since our classical predecessors? Begam & Soderholm’s ten dialogues function as a series of dual-meditations that take Plato as an intellectual godfather while presenting a new form of dialogic knowledge based on the friction and frisson of two minds contending, inventing and improvising.  The authors discuss not only what is healthy and vigorous about Western culture but also consider where that culture is in retreat, as they seek to understand the legacy of the Enlightenment and its relation to the contemporary moment. Platonic Occasions is an experiment in criticism that enjoins the reader to imagine what the dialogic imagination can do when inspired by Platonic inquiry, but not bound by a single master and the singular mind.

Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study.

Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aimé Césaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Négritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.

Simultaneous Worlds challenges the notion that science fiction cinema is largely a Western genre by focusing on cinemas and cultures from Cuba to North Korea that are not traditionally associated with science fiction. This is the first volume to bring a transnational, interdisciplinary lens to science fiction cinema.

Milwaukee’s small but vibrant Mexican and Mexican American community of the 1920s grew over succeeding decades to incorporate Mexican, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central American, and Caribbean migration to the city. Drawing on years of interviews and collaboration with interviewees, Theresa Delgadillo offers a set of narratives that explore the fascinating family, community, work, and career experiences of Milwaukee’s Latinas during this time of transformation.

Through the stories of these women, Delgadillo caringly provides access to a wide variety of Latina experiences: early Mexican settlers entering careers as secretaries and entrepreneurs; Salvadoran and Puerto Rican women who sought educational opportunity in the United States, sometimes in flight from political conflicts; Mexican women becoming leather workers and drill press operators; and second-generation Latinas entering the professional classes. These women show how members of diverse generations, ethnicities, and occupations embraced interethnic collaboration and coalition but also negotiated ethnic and racial discrimination, domestic violence, workplace hostilities, and family separations.

A one-of-a-kind collection, Latina Lives in Milwaukee sheds light on the journeys undertaken then and now by Latinas in the region, and lays the foundation for the further study of the Latina experience in the Midwest.

Includes interviews with Ramona Arsiniega, Maria Monreal Cameron, Daisy Cubías, Elvira Sandoval Denk, Rosemary Sandoval Le Moine, Antonia Morales, Carmen Murguia, Gloria Sandoval Rozman, Margarita Sandoval Skare, Olga Valcourt Schwartz, and Olivia Villarreal.

(From UI Press)

From Penguin:

Lee Lien has long dodged her Vietnamese family’s rigid expectations by immersing herself in books. But now, jobless with a PhD in literature, she is back at home, working in her family’s restaurant under her mother’s hypercritical gaze—until an heirloom from their past sends Lee on a search for clues that may lead back to Wilder herself, transforming strangers’ lives as well as her own.

In a remote village in the foothills of the Himalayas, a gifted but
unknown poet named Kalidas has nurtured an unconventional
romance with his youthful muse, Mallika. When the royal palace
at Ujjayini offers him the position of court poet, Kalidas hesitates,
but Mallika persuades him to leave for the distant city so that his
talent may find recognition. Convinced that he will send for her,
she waits.

He returns years later, a broken man trying to
reconnect with his past, only to discover that time has passed him
by. Titled Ashadh ka ek din in the original Hindi, Mohan Rakesh’s
play is a poignant story of love, separation, and abandonment,
and a modernist reimagining of the life of India’s greatest classical
poet. The new English translation by Aparna Dharwadker and
Vinay Dharwadker was authorized by the author’s estate, and
contains a full editorial apparatus aimed at readers, teachers,
dramaturgs, and theatre directors.

Flyer for One Day in the Season of Rain.
Poster for performance of One Day in the Season of Rain.

Vietnam, 1972: under a full moon, on the banks of the Song Ma River, a baby girl is pulled out of her dead mother’s grave. This is Rabbit, who is born with the ability to speak with the dead. She will flee from her destroyed village with a makeshift family thrown together by war. As Rabbit channels the voices of the dead, their chorus reconstructs the turbulent history of a nation, from the days of French Indochina and the World War II rubber plantations to the chaos of postwar reunification. Radiant, lyrical, and deeply moving, this is the unforgettable story of one woman’s struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while also carving out a place for herself within it.

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus’ fifth-century B.C. trilogy “The Oresteia,” which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides, Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely “to loose battle” or “sow chaos,” a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

This collection displays the fascinating range of intellectual possibilities generated by representations of these medieval ‘objects,’ and through the interdisciplinary collaboration of its contributors produces a fresh view of the multiple intersections of the spiritual and the material in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It also includes a new and authoritative critical edition of the Middle English Arma Christi poem known as ‘O Vernicle’ that takes account of all twenty surviving manuscripts.

The book opens with a substantial introduction that surveys previous scholarship and situates the Arma in their historical and aesthetic contexts. The ten essays that follow explore representative examples of the instruments of the Passion across a broad swath of history, from some of their earliest formulations in late antiquity to their reformulations in early modern Europe. Together, they offer the first large-scale attempt to understand the arma Christi as a unique cultural phenomenon of its own, one that resonated across centuries in multiple languages, genres, and media. The collection directs particular attention to this array of implements as an example of the potency afforded material objects in medieval and early modern culture, from the glittering nails of the Old English poem Elene to the coins of the Middle English poem ‘Sir Penny,’ from garments and dice on Irish tomb sculptures to lanterns and ladders in Hieronymus Bosch’s panel painting of St. Christopher, and from the altar of the Sistine Chapel to the printed prayer books of the reformation.

From LSU Press (Yellow Shoe Fiction):

“The End of the Book is the story of an aspiring contemporary novelist who may or may not be writing a sequel to a forgotten classic, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Adam Clary works in Chicago for a famous Internet company on a massive project to digitize the world’s books, but secretly he hates his job and wishes to be a writer at a time when the book as physical object and book culture itself have never been more threatened. He is the son of a dissipated Anderson scholar, thus his obsession with Winesburg.

Counterpointing Adam’s story is that of George Willard, the young protagonist of Anderson’s book, who arrives in Chicago around 1900 when it was the fastest growing city in the history of the world. Through alternating chapters, we follow George’s travails, including his marriage to the wealthy daughter of his boss, his affair with his hometown sweetheart, his artistic crisis, breakdown and flight, and along the way we see the echoes and intersections between his life and Adam’s struggling in two similar Americas, two similar times in the life of the book.”

This book considers the extent to which the dispersal and circulation—indeed, the propagation—of information and opinion across the various media of the eighteenth century helped speed the flow of transatlantic republicanism. Long a pejorative word since its associations with flag—waving and jingoism, propaganda would hardly seem a useful concept for understanding democracy. After all, spreading false information, manipulating citizens, and other propaganda techniques are preferred by totalitarian states, not democratic ones. This book questions such conventional wisdom by examining how the formation of popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the spirited dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective. Instead of pinning meaning to Enlightenment rationality or national consensus, propaganda infused print culture with the ferment of transatlantic republicanism to widen political discourse beyond either the strictly empirical or official public opinion. The spread of Revolutionary material in the form of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, letters, songs, and poems across British North America created multiple networks that spawned new and often radical ideas about political communication. These networks also encompassed the Caribbean and France after 1789, which became flash points for reflecting on the changing meanings of the American Revolution. Across the Atlantic of the late eighteenth century, communication itself became revolutionary in ways that revealed circulation to be propaganda’s most vital content. By examining the kinetic aspects of print culture, the book shows how the mobility of letters, pamphlets, and other text amounts to political activity par excellence.

This handbook includes 23 essays by leading scholars from a variety of disciplines, divided into three sections: (1) Histories and Nationalities, (2) Institutions and Practices, and (3) Theories and Methodologies. In addition to dealing with the thorny question of definition, the handbook takes up an expansive set of assumptions and a full range of approaches that move propaganda beyond political campaigns and warfare to examine a wide array of cultural contexts and practices.

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecologyexplores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempestand Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

Drawing on archival materials around this national library reading room, Roomscape is the first study that integrates documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this public interior space for women writers and their treatment of reading and writing spaces in literary texts. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image firmly established by Virginia Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own and the legions of feminist scholarship that upholds this spatial conceit.

Susan David Bernstein argues not only that the British Museum Reading Room facilitated various practices of women’s literary traditions, she also questions the overdetermined value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship, a principle generated from Woolf’s feminist manifesto. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, individual events, Roomscape considers the meaning of exteriority and the public and social and gendered dimensions of literary production.

After losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident, 42-year-old Emma flies to Paris, discovers she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren’t the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. A story about identity and the shaping function of art, My Life as a Silent Movie presents a vividly rendered world and poses provocative questions on the relationship of art to life.

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments–as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity–struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural flows and circulation of past and present globalization. How do scholars make ethically and politically responsible comparisons without assuming that their own values and norms are the standard by which other cultures should be measured?

The ancient Greek romances of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus were widely imitated by early modern writers such as Miguel de Cervantes, Philip Sidney, and Mary Wroth. Like their Greek models, Renaissance romances used ekphrasis, or verbal descriptions of visual representation, as a tool for characterization. The Emblematics of the Self shows how the women, foreigners, and non-Christians of these tales reveal their identities and desires in their responses to the ‘verbal pictures’ of romance.

Elizabeth B. Bearden illuminates how ‘verbal pictures’ enliven characterization in English, Spanish, and Neolatin romances from 1552 to 1621. She notes the capacity for change among characters — such as cross-dressed Amazons, shepherdish princesses, and white Mauritanians — who traverse transnational cultural and aesthetic environments. Engaging and rigorous, The Emblematics of the Self breaks new ground in understanding hegemonic and cosmopolitan European conceptions of the ‘other,’ as well as new possibilities for early modern identities, in an increasingly global Renaissance.

