Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books

Book SynopsisExamines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, contributors address the most uncomfortable questions about consent today.Trade Review“Querying Consent gathers contributions that represent a diversity of perspectives on the multi-faceted issue of consent. The collection combines updated discussions on classical controversies with cutting edge and thought-provoking new questions altogether to a timely, much needed intervention and interrogation into the field of study on consent. An intriguing anthology that challenges the reader to think further and into new directions.”— Robin Bauer, author of Queer BDSM Intimacies: Critical Consent and Pushing Boundaries “A welcome interdisciplinary dialogue on the limits, exclusions, and paradoxes of consent, this volume poses delightfully challenging questions in a range of idioms and contexts. What does consenting to consent as an elementary relational paradigm prevent us from doing, seeing, knowing? Querying Consent could not be more timely.”— Tim Dean, author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking "The essays collected in Querying Consent variously call attention to situations in which what might seem to be consent could in fact be construed to as something closer to coercion--not just in sexual interactions, but in everything from software user agreements to the fine print in authorization forms for medical treatment." — Harper's MagazineTable of ContentsContents Introduction: The Subject of Consent Jordana Greenblatt and Keja Valens Part 1: Consent, Power, and Agency Chapter 1: Consent, Command, Confession Karmen MacKendrick Chapter 2: The Gender of Consent in Patmore, Hopkins, and Marie Lataste Amanda Paxton Chapter 3: Consensual Sex, Consensual Text: Law, Literature, and the Production of the Consenting Subject Jordana Greenblatt Chapter 4: Consent and the Limits of Abuse in Their Eyes Were Watching God and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do” Keja Valens Part 2: Consent, Violence, and Refusal Chapter 5: The Seduction of Rape as Allegory in Postcolonial Literature Justine Leach Chapter 6: Willful Creatures: Consent, Response, and Animal Will in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles Kimberly O’Donnell Chapter 7: Consenting to Read: Trigger Warnings and Textual Violence Brian Martin Chapter 8:Blue is the Warmest Color, Luce Irigaray, and the Question of Consent Caroline Godart Part 3: Consent, Personhood, and Property Chapter 9: The Art of Consent Drew Danielle Belsky Chapter 10: Sardanapalus’s Hoard: Queer Possession in Henry James's Aspern Papers Annie Pfeifer Chapter 11: Queering and Quartering Informed Consent: Genomic Medicine and Hyperreal Subjectivity Graham Potts Chapter 12: Vulnerabilities: Consent with Pfizer, Marx, and Hobbes Matthias Rudolf Chapter 13: “I Never Heard Anything So Monstrous!”: Developmental Psychology, Narrative Form, and the Age of Consent in What Maisie Knew Victoria Olwell Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisStudy of the sea - both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation - has been largely ignored by ecocritics. In Shakespeare's Ocean, Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.

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Book SynopsisSir Isaac Newton's publications, and those he inspired, were among the most significant works published during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Reading Popular Newtonianism focuses on the reception of Newton's works in a context framed by authorship, print, editorial practices, and reading.

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Book SynopsisEstablishing the “dandy” as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precendents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller.

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Book SynopsisExamines Langston Hughes's associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognising these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence.Trade ReviewIn this important, original, thoroughly researched work, Shane Graham documents Langston Hughes’s extensive role and influence in the mid-twentieth-century rise of postcolonial Caribbean and African literatures. Drawing on extensive archival research, a clearly articulated theoretical framework, and persuasive close textual analyses, he explains how Hughes’s representations of Africa and blackness changed over time as a result of his interactions with writers from Africa and the Caribbean. The scholarship is solid, and exhibits familiarity with and command of an impressive range of primary sources as well as secondary sources on black Atlantic literatures, translation, and postcolonial theory.

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Book SynopsisProvides a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late-twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of a range of works, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive.

