Emeritus Faculty

Susan David Bernstein

Position title: Professor Emerita

Email: sdbern@bu.edu

Cecilia Ford

Position title: Nancy Hoefs Professor Emerita of English; Professor of Sociology; Honorary Fellow, Sociology

Email: ceford@wisc.edu

Roberta Hill

Position title: Professor Emerita of English and American Indian Studies

Email: rjhill@wisc.edu

Theresa Kelley

Position title: Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor Emerita of English

Email: tkelley@wisc.edu

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Position title: Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English

Email: jlkerche@wisc.edu

Address:
6195G Helen C. White Hall

David Loewenstein

Position title: Emeritus Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities

Email: dal35@psu.edu

Judith Claire Mitchell

Position title: Professor

Email: jmitchell@wisc.edu

Address:
6195F Helen C. White Hall

John D. "Jack" Niles

Position title: Professor Emeritus of Humanities

Email: jdniles@wisc.edu

Ellen Samuels

Position title: Professor Emerita of English and Gender and Women's Studies

Email: ejsamuels@wisc.edu

Ronald Wallace

Position title: Felix Pollak Professor Emeritus of Poetry

Email: rwallace@wisc.edu

Richard F. Young

Position title: Professor

Email: rfyoung@wisc.edu

Address:
7163 Helen C. White Hall

Jane Zuengler

Position title: Professor Emerita

Email: zuengler@wisc.edu

Emeritus Bookshelf

  • A Woman's Guide to Therapy cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) Susan Stanford. A Woman’s Guide to Therapy. Prentice Hall, 1979. Print.
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  • Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Indiana University Press, 1981. Print.
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  • Star Quilt cover
    Hill, Roberta. Star Quilt. Holy Cow! Press, 1985. Print.
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  • Nystrand, Martin. The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity Between Writers and Readers. New York: Academic Press, 1986. Print.

    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

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  • Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition cover
    Keller, Lynn. Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.

    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.

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  • The Dogeater cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. The Dogeater. University of Missouri Press, 1987. Print.

    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.

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  • Wordsworth's Revisionary Aesthetics cover
    Kelley, Theresa. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Print.

    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.

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  • Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.

    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.

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  • Signets: Reading H.D. cover
    (Editor), Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Friedman (1943-2023) (Editor)Susan Stanford. Signets: Reading H.D. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Print.

    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.

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  • Young, Richard F. Variation in Interlanguage Morphology. Peter Lang, 1991. Print.

    “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

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  • Joyce: The Return of the Repressed cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) (Editor)Susan Stanford. Joyce: The Return of the Repressed. Cornell University Press, 1992. Print.

    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.

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  • Grammar in Interaction: Adverbial Clauses in American English Conversations cover
    , Cecilia Ford. Grammar in Interaction: Adverbial Clauses in American English Conversations. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Print.

    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.

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  • Wallace, Ronald. Time’s Fancy: Poems. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994. Print.

    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.

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  • Philadelphia Flowers cover
    Hill, Roberta. Philadelphia Flowers. Holy Cow! Press, 1994. Print.
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  • Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory cover
    (Editor), Cristanne Miller, and Lynn Keller (Editor). Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. University of Michigan Press, 1994. Print.

    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.

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  • Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices cover
    (Editor), Paula Feldman, and Theresa Kelley (Editor). Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. University Press of New England, 1995. Print.

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

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  • Nystrand, Martin. Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. Print.

    “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.

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  • Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture cover
    Bernstein, Susan David. Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture. University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Print.

    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.

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  • Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women cover
    Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Print.

    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.

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  • Reinventing Allegory cover
    Kelley, Theresa. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

    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.

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  • Space: A Memoir cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Space: A Memoir. Algonquin Books, 1998. Print.

    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.

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  • Wallace, Ronald. The Uses of Adversity: Poems. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Print.

    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.

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  • (Co-editor), Agnes Weiyun He, Eds., and Richard F. Young (Co-editor). Talking and Testing: Discourse Approaches to the Assessment of Oral Proficiency. John Benjamins, 1998. Print.