How do we approach the rich field of nineteenth-century American literature? How might we recalibrate the coordinates of critical vision and open up new areas of investigation? To answer such questions, this volume brings together 23 original essays written by leading scholars in American literary studies. By examining specific novels, poems, essays, diaries and other literary examples, the authors confront head-on the implications, scope, and scale of their analysis. The chapters foreground methodological concerns to assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, disability studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, and other cutting-edge approaches. The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature is thus both critically incisive and sharply practical, inviting attention to how readers read,how critics critique, and how interpreters interpret. It offers forceful strategies for rethinking protest novels, women’s writing, urban literature, slave narratives, and popular fiction, just to name a few of the wide array of topics and genres covered. This volume, rather than surveying established ideas in studies of nineteenth-century American literature, registers what is happening now and anticipates what will shape the field’s future.

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and literary discourses meet. Clandestine Marriage explores the meaning and methods of how plants were represented and reproduced in scientific, literary, artistic, and material cultures of the period.

Theresa M. Kelley synthesizes romantic debates about taxonomy and morphology, the contemporary interest in books and magazines devoted to plant study and images, and writings by such authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Period botanical paintings of flowers are reproduced in vibrant color, bringing her argument and the romantics’ passion for plants to life.

In addition to exploring botanic thought and practice in the context of British romanticism, Kelley also looks to the German philosophical traditions of Kant, Hegel, and Goethe and to Charles Darwin’s reflections on orchids and plant pollination. Her interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment.

“Richly documented and deeply researched, Clandestine Marriage displays a wide conversancy with literary criticism and the history of science, recognizing the ways in which the meaning of plants regularly exceeds or disrupts the conceptual categories in which they are placed or found.”—Alan John Bewell, University of Toronto

Praise for previous volumes of Dorothy West’s Paradise: “Soundly researched and well written, Dorothy West’s Paradise adds significantly to our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and its youngest surviving member.”—Maureen Honey, editor of Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance

Dorothy West is best known as one of the youngest writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance. Subsequently, her work is read as a product of the urban aesthetics of this artistic movement. But West was also intimately rooted in a very different milieu—Oak Bluffs, an exclusive retreat for African Americans on Martha’s Vineyard. She played an integral role in the development and preservation of that community. In the years between publishing her two novels, 1948’s The Living is Easy and the 1995 bestseller The Wedding, she worked as a columnist for the Vineyard Gazette. Dorothy West’s Paradise captures the scope of the author’s long life and career, reading it alongside the unique cultural geography of Oak Bluffs and its history as an elite African American enclave—a place that West envisioned both as a separatist refuge and as a space for interracial contact. An essential book for both fans of West’s fiction and students of race, class, and American women’s lives, Dorothy West’s Paradise offers an intimate biography of an important author and a privileged glimpse into the society that shaped her work.

• Best New Journal 2012, by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).
• On-line crowd/peer review experiment for volume: http://postmedievalcrowdreview.wordpress.com/editors-vision-statement/
• On-line forum for volume: http://postmedieval-forum.com/forums/forum-ii-states-of-review/

In media studies circles, it is now almost trite to discuss the term remediation: the liminal, ambivalent staging of a media life caught between older and newer forms, and the functional tussle that happens between them. Nevertheless, scholars today work within this oscillating, in-between space – a space fraught with cross pressures of how we used to do things and how we ought to do things. As (post)medievalists, we study the very old with the very new, but remain constrained by the cultural logic of earlier and increasingly archaic media production. So the theme ‘Becoming Media’ applies as much to the entire process of this issue and its own immediately historical context as to its organizing theme and published product – a product realized here traditionally in print and then again, digitally and differently, on postmedieval’s website. This process has been in many ways a stochastic one, infused with prediction, probability and randomness. We guessed about the new as we studied the old: the form and function of the online crowd review for early drafts of our contributors’ essays necessarily developed out of the moment, as there was relatively little precedent for how such a process would or should work. We experimented with alternatives to the standard modes of publishing scholarship, even as we here produce such scholarship in such modes.

The in-between of media and mediation is as much a historical investment as it is a phenomenological and ontological problem. On the one hand, the ‘new’ in our refrain of ‘new media’ betrays the uncritical assumption that media can appear from the ether as novel innovations unfettered by their remediations in and through the past. On the other, there is a tendency to reify the media object as a ‘lure’ to ‘demonstrating its past’; that is, media objects lure us toward an archeology of their present that is rooted in a chronology of progressive succession. What of historically abject media, of the object resistant entirely to a telos of mediation ‘for’ …?”

Especially since the postwar women’s and civil rights movements, there has been an explosion of interest in race and gender in the United States. Writing by and about Asian American women has kept pace with the emergence of serious scholarship concerned with the nuances of gender and culture, and as research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge and Edition Synapse meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature.

Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

In her third poetry collection, Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. In the long poem “meditations” Barry examines her own guilt in initially supporting the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the manuscript she investigates war and its aftermath by negotiating between geographically disparate landscapes—from the genocide in the Congo—to a series of pros poem “snapshots” of modern day Vietnam. Despite the gravity of war, Barry also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.

Lisa H. Cooper offers new insight into the relationship of material practice and literary production in the Middle Ages by exploring the representation of craft labor in England from c.1000-1483. She examines genres as diverse as the school-text, comic poem, spiritual allegory, and mirror for princes, and works by authors both well-known (Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton) and far less so. Whether they represent craft as profitable endeavor, learned skill, or degrading toil, the texts she reviews not only depict artisans as increasingly legitimate members of the body politic, but also deploy images of craft labor and its products to confront other complex issues, including the nature of authorship, the purpose of community, the structure of the household, the fate of the soul, and the scope of princely power.

The divide between the sciences and the humanities, which often seem to speak entirely different languages, has its roots in the way intellectual disciplines developed in the long eighteenth century. As various fields of study became defined and to some degree professionalized, their ways of communicating evolved into an increasingly specialist vocabulary. Chemists, physicists, philosophers, and poets argued about whether their discourses should become more and more specialised, or whether they should aim to remain intelligible to the layperson. In this interdisciplinary 2009 study, Robin Valenza shows how Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth invented new intellectual languages. By offering a much-needed account of the rise of the modern disciplines, Robin Valenza shows why the sciences and humanities diverged so strongly, and argues that literature has a special role in navigating between the languages of different areas of thought.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative and theoretical innovations, particularly her concept of mestiza consciousness, have influenced critical thinking about colonialism, gender, history, language, religion, sexuality, spirituality, and subjectivity. Yet Anzaldúa’s theory of spiritual mestizaje has not been extensively studied until now. Taking up that task, Theresa Delgadillo reveals spiritual mestizaje as central to the queer feminist Chicana theorist’s life and thought, and as a critical framework for interpreting contemporary Chicana literary and visual narratives. First mentioned by Anzaldúa in her pioneering book Borderlands/La Frontera, spiritual mestizaje is a transformative process of excavating bodily memory to develop a radical, sustained critique of oppression and renew one’s relation to the sacred. Delgadillo analyzes the role of spiritual mestizaje in Anzaldúa’s work and in relation to other forms of spirituality and theories of oppression. Illuminating the ways that contemporary Chicana narratives visualize, imagine, and enact Anzaldúa’s theory and method of spiritual mestizaje, Delgadillo interprets novels, memoir, and documentaries. Her critical reading of literary and visual technologies demonstrates how Chicanas challenge normative categories of gender, sexuality, nation, and race by depicting alternative visions of spirituality.

(From Duke University Press)

As the “Theory Wars” of the late twentieth century have subsided and as literary critics increasingly practice a pluralism that combines formal analysis with history, philosophy and aesthetics, the moment has come to reconsider two of the most basic concepts of literary interpretation: “text” and “meaning.” In doing so, the present volume addresses a number of fundamental questions: Where do we locate the material, linguistic and cultural boundaries of a text? What role is played in the establishment of meaning by intention, production, and reception? Does the meaning or significance of a text—whether literary or non-literary—change over time, and if so how?

The essays that constitute this volume are organized into five parts. “British and Irish Literature,” “American Literature” and “German Literature” approach “text and meaning” from historical and theoretical perspectives, interrogating the ways in which these concepts have evolved from the Middle Ages to the present, while examining how they operate within given literary periods. “Textuality and the Visual Arts” moves beyond traditional notions of textuality to include image and text, as well as the dynamic that exists between the two. Finally, “Linguistics, Philosophy and Interpretation,” seeks to define the theoretical assumptions that inform how we construe meaning and to establish principles of validation within the realm of interpretation.  Topics covered include everything from Medieval literature and art, Renaissance drama, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American literature to modern and contemporary literature and art, German literature, the visual arts, philosophy and linguistics.

2012 Honorable mention for the Book Award in Cultural Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies

Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

The Scent of the Gods tells the enchanting, haunting story of a young girl’s coming of age in Singapore during the tumultuous years of its formation as a nation. Eleven-year-old Su Yen bears witness to the secretive lives of “grown-ups” in her diasporic Chinese family and to the veiled threats in Southeast Asia during the Cold War years. From a child’s limited perspective, the novel depicts the emerging awareness of sexuality in both its beauty and its consequences, especially for women. In the context of postcolonial politics, Fiona Cheong skillfully parallels the uncertainties of adolescence with the growing paranoia of a population kept on alert to communist infiltration. In luminous prose, the novel raises timely questions about safety, protection, and democracy–and what one has to give up to achieve them.