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Book SynopsisJane Tompkins, a literature professor and author, thought she knew what reading was until, struck by a debilitating illness, she finds herself reading day and night because it is all she can do. A lifelong lover of books, she realizes that if you pay close attention to your reactions as you read, literature can become a path of self-discovery.Trade ReviewTompkins’ book has something of the charge of a detective story, as she moves from book to book in search of herself and her past. Her account of illness has the shape of a novel. … She is a direct and generous narrator. ‘The thing is not to be afraid,’ she writes. ‘When a book upsets or troubles you, you need to find out why.’ A disarmingly intimate chronicle of reading as self-discovery. Reading Through the Night is a perfect book for anyone who believes literature should amount to more than diversion and fodder for term papers.... Tompkins becomes our own suffering servant, though perhaps less a [Kurt] Wallander than a bedridden Alice James, nearly forgotten in the shadow of celebrated men, but scribbling all the while to produce something equally essential, equally profound. A woman lies in bed, reading. She isn’t well, and some days reading is all she can do. As she reads she comes to understand a lot about herself—her upbringing, her fears and her envy, her privileges, her life’s steps and missteps. She is not reading for culture or academic privilege. She is reading to save her life. I loved reading with Tompkins as she lingers over books by Naipaul, Theroux, Dickinson, and Patchett and lets their stories open windows of all kinds. Every book group in the country should be reading Reading through the Night, for the conversations it will provoke, for the reading it will inspire, and for its captivating wisdom and grace. A surprising, ambitious memoir that raises important questions about what it is that we are doing when we read. Through a series of literary adventures Tompkins shares a journey to new self-knowledge. Her story will engage all book lovers for whom reading is a lifeline. Reading through the Night is a vital manifesto on the importance of reading. It is not simply a reminder that literature can enrich us; it is a statement about the ability to live a rich and fulfilling life of the mind even when the body betrays us. Jane Tompkins guides us through what might have been a devastating loss—a disease that deprives her of her basic physical abilities—but instead becomes a new way of experiencing the world, and understanding her personal experience in the world, through a closer and more attentive relationship with words on the page. I have a profoundly altered appreciation for what literature offers us after reading this memoir. Some of the most memorable passages of the book focus on marriage: first those of Naipaul and Theroux, and then Tompkins’s own. (Her husband is the famous literary critic Stanley Fish.) Sheleads readers into multiple layers of meaning of love and forgiveness as perspectives shift, new memories appear, and images expand, illustrating the power of one large story that overcomes, or at least enlightens, a host of smaller and meaner ones. The title Reading Through the Night alludes to the sleepless hours that accompany the chronic fatigue from which Tompkins has long suffered, and also calls up for me the iconic image of the desolate David Copperfield, "sitting on my bed, reading as if for life." There's no "as if" about it: you read for life.

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Book SynopsisFrom the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. Julie-Francoise Tolliver examines the links that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences.

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Book SynopsisProvides the first book-length study of The Piazza Tales - Herman Melville’s only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime - and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville’s stories.

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Book SynopsisDrawing inspiration from Timothy Morton's concept of the “mesh” as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena.

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Book SynopsisExamines rum in anglophone Atlantic literature in the period of decolonization. This innovative study reveals rum's fascinating role in expressing the paradox of a postcolonial world still riddled with the legacies of colonialism.Trade ReviewFascinating and accessible, this important book situates rum as a potent economic, cultural, and specifically literary product in the Caribbean." - Supriya M. Nair, Tulane University, author of Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours"This outstanding and engaging study uses the lens of rum to untangle the legacies of Caribbean colonialism and to challenge discourse that has demonized and eroticized the Caribbean region. Drawing on popular novels and historical scholarship, this theoretically sophisticated study is grounded in postcolonial studies, literary criticism, alcohol studies, and the anthropology of the Caribbean. Rum, according to Nesbitt, is simply "strange." However, a critical reading of rum histories offers Nesbitt a unique, and sometimes blurred, prism through which to confront colonial tropes and examine competing political dichotomies in the modern global community." - Frederick H. Smith, North Carolina A&T State University