    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.

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  • Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) Susan Stanford. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton University Press, 1998. Print.

    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.

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  • World as Dictionary cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. World As Dictionary. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999. Print.

    “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”

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  • Wallace, Ronald. Quick Bright Things: Stories. Midlist, 2000. Print.

    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.’

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  • Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle cover
    Friedman (1943-2023) (Editor)Susan Stanford. Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle. New Directions, 2001. Print.

    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.

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  • (Editor), Barbara A. Fox, Cecilia Ford (Editor), and Sandra A. Thompson (Editor). The Language of Turn and Sequence. Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

    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.

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  • The Museum of Happiness cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. The Museum of Happiness. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Print.

    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.

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  • Wallace, Ronald. Long For This World. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Print.

    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.

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  • Building Fiction cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Building Fiction. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Print.

    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.

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  • The Last Day of the War cover
    Mitchell, Judith Claire. The Last Day of the War. Pantheon, 2004. Print.

    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.

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  • Sound Patterns in Interaction: Cross-linguistic Studies of Phonetics and Prosody for Conversation cover
    (Editor), Cecilia Ford, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (Editor). Sound Patterns in Interaction: Cross-Linguistic Studies of Phonetics and Prosody for Conversation. Benjamins, 2004. Print.

    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.

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  • Dog Angel cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Dog Angel. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Print.

    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.

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  • Wallace, Ronald. Now You See It: Poems. Parallel Press, 2005. Print.

    “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.

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  • Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Film History As Train Wreck. Center for Book Arts, 2006. Print.

    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.

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  • Reuben Sachs, by Amy Levy cover
    Bernstein (Editor), Susan David. Reuben Sachs, by Amy Levy. Broadview Press, 2006. Print.

    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.

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  • The Romance of a Shop, by Amy Levy cover
    Bernstein (Editor), Susan David. The Romance of a Shop, by Amy Levy. Broadview Press, 2006. Print.

    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.

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  • The Alice Stories cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. The Alice Stories. University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Print.

    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.

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  • Wallace, Ronald. For a Limited Time Only: Poems. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Print.

    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.

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  • Young, Richard F. Language and Interaction: An Advanced Resource Book. Routledge, 2008. Print.

    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.

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  • Women Speaking Up: Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings cover
    , Cecilia Ford. Women Speaking Up: Getting and Using Turns in Workplace Meetings. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.

    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.”

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  • Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture cover
    (Editor), Elsie B. Michie, and Susan David Bernstein (Editor). Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture. Ashgate, 2009. Print.

    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.

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  • Young, Richard F. Discursive Practice in Language Learning and Teaching. Blackwell, 2009. Print.

    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.

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  • Cinema Muto cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Cinema Muto. Southern Indiana University Press, 2009. Print.

    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.

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  • Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women's Exploratory Poetics cover
    Keller, Lynn. Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics. University of Iowa Press, 2010. Print.

    “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.

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  • Brazil cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Brazil. Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010. Print.

    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.

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  • Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture cover
    Kelley (Editor), Theresa. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Print.

    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

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  • My Life as a Silent Movie cover
    Kercheval, Jesse Lee. My Life As a Silent Movie. Indiana University Press, 2013. Print.

    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.

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  • Friedman (1943-2023) (Co-editor)Susan Stanford. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.

    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?

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  • Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf cover
    Bernstein, Susan David. Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print.

    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.

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  • Friedman (1943-2023) (Editor)Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. Columbia University Press, 2015. Print.

    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.

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  • Friedman (1943-2023) (Editor)Susan Stanford. Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Print.

    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.

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  • Nystrand, Martin. Twenty Acres: Events That Transform Us. Paris: Kiwai Media, 2019. Print.
  • Knowles (Co-editor), Richard, and Kevin Donovan (Co-editor). King Lear: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Modern Language Association of America, 2020. Print.

    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.

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