Ideal for students and scholars of Asian American and transnational literature, postcolonial history, women’s studies, and many other interconnected disciplines, this special edition of The Scent of the Gods includes a contextualizing introduction, a chronology of historical events covered in the novel, and explanatory notes.

Fiona Cheong is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of the novel Shadow Theatre. Leslie Bow is a professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South.

The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is a Jacobean closet drama by Elizabeth Tanfield Cary. First published in 1613, it was the first work by a woman to be published under her real name. Never performed during Cary’s lifetime, and apparently never intended for performance, the Senecan revenge tragedy tells the story of Mariam, the second wife of Herod. The play exposes and explores the themes of sex, divorce, betrayal, murder, and Jewish society under Herod’s tyrannous rule. A new introduction includes recent criticism and new developments in theatre history and scholarship. A more substantial performance history is given, including accounts of recent screen versions.

“For all their awards and publications, until now the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, C. D. Wright, Alice Fulton, Susan Wheeler, Cole Swensen, and Myung Mi Kim has not received always commensurate scholarly attention. Thinking Poetry gathers together for the first time Lynn Keller’s groundbreaking work on these poets and will be a superlative resource for students of innovative contemporary poetry by American women writers. The volume will also be of significant interest to anyone examining women writers who are, as Keller notes, ‘indebted to Language poetry but not necessarily tied to it.’ Each chapter provides meticulous, provocative analyses of the poets’ challenging formal strategies, themes, and source texts. This is an outstanding volume.”—Susan Vanderborg, University of South Carolina

As the twentieth century drew to a close, experimentalism in American poetry was most commonly identified with Language writing. At the same time, however, a number of poets, many of them women, were developing their own alternative forms of experimentalism, creating “uncommon languages” often indebted to Language writing but distinct from it.

With impressive intellectual engagement and nuanced presentation, Thinking Poetry provides a meticulous and provocative analysis of the ways in which Alice Fulton, Myung Mi Kim, Joan Retallack, Cole Swensen, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Wheeler, and C. D. Wright explored varied compositional strategies and created their own innovative works. In doing so, Lynn Keller resourcefully models a range of reading strategies that will assist others in analyzing the complex epistemology and craft of recent “exploratory” writing.

The seven women whose work is discussed here demonstrate widely differing ways of using poetry to, as Swensen puts it, “stretch the boundaries of the sayable.” Thinking Poetry examines approaches to women’s poetic exploration ranging from radically open, thoroughly disjunctive writing to feminist experimentation within relatively conventional free verse forms; from texts testing the resources of visual elements and page space to those in which multilingualism or digital technology provide arenas for innovation; from revitalized forms of ekphrasis to fresh approaches to pop culture.

Keller illuminates as well a transitional era in U.S. poetry that presaged current developments that are often seen as combining the poetics of personal lyric and Language writing. Thinking Poetry challenges reductive notions of such a synthesis as it makes clear that the groundwork for current poetic trends was laid by poets who, in a far more polarized climate, pursued their own, often distinctly feminist, visions of necessary innovation.

Brazil is a quintessential American road trip. Paulo, an 18 year old bell boy in a Miami Beach hotel, and Claudia, a wealthy Hungarian refugee, take off on a night drive that turns into a crosscountry journey, a sleep deprived search for the real America and for missing family, a fast-moving car trip into her past and toward their future.

“Cherene Sherrard describes the ache of exclusion and illuminates what beauty dwells along the margins.  Her treatment of Jeanne Duval, the mixed-race mistress and muse of Charles Baudelaire, is at once haunting and harrowing.  Through Duval’s eyes we glimpse the tawdry righteousness of Parisian society, while the rest of Sherrard’s clear-eyed collection reacquaints us with other too-often-ignored characters from our common history.  In Mistress, Reclining Sherrard digs up the dirt of the past, sifts it, and comes up with nuggets of pure gold.” –Camille T. Dungy, author of Suck on the Marrow and editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

“Cherene Sherrard’s fascinating book, MISTRESS, RECLINING, draws the reader into the confusions and triumphs of various historical women who must struggle against problems with race and gender. Especially engaging is the series of persona poems chronicling the complex life of Jeanne Duval, mistress and notorious inspiration for Charles Baudelaire. The author’s poetic originality and fascinating topic will delight the reader of this collection.” –Carol Hamilton, former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and author of The Dawn Seekers

This volume explores the interplay of syntactic variation and genre. How do genres emerge and what is the role of syntax in constituting them? Why do certain constructions appear in certain types of text? The book takes the concept of genre as a reference-point for the description and analysis of morpho-syntactic variation and change. It includes both overviews of theoretical approaches to the concept of genre and text type in linguistics and studies of specific syntactic phenomena in English, German, and selected Romance languages. Contributions to the volume make use of insights from attempts for text classification and rhetorical views on genre and reach from quantitative, corpus-based methodology to qualitative, text-based analyses. The types of texts investigated cover spoken, highly interactive, and written forms of communication, including selected genres of computer-mediated communication. Corpus data come from both synchronic and diachronic linguistic corpora, such as LOB, Brown, FLOB, Frown, ARCHER, and ICE-Jamaica. This spectrum both in approaches and data is meant to provide a theoretical foundation as well as a realistic view of the inherent complexity of form-function relationships in syntax. At the same time, genre is treated as a category relevant beyond discourse studies, consisting of forms and conventions at all levels of linguistic analysis, including syntax. The book is therefore of interest to linguists and graduate students in the area of syntax, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, as well as to sociolinguists and corpus linguists working on register variation.

The Novel as Event is a timely reconsideration of the historical role of the Victorian novel from the perspective of its performativity. In a highly original application of the work of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and other readers of J. L. Austin, Mario Ortiz Robles argues that the language of the novel is paramount and that the current emphasis on the representational and physical aspects of the novel tends to obscure this fact. He provides brilliant original readings of five major Victorian novels: Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Collins’s The Woman in White, illustrating that it is impossible to fully grasp the cultural power of the novel, from its role in the cultivation of manners and the conduct of courtship to the consolidation of bourgeois ideology and the construction of the subject, without an adequate account of the performativity of its language. By considering the novel as a linguistic event, Ortiz Robles offers a new explanatory model for understanding how novels intervene materially in the reality they describe, and, in doing so, he seeks to reinvigorate critical debate on the historicity of the realist novel and current methods of cultural criticism. The Novel as Event serves as a well-timed corrective to the narrow historicist approach to the materiality of the novel that currently holds sway.

“The Novel as Event brilliantly does two things: presents a strikingly new theory of the way novels have effect in the social world, and also presents original readings of five major Victorian novels as demonstrations of the way that theory may be exemplified in practice. No other book that I know of does either of these two things in at all the same way.” —J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

“I have no doubt that this book will become an important part of a renewed questioning of a certain unchallenged historicism prevalent in Victorian novel studies from the beginning.” —Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University

From Penguin:

Called “A writer to watch, a tremendous talent” by the Chicago Tribune, Bich Minh Nguyen makes her fiction debut with the deeply moving and entertaining story of two Vietnamese sisters. Aside from their petite stature, Van and Linny Luong couldn’t be more different. Diligent, unassuming Van works as an immigration lawyer in the Michigan suburbs where she resides with her handsome, Chinese-American lawyer husband. Beautiful, fashionable Linny lives in Chicago and has drifted into an affair with a married man. When Van’s picture-perfect marriage collapses and Linny finds herself grappling to escape her dead-end life, the long-estranged sisters are unable to confide in one another- until their eccentric inventor father calls them back home to the Vietnamese American community they fled long ago.

Much of the discussion surrounding the Holocaust and how it can be depicted sixty years later has focused on memory. In Forgetful Memory, Michael Bernard-Donals focuses on the relation between memory and forgetfulness, arguing that memory and forgetfulness cannot be separated but must be examined as they complicate our understanding of the Shoah. Drawing on the work of Josef Yerushalmi, Maurice Blanchot, David Roskies, and especially Emmanuel Levinas, Bernard-Donals explores contemporary representations of the Holocaust in memoirs, novels, and poetry; films and photographs; in museums; and in our contemporary political discourse concerning the Middle East. Ultimately, Forgetful Memory makes the case that we should give up on the idea of memory as a kind of representation, and that we should see it instead as an intersection of remembrance and oblivion, as a kind of writing, where what remains at its margins—what is left unwritten—is at least as important as what is given voice.

Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity’s troubled history for today’s writers, critics, and artists.

Crab Orchard Open Selection Award Winner

In ….i, Jesse Lee Kercheval examines the enduring themes of time, mortality, and love as revealed through the power of silent film. Following the ten days of the annual Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy, this collection of ekphrastic poems are love letters to the evocative power of silent cinema. Kercheval’s poems elegantly capture the allure of these rare films, which compel hundreds of pilgrims from around the world—from scholars and archivists, to artists and connoisseurs—to flock to Italy each autumn. Cinema Muto celebrates the flickering tales of madness and adventure, drama and love, which are all too often left to decay within forgotten vaults. As reels of Mosjoukine and D. W. Griffith float throughout the collection, a portrait also emerges of the simple beauty of Italy in October and of two lovers who are drawn together by their mutual passion for an extinct art. Together they revel in recapturing “the black and white gestures of a lost world.”