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Book SynopsisRelates the life of Negley Farson, adventurer, iconoclast, best-selling writer, foreign correspondent, and raging alcoholic who died in oblivion. Born only a few years before Ernest Hemingway, Farson had a life trajectory that paralleled and intersected Hemingway's in ways that compelled writers to compare them.Trade ReviewNegley Farson lived his life like a headlong attack, and Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos keep pace with him. Almost Hemingway is a beautifully written account of an avatar of a vanishing breed—the adventurer. It is a distinct pleasure to barrel through Farson’s vivid life with the authors." - Mary Dearborn, author of Ernest Hemingway: A Biography"Almost Hemingway is a revelation and a page turner — the story of a 'mutinous existential renegade' who trekked the world by boat, car, train and horseback, won fame, faced dangers, wrote magnifient prose and lived by the creed that 'men who spent their time merely trying to get rich were pitiably dumb bastards.' Bowman and Santos capture Negley Farson's life in all its brilliance and daredeviltry. It's hard to put down a book that includes such lines as: 'After forcing Farson to make a drunken speech, the regiment carried him around the town square on their shoulders.'" - Michael Hudson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis"Negley Farson. The name alone conjures up the incredible life story. This twentieth century epic unfolds in the authors’ capable hands, sweeping across the continents and spanning two world wars, bringing back the romance and excitement of the foreign correspondent. In lively prose, the authors show how he lived by his wits, struggled with alcohol, and needed little more than a manual typewriter and a telephone to do his job." - Nicholas Reynolds, author of New York Times bestseller Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961"Although Farson 'managed to hide the deepest parts of himself,' the authors draw on his memoirs, letters, and reportage to create a lively chronicle of his peripatetic adventures... A brisk tale of an eventful life." - Kirkus Reviews"A lively, engaging, and fast-paced tale of an incredible adventurer. Farson, the author of travel books published from the 1930s through the 1950s--ranging from the Caucasus to Africa, but also including a book on the Blitz and the apparently immortal Going Fishing--investigated the politics, the ordinary life, and the flora and fauna of almost every continent. He interspersed his observations about the lives of others with reports of his own daredevil expeditions crossing treacherous mountain paths and fording rushing streams." - Nancy L. Green, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, author of The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941

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Book SynopsisOffers the first comparative study of Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe. Surveying both writers’ oeuvres, Christopher Okonkwo examines significant relations between Achebe’s and Morrison’s personal backgrounds, career histories, artistic visions, and life philosophies, finding in them striking parallels.

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Book SynopsisThe scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age.

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Book SynopsisDemonstrates that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa.

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Book SynopsisDemonstrates that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa.

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Book SynopsisThe mambi is the foremost icon of Cuba’s past and present. Scrutinizing how this figure has been aesthetically rendered in literature, historiography, cinema, and monuments, Eric Morales-Franceschini teases out the emancipatory promises that the story of Cuba Libre came to embody in the twentieth-century popular imagination.

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Book SynopsisTraces the culture of sharecropping - crucial to understanding life in the southern United States - from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture.

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Book SynopsisTraces the culture of sharecropping - crucial to understanding life in the southern United States - from Emancipation to the twenty-first century. By reading dozens of works of literature in their historical context, David Davis demonstrates how sharecropping emerged, endured for a century, and continues to resonate in American culture.

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Book SynopsisA book about what does not happen in the Victorian novel. The description may sound absurd, yet consideration of alternatives to a given state of affairs is crucial to our understanding of a novel. Glatt demonstrates the Victorian novel is characterized by a proliferation of possibilities.Trade Review"Counterfactuals have been of increasing interest to literary critics, and Narrative and Its Nonevents will thicken and enrich the conversation about them. Timely and lucidly phrased and organized, this book is also witty—occasionally it made me laugh out loud. Most important, it shows that Glatt is an acute critic, with a narratological argument that leads to fresh commentary on classic texts. In stylish prose, this book makes substantial theoretical and critical contributions to its field."- Andrew H. Miller, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

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Book SynopsisAgainst the methodological backdrop of historical and comparative folk narrative research, 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition surveys the history, dissemination, and characteristics of over one hundred narratives transmitted to Western tradition from or by the Middle Eastern Muslim literatures.