Cinema Muto is a tender tribute to the brief yet unforgettable reign of silent film. Brimming with stirring images of dreams, desire, and the ghosts of cinema legends gone by, Kercheval’s verse is a testament to the mute beauty and timeless lessons that may still be discovered in a fragile roll of celluloid.

Comedy: American Style, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s fourth and final novel, recounts the tragic tale of a family’s destruction—the story of a mother who denies her clan its heritage. Originally published in 1933, this intense narrative stands the test of time and continues to raise compelling, disturbing, and still contemporary themes of color prejudice and racial self-hatred. Several of today’s bestselling novelists echo subject matter first visited in Fauset’s commanding work, which overflows with rich, vivid, and complex characters who explore questions of color, passing, and black identity. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s introduction places this literary classic in both the new modernist and transatlantic contexts and will be embraced by those interested in early twentieth-century women writers, novels about passing, the Harlem Renaissance, the black/white divide, and diaspora studies. Selected essays and poems penned by Fauset are also included, among them “Yarrow Revisited” and “Oriflamme,” which help highlight the full canon of her extraordinary contribution to literature and provide contextual background to the novel.

The essays in this volume address foundational questions in phonology that cut across different schools of thought within the discipline. The theme of modularity runs through them all, however, and these essays demonstrate the benefits of the modular approach to phonology, either investigating interactions among distinct modules or developing specific aspects of representation within a particular module. Although the contributors take divergent views on a range of issues, they agree on the importance of representations and questions of modularity in phonology. Their essays address the status of phonological features, syllable theory, metrical structure, the architecture of the phonological component, and interaction among components of phonology. In the early 1990s the rise of Optimality Theory—which suggested that pure computation would solve the problems of representations and modularity—eclipsed the centrality of these issues for phonology. This book is unique in offering a coherent view of phonology that is not Optimality Theory based. The essays in this book, all by distinguished phonologists, demonstrate that computation and representation are inherently linked; they do not deny Optimality Theory but attempt to move the field of phonology beyond it. Contributors: Juliette Blevins, Charles E. Cairns, Andrea Calabrese, G. Nick Clements, B. Elan Dresher, Morris Halle, Harry van der Hulst, William J. Idsardi, Ellen Kaisse, Andrew Nevins, Thomas C. Purnell, Eric Raimy, Keren Rice, Charles Reiss, Bert Vaux, Aaron Wolfe.

MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize Honorable Mention 2009

Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations of asymmetry, and, most simply put, by heterogeneous voices. The essays in Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric examine broadly the histories, theories, and practices of Asian American rhetoric, situating rhetorical work across the disciplines where critical study of Asian Americans occurs: Asian American studies, rhetoric and composition, communication studies, and English studies. These essays address the development and adaptation of classical rhetorical concepts such as ethos and memory, modern concepts such as identification, and the politics of representation through a variety of media and cultural texts. As these essays collectively argue, Asian American rhetoric not only reflects and responds to existing social and cultural conditions and practices, but also interacts with and impacts such conditions and practices. To the extent it does, it becomes a rhetoric of becoming–a rhetoric that is always in the process of negotiating with, adjusting to, and yielding an imagined identity and agency that is Asian American.

This book analyzes the form and function of the English passive from a verb-based point of view. It takes the position that the various surface forms of the passive (with or without thematic subject, with or without object, with or without by-phrase, with or without auxiliary) have a common source and are determined by the interplay of the syntactic properties of the verb and general syntactic principles. Each structural element of the passive construction is examined separately, and the participle is considered the only defining component of the passive. Special emphasis is put on the existence of an implicit argument (ususally an agent) and its representation in the passive. A review of data from syntax, language acquisition, and psycholinguistics shows that the implicit agent is not just a conceptually understood argument. It is argued that it is represented at the level of argument structure and that this is what sets the passive apart from other patient-subject constructions. A corpus-based case study on the use of the passive in academic writing analyzes the use of the passive in this particular register. One of the findings is that about 20-25% of passives occur in constructions that do not require an auxiliary, a result that challenges corpus studies on the use of the passive that only consider full be-passives. It is also shown that new active-voice constructions have emerged that compete with the passive without having a more visible agent. The emergence of these constructions (such as “This paper argues…”) is discussed in the context of changes in the rhetoric of scientific discourse. The book is mainly of interest to linguists and graduate students in the areas of English syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Discursive Practice is a theory of the linguistic and socio-cultural characteristics of recurring episodes of face-to-face interaction; episodes that have social and cultural significance to a community of speakers. This book examines the discursive practice approach to language-in-interaction, explicating the consequences of grounding language use and language learning in a view of social realities as discursively constructed, of meanings as negotiated through interaction, of the context-bound nature of discourse, and of discourse as social action. The book also addresses how participants’ abilities in a specific discursive practice may be learned, taught, and assessed.

A groundbreaking study of contemporary American poetry, Race and the Avant-Garde changes the way we think about race and literature. Examining two of the most exciting developments in recent American writing, Timothy Yu juxtaposes the works of experimental language poets and Asian American poets—concerned primarily with issues of social identity centered around discourses of race. Yu delves into the 1960s social upheaval to trace how Language and Asian American writing emerged as parallel poetics of the avant-garde, each with its own distinctive form, style, and political meaning. From its provocative reevaluation of Allen Ginsberg to fresh readings of Ron Silliman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau, along with its analysis of a new archive of Asian American writers from the 1970s, this book is indispensable for readers interested in race, Asian American studies, contemporary poetry, and the avant-garde.

In the past two decades, scholarly assessment of the Bayeux Tapestry has begun to consider issues beyond its sources and analogues, dating, origin and purpose, and site of display.” “This volume demonstrates the utility of more recent interpretive approaches to this famous artefact, especially with regard to newer concepts of gender, materiality, reception theory, cultural criticism, performativity, spatial narrative, New Historicism, and post-structuralism.” “The essays frame vital issues for the future of Tapestry scholarship: they provide original perspectives, and engage with myriad critical concerns: the (New-) historical layering of meaning, representational systems of gender difference, visuality, memory and architecture, modern obsessions with author-like patronage, post-colonial notions of territory and saintly relics, and the function of historiography and media.” “A bibliography of three centuries of critical writings completes the work.

The contributors to this volume argue that for too long, inclusiveness has substituted for methodology in American studies scholarship. The ten original essays collected here call for a robust comparativism that is attuned theoretically to questions of both space and time.

States of Emergency asks readers to engage in a thought experiment: imagine that you have an object you want to study. Which methodologies will contextualize and explain your selection? What political goals are embedded in your inquiry? This thought experiment is taken up by contributors who consider an array of objects–the weather, cigarettes, archival material, AIDS, the enemy, extinct species, and torture. The essayists recalibrate the metrics of time and space usually used to measure these questions. In the process, each contributes to a project that redefines the object of American studies, reading its history as well as its future across, against, even outside the established grain of interdisciplinary practice.

This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

While women are succeeding in historically male professions, stereotypes of their lack of competence persist as obstacles to their advancement, with popular media urging women to improve their language skills if they hope to advance in traditionally male professions.

In Women Speaking Up: Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings, Cecilia E. Ford rejects popular notions of gender difference and even deficiency in women’s language use. She uses careful analysis of interaction to counter negative myths, focusing on women’s turns as exemplars skills required by men and women alike to contribute to workplace meetings. Based on videotaped meetings in a variety of settings the author offers new insights into vocal and non-vocal practices for getting and using turns in these common workplace events. The book introduces conversation analytic methods and presents new findings on turn taking, the use of questions to present challenges and open participation, and the interactional skills required to effectively raise issues that go counter to ideas of higher ranking co-workers. For any one who wants to understand meeting interaction, Women Speaking Up offers a wealth of well-grounded new perspectives, while celebrating women’s demonstrated competence.”

Winner of the 2008 Posner Book-Length Poetry Award. Winner of the 2009 Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award.

For a Limited Time Only explores issues of aging, illness, and mortality, and the philosophical and theological speculations that arise from personal tragedy, and invokes humor, hope, and consolation in the face of death and loss.

Language and Interaction brings together essential readings in anthropology, discourse studies and sociology in order to introduce key concepts in language and social interaction and to describe how individuals develop skills in social interaction andcreate identities through their use of language.

From Penguin:

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination.

In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.

This collection of essays by renowned literary scholars offers a sustained and comprehensive account of the relation of British and Irish literary modernism to colonialism. Bringing postcolonial studies into dialogue with modernist studies, the contributors move beyond depoliticized appreciations of modernist aesthetics as well as the dismissal of literary modernism as irredeemably complicit in the evils of colonialism. They demonstrate that the modernists were not unapologetic supporters of empire. Many were avowedly and vociferously opposed to colonialism, and all of the writers considered in this volume were concerned with the political and cultural significance of colonialism, including its negative consequences for both the colonizer and the colonized. Ranging over poetry, fiction, and criticism, the essays provide fresh appraisals of Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, E. M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Evelyn Waugh, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. The essays that bookend the collection connect the modernists to their Victorian precursors, to postwar literary critics, and to postcolonial poets. The rest treat major works written or published between 1899 and 1939, the boom years of literary modernism and the period during which the British empire reached its greatest geographic expanse. Among the essays are explorations of how primitivism figured in the fiction of Lawrence and Lewis; how, in Ulysses, Joyce used modernist techniques toward anticolonial ends; and how British imperialism inspired Conrad, Woolf, and Eliot to seek new aesthetic forms appropriate to the sense of dislocation they associated with empire.

Contributors include Nicholas Allen, Rita Barnard, Richard Begam, Nicholas Daly, Maria DiBattista, Ian Duncan, Jed Esty, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Declan Kiberd, Brian May, Michael Valdez Moses, Jahan Ramazani, Vincent Sherry.

The photographer and reformer Jacob Riis once wrote, “I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club.” Riis was not alone in his belief that beauty could tame urban chaos, but are aesthetic experiences always a social good? Could aesthetics also inspire violent crime, working-class unrest, and racial murder? To answer these questions, Russ Castronovo turns to those who debated claims that art could democratize culture–civic reformers, anarchists, novelists, civil rights activists, and college professors – to reveal that beauty provides unexpected occasions for radical, even revolutionary, political thinking.

Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals, Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally suppose.

Wisconsin is not where Alice, a girl raised in Florida, meant to end up. But when she falls in love with Anders Dahl, a descendant of Norwegian farmers born for generations in the same stone farmhouse, she realizes that to love Anders is to settle into a life in Wisconsin in the small house they buy before their daughter, Maude, is born. Together, Alice and Anders move forward into a life of family, friends, and the occasional troubled student until they face their biggest challenge. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval’s The Alice Stories tells the tale of a family: the pain of loss and the importance of the love of friends in the midst of turmoil. As timely as the news yet informed by rich humor and a deep understanding of human character, the interlinked Alice Stories form a luminous tale of family life.

• International Society of Anglo-Saxonists [ISAS] Best First Book Publication Prize
• Finalist for the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize

Foys argues that early medieval culture did not favor the representational practices privileged by the modern age and that five hundred years of print culture have in effect shut off modern readers from interpretations of text and image that would have been transparent to a medieval audience. Examining print and post-print ways of reading medieval literature and art, he derives alternative models of understanding from the realm of digital media, considering pre-print expression through a range of post-print ideas and producing new and vital understandings of visionary Old English poetry, Anglo-Saxon maps of the world, 11th-century Benedictine devotional writings, medieval mathematical systems, stone sculpture of Viking settlers, and the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

Building chapter upon chapter into a sustained discussion of New Media theory and medieval interpretation, Foys provides a field-defining investigation of how digital technology and expression can refine and revitalize early medieval studies.

This single volume traces three approaches to the study of the Holocaust: through notions of history, theories of memory, and a focus on art and representation.  It introduces students to the different ways we have come to understand the Holocaust, gives them an opportunity to ask questions about those conclusions, and examines how this event can be understood once all the survivors are gone. In addition, the book looks at the different disciplines — history, sociology, religious studies, and literary interpretation, among others — through which studies of the Holocaust take place.

Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make Reuben Sachs, in some sort, a classic.” Reuben Sachs, the story of an extended Anglo-Jewish family in London, focuses on the relationship between two cousins, Reuben Sachs and Judith Quixano, and the tensions between their Jewish identities and English society. The novel’s complex and sometimes satirical portrait of Anglo-Jewish life, which was in part a reaction to George Eliot’s romanticized view of Victorian Jews in Daniel Deronda, caused controversy on its first publication.

This Broadview edition prints for the first time since its initial publication in The Jewish Chronicle Levy’s essay “The Jew in Fiction.” Other appendices include George Eliot’s essay on anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian England and a chapter from Israel Zangwill’s novel The Children of the Ghetto. Also included is a map of Levy’s London with landmarks from her biography and from the “Jewish geography” of Reuben Sachs.

The Romance of a Shop is an early “New Woman” novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own home in central London after their father’s death and their loss of financial security. In this novel, Amy Levy examines both the opportunities and dangers of urban experience for women in the late nineteenth century who pursue independent work rather than follow the established paths of domestic service. By outfitting her characters as photographers, Levy emphasizes the importance of the gendered gaze in this narrative of the modern city.

This Broadview edition prints for the first time since the 1880s Levy’s essay on Christina Rossetti and a short story set in North London, both published in Oscar Wilde’s magazine The Woman’s World. Other appendices include poetry by Levy, Michael Field, Dollie Radford, and A. Mary F. Robinson, and essays on Victorian photography, literary realism, “the woman question” at the end of the nineteenth century, and the plight of women working in London.

Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria considers Queen Henrietta Maria’s patronage of drama in England in the light of her French heritage. Karen Britland challenges a common view of Henrietta Maria as a meddlesome and frivolous woman whose actions contributed to the outbreak of the English civil wars by showing how she was consistent in her allegiances to her family and friends, and how her cultural and political positions were reflected in the plays and court masques she sponsored. Unlike previous studies, this book considers the queen’s upbringing at the French court and her later exile in France during the English civil wars, and is therefore able to challenge received notions about her activities in England during the 1630s. Karen Britland employs innovative research by combining discussions of literary texts with historical and archival research and discussions of art, architecture and music.

Winner of the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, selected by Albert Goldbarth

Film History as Train Wreck was published in 2006 by Center for Book Arts as a letterpress chapbook printed by Barbara Henry in an edition of 100.

A Nota Bene selection of The Chronicle of Higher Education

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels in the period that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined–and in one case, incited–market crashes and financial panics. Panic! examines how Americans’ attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading, could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis, novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction’s aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.

From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

The New York Times called Porter Shreve’s first novel, The Obituary Writer, “an involving and sneakily touching story whose twists feel less like the conventions of a genre than the convolutions of a heart—any heart.” Newsday hailed the book as “a substantial achievement,” and Tim O’Brien described it as “taut, compelling, and moving . . . beautifully written, engrossing from start to finish.” Shining with the same heart and humor, Shreve’s second novel, Drives Like a Dream, is a smart, wry tale about a modern-day mother in the midst of a lifestyle crisis—and her outlandish attempts to get her family back.

Lydia Modine is sixty-one and about to come undone. Her three grown-up children have flown the coop. She hasn’t seen them together in more than a year, and now her ex-husband is about to remarry a woman half his age. And the insults keep coming: Lydia is stuck on a book she’s writing about Detroit’s car industry, which uncannily parallels her own life — out with the old model, in with the new. She’s poured her soul into her family, only to be abandoned in the City of Dream Machines. But then a twist of fate introduces her to Norm, an eco-car fanatic out to remake her and the world. Is he the answer to all of her problems, or does he hold the one secret that just might get her children back to Detroit, home for good?

A warm, funny, and affecting novel that’s sure to appeal to anyone who has longed for an alternate life, Drives Like a Dream confirms that sometimes when you set out for a spin, the twists and turns can be perfectly rewarding—and right.

Winner of the prestigious Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Drama and Theatre (2005); Finalist, George Freedley Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association (2006).

Theatres of Independence is a comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages. The book also offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre. Theatres of Independence will be of interest to students and scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.

“He said, ‘No thank you.’/Life wasn’t going to jilt him now…” Part nervous laughter, part numb disbelief, part where-do-we-go-from-here, these poems try on catchy rejoinders to the “sick joke” of prostate cancer. Ron Wallace writes with wry edginess of how obituaries ought to drop the “heroic struggle” lingo and simply acknowledge “Rolled over. Bailed out.” How the doctors’ recommendation for treatment (“just cut it out”) was what he kept telling his brimming tears. These are poems of tenacity rather than submission, simultaneously laughing and crying and holding on with all you’ve got.

Controvertibles features more of the refined brilliance and delicate lyricism of this poet, cast in a more meditative mode. Throughout, she examines cultural objects by lifting them out of their usual settings and repositioning them in front of new, disparate backdrops. Doug Flutie’s famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer’s role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bob Beamon’s world-record-setting long jump in the 1968 Olympics is slowed down and examined in the style of The Matrix’s revolutionary bullet time. Samantha Smith, Richard Nixon, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, the largo from Handel’s Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are among the many disparate people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of existence.

Witnessing the Disaster examines how histories, films, stories and novels, memorials and museums, and survivor testimonies involve problems of witnessing: how do those who survived, and those who lived long after the Holocaust, make clear to us what happened? How can we distinguish between more and less authentic accounts? Are histories more adequate descriptors of the horror than narrative? Does the susceptibility of survivor accounts to faulty memory and the vestiges of trauma make them any more or less useful as instruments of witness? And how do we authenticate their accuracy without giving those who deny the Holocaust a small but dangerous foothold?

These essayists aim to move past the notion that the Holocaust as an event defies representation. They look at specific cases of Holocaust representation and consider their effect, their structure, their authenticity, and the kind of knowledge they produce. Taken together they consider the tension between history and memory, the vexed problem of eyewitness testimony and its status as evidence, and the ethical imperatives of Holocaust representation.

Michael Bernard-Donals is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Richard Glejzer is associate professor of English at North Central College in Illinois. They are coeditors of Between Witness and Testimony.

This collection of original papers by eminent phoneticians, linguists and sociologists offers the most recent findings on phonetic design in interactional discourse available in an edited collection. The chapters examine the organization of phonetic detail in relation to social actions in talk-in-interaction based on data drawn from diverse languages: Japanese, English, Finnish, and German, as well as from diverse speakers: children, fluent adults and adults with language loss. Because similar methodology is deployed for the investigation of similar conversational tasks in different languages, the collection paves the way towards a cross-linguistic phonology for conversation. The studies reported in the volume make it clear that language-specific constraints are at work in determining exactly which phonetic and prosodic resources are deployed for a given purpose and how they articulate with grammar in different cultures and speech communities.

Full of wit, vivid language, and devastating honesty, these autobiographical poems trace the timelines of life forward and backward. In them Kercheval offers a moving examination of the role of family and the possible/probable/hoped for existence of God—and how our perceptions of the divine can be transformed from a kindergartner’s dyslexically scrawled “doG loves U” to the ever-present but oft-ignored Dog Angel of the title.

Ranging from a cross-country drive to bury her mother’s ashes at Arlington National Cemetery, to a family vacation in Spain, to an imagined final exam given by her children, Kercheval explores the vagaries of love, loss, faith, grief, and joy with a calm, convincing wisdom that permeates this resonant and wonderful collection.

Yael Weiss, eighteen years old and looking for adventure, finds it in the library one day when she discovers a packet of guns meant for Erinyes, an Armenian organization set on avenging their people’s massacre by the Turks in 1915. While the weapons make her nervous, Dub Hagopian, the young Armenian-American soldier sent to retrieve them, excites her in a completely different way. Smitten, Yael impulsively follows Dub to France by volunteering with the YMCA, reinventing herself along the way as twenty-five-year-old Methodist Yale White. When she and Dub cross paths again, Yael gets caught up in a crowd bursting with both the passionate ideals and the devil-may-care energy of youth–with consequences neither of them could ever foresee.

Through a blend of personal narrative, cultural and literary analysis, and discussions about teaching, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship shows how people of color use reading and writing to develop and articulate notions of citizenship. Morris Young begins with a narration of his own literacy experiences to illustrate the complicated relationship among literacy, race, and citizenship and to reveal the tensions that exist between competing beliefs and uses of literacy among those who are part of dominant American culture and those who are positioned as minorities. Influenced by the literacy narratives of other writers of color, Young theorizes an Asian American rhetoric by examining the rhetorical construction of American citizenship in works such as Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” from Woman Warrior. These narratives, Young shows, tell stories of transformation through education, the acquisition of literacy, and cultural assimilation and resistance. They also offer an important revision to the American story by inserting the minor and creating a tension amid dominant discourses about literacy, race, and citizenship. Through a consideration of the literacy narratives of Hawaii, Young also provides a context for reading literacy narratives as responses to racism, linguistic discrimination, and attempts at “othering” in a particular region. As we are faced with dominant discourses that construct race and citizenship in problematic ways and as official institutions become even more powerful and prevalent in silencing minor voices, Minor Re/Visions reveals the critical need for revising minority and dominant discourses. Young’s observations and conclusions have important implications for the ways rhetoricians and compositionists read, teach, and assign literacy narratives.

No one looks at structure like Jesse Lee Kercheval. She builds a work of fiction just as an architect would design a house-with an eye for details and how all parts of a story or novel interconnect. Even with the most dynamic language, images, and characters, no piece of fiction will work without a strong infrastructure. Kercheval shows how to build that structure using such tools as point of view, characterization, pacing, and flashbacks. Building Fiction will help you envision the landscape of your fiction and build great stories.

Ginny Gillespie is a young widow who has fled Florida with her husband’s ashes in her suitcase. Roland Keppi is a half-Alsatian, half-German carnival worker in search of a vision. They meet in Paris in 1929 and fall in love under a cloud of sparrows, but are soon separated when Roland is deported. Moving back and forth between Ginny and Roland, past and present, The Museum of Happiness follows the paths that bring them together in Paris, and the journeys that reunite them in a town where happiness has a shrine of its own.

Along the way, we meet an eccentric array of characters whose fates are all somehow connected to those of Ginny and Roland: Roland’s grandmother Odile, a visionary like him whose final revenge on their superstitious hometown is forgiveness; Ginny’s landlady, the indomitable Madame Desnos, who finds herself evicted from her own hotel; Ginny’s mother, a doctor whose religion has led her away from humanity; and a crew of filmmakers out to document the entire world.

Starting with Roland’s birth just before World War I and ending with the invention of television, The Museum of Happiness ranges from small-town Florida to a bizarre German detention camp, from the Parisian underworld to a place in the south of France where lace is the only industry. Exploring the conflicts between nationality and identity, family and freedom, fate and choice, The Museum of Happiness is a romantic and compelling novel with a gloriously happy ending.

Long for This World includes twenty-six new poems from this master of the sonnet and other traditional forms, along with selections from his six previous collections. This book exemplifies the comic sense, the synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, and the sensory immediacy that have become Ronald Wallace’s hallmarks.

• Choice Outstanding Academic Title
• International Society of Anglo-Saxonists [ISAS] Best Edition Publication Prize

“The Bayeux Tapestry presents its story of the Norman Conquest of England in words of such simplicity and images of such power that it has long determined the view we take of the momentous events of 1064-6. This digital edition creates new and exciting ways of viewing the Tapestry, with additional features in the form of a brilliantly-conceived array of supporting material. It transforms the way in which students and teachers alike will be able to approach, to use and to enjoy one of the most remarkable of all our sources for the middle ages.” – Simon Keynes, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge.

This online edition presents full images of the tapestry itself, magnifiable so that individual stitches can be seen, with images of three facsimiles, and of many related artifacts. They are accompanied by authoritative translations of seventeen historical sources concerning the events of 1066, maps, genealogies, bibliography, and full commentary, in an attractive interface. Read More

For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy. They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia.

Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy.

Contributors: Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

Russ Castronovo is the Jean Wall Bennett Professor of English and American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, published by Duke University Press. Dana D. Nelson is Professor of English and Social Theory at the University of Kentucky and author of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, also published by Duke University Press.

This collection of previously unpublished, cutting-edge research discusses the conversation analysis (CA) approach to understanding language use. CA is the dominant theory for analyzing the social use of language and is concerned with the description of how speakers engage in conversation and other forms of social interaction involving language. Its proponents are not only linguists but sociologists and anthropologists as well. The unifying theme of these chapters is the intersection of practice and form through the construction of turns and sequences.

Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; 2002 Finalist in Poetry, Society of Midland Authors

Quan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix. Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In “some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked” the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems. Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, “Where is it written that we should want to be saved?” Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.

“One of the book’s strengths is that it speaks to many of its potential competitors. Reading this book will lead people new to the study of the Shoah to read other books. This is a rare book, one that is interesting not only in terms of what it says but in terms of what it prompts its readers to reconsider.” – David Metzger, Old Dominion University

The Holocaust presents an immense challenge to those who would represent it or teach it through fiction, film, or historical accounts. Even the testimonies of those who were there provide only a glimpse of the disaster to those who were not. Between Witness and Testimony investigates the difficulties inherent in the obligation to bear witness to events that seem not just unspeakable but also unthinkable. The authors examine films, fictional narratives, survivor testimonies, and the museums at Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in order to establish an ethics of Holocaust representation. Traversing the disciplines of history, philosophy, religious studies, and literary and cultural theory, the authors suggest that while no account adequately provides access to what Adorno called “the extremity that eludes the concept,” we are still obliged to testify, to put into language what history cannot contain.

Michael Bernard-Donals is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the author of The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy and Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism. Richard Glejzer is Assistant Professor of English at North Central College. They are the coeditors of Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy.

Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their “disloyalty” pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her “seduction” of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion.

In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women’s domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality’s construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow’s bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

In Necro Citizenship Russ Castronovo argues that the meaning of citizenship in the United States during the nineteenth century was bound to – and even dependent on – death. Deploying an impressive range of literary and cultural texts, Castronovo interrogates an American public sphere that fetishized death as a crucial point of political identification. This morbid politics idealized disembodiment over embodiment, spiritual conditions over material ones, amnesia over history, and passivity over engagement.

Moving from medical engravings, séances, and clairvoyant communication to Supreme Court decisions, popular literature, and physiological tracts, Necro Citizenship explores how rituals of inclusion and belonging have generated alienation and dispossession. Castronovo contends that citizenship does violence to bodies, especially those of blacks, women, and workers. “Necro ideology,” he argues, supplied citizens with the means to think about slavery, economic powerlessness, or social injustice as eternal questions, beyond the scope of politics or critique. By obsessing on sleepwalkers, drowned women, and other corpses, necro ideology fostered a collective demand for an abstract even antidemocratic sense of freedom. Examining issues involving the occult, white sexuality, ghosts, and suicide in conjunction with readings of Harriet Jacobs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frances Harper, Necro Citizenship successfully demonstrates why Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” has resonated so strongly in the American imagination. Those working in the fields of American studies, literature, history, and political theory will be interested in the social revelations and cultural connections found in Necro Citizenship.

Breezy, informal, irreverent, vibrant in detail, H.D.’s letters to her companion, Bryher, revolve around her 1933-1934 therapy sessions with Sigmund Freud, from which she emerged reborn. “A correspondence that tells us more about Freud as a clinician than any other source” (PsyArt), this volume includes H.D.’s and Bryher’s letters, as well as letters by Freud to H.D. and Bryher, most of them published here for the first time. In addition, the book includes H.D.’s and Bryher’s letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPherson, Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound, and Anna Freud, among others. Taken together, the 307 letters in Analyzing Freud, introduced and fully annotated by Susan Stanford Friedman, comprise a fresh, compelling portrait of H.D., and her analyst, Freud.

Quick Bright Things is greater than the sum of its brilliant parts. The stories stand alone. Each of the twenty-one stories has individually appeared in prestigious journals, magazines, and anthologies. But this collection can also be read as a sequence of episodes from the lives of Peterson and Christine Kingsley and their daughters Jennifer and Phoebe. In the title story, the last in the collection, Peterson Kingsley has begged off a trip with his wife and daughters to visit his in-laws. While on a solitary run along a Wisconsin country road, he reflects on the defining moments with his family. He recalls Lysander’s lament from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion.” With a poet’s lyricism, Wallace weaves the various moments into one man’s life experience and makes that experience universal. These stories always return to the question of whether tolerance, good temper, and sympathy can prevail in the face of destructive forces—whether ‘things,’ despite their confusion, can somehow remain ‘quick’ and ‘bright.’

This book proposes a new representational analysis of reduplication based on making explicit precedence relations in phonological representations. The main claim is that reduplication results from loops in the precedence structure of phonological representations. Modular rule based analyses of overapplication and underapplication effects including backcopying are presented to argue against the McCarthy and Prince (1995) claim that a derivational model of reduplication is conceptually and empirically inadequate. Other sections of the book discuss the implications of explicit precedence information for the concatenation of morphemes, the analysis of infixation, and templates in reduplication. Analyses of relevant phenomena from Indonesian, Tohono Oodham, Chaha, Chumash and Nancowry among other languages are provided.

From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt:

Gordie Hatch is twenty-two, charmingly naive, and certain that his first job as a writer for the ST LOUIS INDEPENDENT’S obituary page will be a stepping stone to a crackerjack career in journalism. The year is 1989, and Gordie watches helplessly while dramatic events — the very events that could be his lucky break — unfold in the world around him. But nothing can prepare him for the call he gets from Alicia Whiting, a young widow with an accent he can’t quite place. When Gordie agrees to meet Alicia, against his better judgment, his journalistic curiosity quickly turns into an obsessive search for the outrageous truth behind the Whiting family. Shot through with affectionate humor and surprising twists and turns, THE OBITUARY WRITER introduces an author of enormous talent and heart. Porter Shreve brings a deft touch to the moments that mark a young person’s entrance into the world, and a sharp eye to the ways in which the lead story can be wonderfully, seductively misleading.

“From the powerful and unforgettable opening sequence which recounts, with passionate intensity and uncompromising honesty, the death of a dear friend from cancer; through the wonderful middle poems on the complex pleasures of marriage, motherhood, and family life; to the final meditations on the poet’s own intractable childhood; World as Dictionary explores the vagaries of love, loss, desire, and will. At times heartbreaking and elegiac, mourning a universe that ‘is racing from us / at the speed of light/ and . . . is never coming back,’ Kercheval is also unswervingly affirmative, celebrating with her infant daughter (whose word for ‘open’ expands her world), ‘Ope, ope, ope . . . we live in hope./ My daughter claps her hands.’ Fierce, intimate, lyrical, profound, and true, World as Dictionary is a beautiful, beautiful book. A book that lives in hope. A book that claps its hands.” -Ron Wallace”

Theory has become a common language in the humanities in recent years, but its practical application as a pedagogical aid has yet to be fully addressed. In The Practice of Theory, Michael Bernard-Donals examines the connection between theory and pedagogy at the level of practice. He argues that though rhetoric links pedagogy with theory, this tradition must also connect with other human and natural sciences. A materialistic rhetoric can, he claims, reinvigorate the link between theory, teaching and practice. This book offers a sustained reflection on the production of knowledge across a range of contemporary disciplines.

In this brilliant collection, literary scholars, philosophers, and teachers inquire into the connections between antifoundational philosophy and the rhetorical tradition. What happens to literary studies and theory when traditional philosophical foundations are disavowed? What happens to the study of teaching and writing when antifoundationalism is accepted? What strategies for human understanding are possible when the weaknesses of antifoundationalism are identified? This volume offers answers in classic essays by such thinkers as Richard Rorty, Terry Eagleton, and Stanley Fish, and in many new essays never published before.

The contributors to this book explore the nexus of antifoundationalism and rhetoric, critique that nexus, and suggest a number of pedagogical and theoretical alternatives. The editors place these statements into a context that is both critical and evaluative, and they provide for voices that dissent from the antifoundational perspective and that connect specific, practical pedagogies to the broader philosophical statements. For those with an interest in rhetoric, philosophy, comparative literature, or the teaching of composition, this book sets forth a wealth of thought-provoking ideas.

In this powerful work, Susan Friedman moves feminist theory out of paralyzing debates about us and them, white and other, first and third world, and victimizers and victims. Throughout, Friedman adapts current cultural theory from global and transnational studies, anthropology, and geography to challenge modes of thought that exaggerate the boundaries of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and national origin. The author promotes a transnational and heterogeneous feminism, which, she maintains, can replace the proliferation of feminisms based on difference. She argues for a feminist geopolitical literacy that goes beyond fundamentalist identity politics and absolutist poststructuralist theory, and she continually focuses the reader’s attention on those locations where differences are negotiated and transformed.

Pervading the book is a concern with narrative: the way stories and cultural narratives serve as a primary mode of thinking about the politically explosive question of identity. Drawing freely on modernist novels, contemporary film, popular fiction, poetry, and mass media, the work features narratives of such writers and filmmakers as Gish Jen, Julie Dash, June Jordon, James Joyce, Gloria Anzalda, Neil Jordon, Virginia Woolf, Mira Nair, Zora Neale Hurston, E. M. Forster, and Irena Klepfisz.

Defending the pioneering role of academic feminists in the knowledge revolution, this work draws on a wide variety of twentieth-century cultural expressions to address theoretical issues in postmodern feminism.

Winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association

Looking back at a time when America was on the brink of all the big changes coming by way of Apollo 11, The Feminine Mystique, and the Vietnam War, this high-spirited memoir focuses on what it was like back then–for a girl.

Jesse Lee Kercheval opens her story in 1966 when she was a precocious ten-year old girl whose family moves from Washington, D.C. to Cocoa, Florida. Bedroom community to the rocket launchers, Cocoa was a town rising out of a swamp, a city of the future being built out of concrete block and hope. Alligators still wandered across the newly paved subdivision streets, and civilization was based on the twin luxuries of central air-conditioning and mosquito control.

Living in their brand-new house in a brand-new development (called Lunar Heights), the Kercheval’s–father, mother, two little girls, tried to ride the Space Race’s tide of optimism. But even as the rockets kept going up, the Kercheval family was spiraling down. Father hid out at work while Mother overdosed her depression and Jesse Lee and her sister, Carol, hovered at the edge of the nest, having to try their wings too early and too alone. By the end of the book, America has flown to the moon but the Kercheval family, weighed down by the realities of life on earth, has crashed.

Weaving domestic and public concerns, this brilliant rendering of an era juxtaposes the sensibilities of a young woman poised at the edge of adulthood (hilariously, touchingly so) and those of a whole country poised on the edge of things equally frightening–the future of NASA, the outcome of the war and woman’s lib.

In this collection of one hundred sonnets, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Ronald Wallace once again proves himself to be one of our most versatile and affirmative poets.

This book brings together a collection of current research on the assessment of oral proficiency in a second language. Fourteen chapters focus on the use of the language proficiency interview or LPI to assess oral proficiency. The volume addresses the central issue of validity in proficiency assessment: the ways in which the language proficiency interview is accomplished through discourse. Contributors draw on a variety of discourse perspectives, including the ethnography of speaking, conversation analysis, language socialization theory, sociolinguistic variation theory, human interaction research, and systemic functional linguistics. And for the first time, LPIs conducted in German, Korean, and Spanish are examined as well as interviews in English. This book sheds light on such important issues as how speaking ability can be defined independently of an LPI that is designed to assess it and the extent to which an LPI is an authentic representation of ordinary conversation in the target language. It will be of considerable interest to language testers, discourse analysts, second language acquisition researchers, foreign language specialists, and anyone concerned with proficiency issues in language teaching and testing.

Susan Bernstein examines the gendered power relationships embedded in confessional literature of the Victorian period. Exploring this dynamic in Charlotte Bronta’s Villette, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she argues that although women’s disclosures to male confessors repeatedly depict wrongdoing committed against them, they themselves are viewed as the transgressors. Bernstein emphasizes the secularization of confession, but she also places these narratives within the context of the anti-Catholic tract literature of the time. Based on cultural criticism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory, Bernstein’s analysis constitutes a reassessment of Freud’s and Foucault’s theories of confession. In addition, her study of the anti-Catholic propaganda of the mid-nineteenth century and its portrayal of confession provides historical background to the meaning of domestic confessions in the literature of the second half of the century.

Expanding the boundaries of both genre and gender, contemporary American women are writing long poems in a variety of styles that repossess history, reconceive female subjectivity, and revitalize poetry itself. In the first book devoted to long poems by women, Lynn Keller explores this rich and evolving body of work, offering revealing discussions of the diverse traditions and feminist concerns addressed by poets ranging from Rita Dove and Sharon Doubiago to Judy Grahn, Marilyn Hacker, and Susan Howe.

Arguing that women poets no longer feel intimidated by the traditional associations of long poems with the heroic, public realm or with great artistic ambition, Keller shows how the long poem’s openness to sociological, anthropological, and historical material makes it an ideal mode for exploring women’s roles in history and culture. In addition, the varied forms of long poems—from sprawling free verse epics to regular sonnet sequences to highly disjunctive experimental collages—make this hybrid genre easily adaptable to diverse visions of feminism and of contemporary poetics.

Winner, Best Scholarly Book, South Central Modern Language Association (1998).

Reinventing Allegory asks how and why allegory has survived as a literary mode from the late Renaissance to the postmodern present. Three chapters on Romanticism, including one on the painter J. M. W. Turner, present this era as the pivotal moment in allegory’s modern survival. Other chapters describe larger historical and philosophical contexts, including classical rhetoric and Spenser, Milton and seventeenth-century rhetoric, Neoclassical distrust of allegory, and recent theory and metafiction. By using a series of key historical moments to define the special character of modern allegory, this study offers an important framework for assessing allegory’s role in contemporary literary culture.

“Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom” promises to reorient our thinking about how younger adolescents and their teachers, talking together, compose shared understandings that contribute to individual students’ learning. Presenting a new conceptual framework, Nystrand and his colleagues argue that people learn not merely by being spoken (or written) to, but by participating in communicative exchanges. Dozens of schools and thousands of students participated in the study reported here, under the auspices of the National Centre on Effective Secondary Schools. Its audience will include graduate education courses in language, literature, and literacy, teaching methods, quantitative research, teacher research, and educational psychology, as well as researchers, teachers and policymakers.

This study explores the relation between Samuel Beckett’s five major novels—Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—and the phenomenon that Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo have described as the “end of modernity.” Through a sustained reading of Beckett’s “pentalogy,” Begam demonstrates how these novels, written between 1935 and 1950, strikingly anticipate many of the defining themes and ideas of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, extending from madness and the cogito to the “death of the author” and the “end of the book,” from différance and unnamability to the “end of man” and the “beginning of writing.”

Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity situates Beckett in relation to a postmodern philosophical intervention that is defined by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, and a modernist literary tradition that is represented by Marcel Proust and James Joyce.  Arguing against the tendency to treat the postmodern as the mere negation of Enlightenment thinking—a form of “overcoming” in which the modern is replaced by the antimodern—Begam proposes an approach that is based more on “différance” than antithesis.   Especially important in this regard is Derrida’s claim that there is never “any question of choosing” between modernity (“Western metaphysics”) and a term of opposition (the “overcoming” of metaphysics).  Rather, Derrida recommends what he calls a “new writing” that simultaneously coordinates two modes of deconstruction, at once working critically within the tradition and projecting itself imaginatively beyond that tradition. The pentalogy offers an extended application of this “new writing” some twenty years before the advent of poststructuralism.

Fathering the Nation examines competing expressions of national memory appearing in a wide range of mid-nineteenth-century artifacts, including slave autobiography, classic American fiction, monumental architechture, myths of the Revolution, proslavery writing, and landscape painting. While these images, icons, and fictions attempt to present an ordered, inspiring narrative of America, they also tell other stories that disrupt the nation. Arguing that even the most rigid representations, such as the Bunker Hill Monument and official legends of the founding fathers, are incoherent, Castronovo presents a geneology that recovers those members of the national family whose status challenges the body politic and its history. The forgotten orphans in Melville’s Moby Dick and Israel Potter, the rebellious slaves in the work of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the citizens afflicted with amnesia in Lincoln’s speeches, and the dispossessed sons in slave narratives all provide dissenting voices that provoke insurrectionary plots and counter-memories. Viewed here as a “miscegenation” of stories, the narrative of “America” resists being told in terms of an intelligible story of uncontested descent. National identity rests not on rituals of consensus but on repressed legacies of parricide and rebellion.

This collection of essays forges a new definition of Romanticism that includes the wide range of women’s artistic expression.

The work of Mikhail Bakhtin does not fall neatly under a single rubric, because its philosophical foundation rests ambivalently between phenomenology and Marxism. The theoretical tension between these two positions creates philosophical impasses in Bakhtin’s work, which have been neglected or ignored in previous studies of Bakhtin. Michael Bernard-Donals examines developments in phenomenological and materialist theory, providing a contextualized study of Bakhtin, a critique of the problems of contemporary criticism, and an original contribution to literary theory.

Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory breaks new ground in postmodern literary theory, including feminist theory, by moving the focus away from narrative fiction and onto poetry. The book responds to the need for more adequately theorized approaches to poetic literature by bringing together new, previously unpublished essays by fourteen accomplished critics.

Varied in subject, scope, and theoretical orientation, the essays consider poets from Aemilia Lanyer and Emily Dickinson to Lucille Clifton, Marilyn Hacker, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The issues addressed range from the gender ideologies of the lyric to the construction of gendered narrative voice in Chicana poetry, and from the honoring of African-American spiritual traditions by acknowledging the reality of ghosts to the relevance to Adrienne Rich’s poetry of Irigaray’s recent writing on ethics. These diverse essays share a common interest in a theoretically self-conscious exploration of gender’s role in poetic production.

Contributors include Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman, Margaret Homans, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, and Suzanne Juhasz. Several pieces by poet critics, most notably those by Marlene Nourbese Philip and by Joan Retallack, radically revise the generic expectations of literary criticism. By emphasizing the intersection of theoretical and poetic discourses, the book moves beyond the simple application of theory to text; it opens up the possibilities of the academic essay. The collection will be of vital interest to scholars and students interested in feminist literary criticism and women’s poetry, and to readers of American poetry and twentieth-century poetry.

Lynn Keller is Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cristanne Miller is Associate Professor of English, Pomona College. She is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar.

Winner of the 1995 Banta Book Prize for a Wisconsin Author

Ronald Wallace is best known for his wit and good humor, his synthesis of technical skill and strong emotion, his sensory immediacy, his accessibility, and charm. Now in Time’s Fancy, his fifth collection, Wallace explores the tragic aspects of life more fully, fashioning a declarative poetry that is darker and deeper, more meditative and complex.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr. Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.

Did James Joyce, that icon of modernity, spearhead the dismantling of the Cartesian subject? Or was he a supreme example of a modern man forever divided and never fully known to himself? This volume reads the dialogue of contradictory cultural voices in Joyce’s works–revolutionary and reactionary, critical and subject to critique, marginal and central. It includes ten essays–all but two of them published here for the first time–that identify repressed elements in Joyce’s writings and examine how psychic and cultural repressions persistently surface in his texts.

Penelope’s Web should appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in twentieth-century modernism, women’s writing, feminist criticism, post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis, autobiography, and women’s studies. It is the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writings of H.D., the pen-name for Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who has been known primarily as a poet. Her prose, more personal, experimental, and postmodern than her poetry, raises central questions about the relation of women writers to language, desire, and history. She suppressed in her lifetime many of these texts because of their daring exploration of her bisexuality and their radical critique of the social order. H.D.’s prose writings contribute importantly to the many histories and theories of modernism that are redrawing boundaries to include the achievement of women writers.

Signets is an essential resource for those interested in H. D., modernism, and feminist criticism and writing that brings together the best essays of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis have gathered the most influential and generative studies of H. D.’s work and complemented them with photobiographical, chronological, and bibliographical portraits unique to this volume.

The essays in Signets span H. D.’s career from the origins of Imagism to late modernism, from the early poems of Sea Garden to the novel HER and the epic poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Diana Collecott, Robert Duncan, Albert Gelpi, Eileen Gregory, Susan Gubar, Barbara Guest, Elizabeth A. Hirsch, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, Cassandar Laity, Adalaide Morris, Alicia Ostriker, Cyrena N. Pondrom, Perdita Schaffner, and Louis H. Silverstein.

Susan Stanford Friedman is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her works include Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. and Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction.Rachel Blau DuPlessis is Professor of English at Temple University. She is author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of the Twentieth-Century Women Writers and H. D.: The Career of that Struggle.

“Young’s study is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of learner speech and the role of variation in SLA.” (Robert Bayley, University of Texas, San Antonio) –Studies in Second Language Acquisition, September 1993

“Young is successful in highlighting some of the major issues in L2 research and in presenting the problems inherent in interlanguage variation research.” (Susan Braidi, Arizona State University) –Language Learning, December 1992

“As one who is interested in linguistic variation and second-language acquisition, I found that this book explores important issues, and invites further research and discussion.” (James Walker, University of Toronto) –Language, March 1993

“The volume is of great benefit for linguists and people interested or involved in second language teaching.” (Yousef Bader, Yarmouk University) –IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, August 1993

This book offers a fresh understanding of the role of aesthetics in Wordsworth’s major poetry and prose. Professor Kelley proposes aesthetic and geological precedents for this aesthetic model and evaluates its differences from the models developed by Burke, Kant and Hegel.

As a tradition modernism has fostered particularly polarised impulses – though the great modernist poems offer impressive models, modernist principles, epitomised in Ezra Pound’s exhortation to ‘make it new’, encourage poets to reject the methods of their immediate predecessors. Re-making it New explores the impact of this polarised tradition on contemporary American poets by examining the careers of John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley and James Merrill. To demonstrate how these four have extended modernist attitudes to create a distinctive post-modern art, each one’s poetry is compared with that of a modernist who has been an important influence: Ashbery is discussed in conjunction with Wallace Stevens, Bishop with Marianne Moore, Creeley with William Carlos Williams and Merrill with W. H. Auden. Lynn Keller’s book shows that contemporary poets have chosen not to reach for order as their modernist predecessors did; instead, they attempt to dissolve hierarchical distinction and polarising categories in a modest spirit of accommodation and acceptance.

Winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction

The stories included in the collection are  “Underground Women,”  “Willy,”  “A Clean House,”  “Tertiary Care,”  “La Mort au Moyen Age,”  “The History of the Church in America,”  “A History of Indiana,” and the title story  “The Dogeater,” about an elderly Igorrote man, living in New Orleans, who was originally brought to the United States as part of an exhibit for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

“Underground Women,” the first story in the collection, became the nucleus for The Museum of Happiness. It was also the basis of Paula Froehle’s 2002 film.

This book transcends current research on writing by relating written text to the cognitive and social processes that create and change it.

Key Features
* Reciprocity as a principle of discourse
* Language development as socialization
* Context, explicitness, genre, topic, and comment as concepts in discourse analysis
* Writing and reading as social processes