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Book SynopsisAgainst the methodological backdrop of historical and comparative folk narrative research, 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition surveys the history, dissemination, and characteristics of over one hundred narratives transmitted to Western tradition from or by the Middle Eastern Muslim literatures.

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Book SynopsisAn abridged version of a collection originally published in 1961, the 42 stories here are written by Jewish writers of the 20th century, including Sholem Aleichem, Abraham Raisin and Joseph Opotashu. They offer a testament to the mother tongue through the trials of Americanization.

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Book SynopsisIn this anaysis of Roddy Doyle's first five novels, Caramine White argues that while Doyle is undoubtedly one of the most popular contemporary novelists, he also needs to be seen as a serious and gifted writer.

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Book SynopsisCenturies before W.B. Yeats wove Indian, Japanese and Irish forms together in his poetry and plays, Irish writers found kinships in Asian and West Asian cultures. This book maps the unacknowledged discourse of Irish Orientalism within Ireland's complex colonial heritage.Trade ReviewA fascinating read, inaugurating its subject with style and substance and opening a whole new critical conversation. A fascinating study of the parallels between Orientalism and Celticism. Original, provocative, and compelling. Its central thesis—that a tradition of Irish contact. . . . existed with Asia and North . . . is startling. The author's exhaustive research is evident and his manner of presentation . . . engages the reader.

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Book SynopsisTracing the history of the Catholic-authored novel in nineteenth-century Ireland, this work offers a tour of Ireland's literary landscape from its early origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to the transformative zenith brought on by James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.Trade ReviewLucid, bold, and unfailingly incisive, Catholic Emancipations will be recognized as an over-arching vision of Irish culture by a radical critic of immense subtlety and imaginative power." - Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland

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Book SynopsisProvides a comprehensive introduction to classical Arabic poetry. Covering the period roughly of 500-1250 CE, this volume features original translations and illuminating discussions of a number of major classical Arabic poems from a variety of genres.Trade ReviewEven for more advanced students and scholars, the poems juxtaposed to the historical context offer a useful framework for thinking about poetry and history together over a wide range of space and time. This innovative work should provoke much discussion among Arabic and Middle Eastern literature scholars. Provides readable and sensible essays on the poems, giving ample and illuminating attention to their backgrounds One of the most important books to have been written in the field in a very long time. . . . Farrin is not only a conscientious scholar, but also a very refined and sensitive literary critic.

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Book SynopsisLooking at texts by writers who do not necessarily define themselves as Orientalists, this title broadens the possible ways of thinking about Istanbul - a complex, idiosyncratic city of the world.Trade ReviewFor centuries the western gaze has distorted Istanbul, revealing more about the beholder than the city beheld. In this important and long overdue study about eight canonical American writers writing from or about Istanbul, Fortuny offers a brilliant analysis of the varied but quintessentially North American preoccupations they bring to bear as they struggle to make sense of a culture and a history that remains, for the most part, beyond their ken.

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Book SynopsisProvides a comprehensive introduction to classical Arabic poetry, one of the richest of poetic traditions. Covering the period roughly of 500 to 1250 c.e., it features original translations and illuminating discussions of a number of major classical Arabic poems from a variety of genres. The poems are presented chronologically, each situated within a specific historical and literary context.

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Book SynopsisRevisits and reassesses, in a modern critical light, many traditional narratives of the Arab world. Kilito brings to such celebrated texts as A Thousand and One Nights, Kalila and Dimna, and Kitab al-Bukhala' refreshing and iconoclastic insight, giving new life to classic stories that are often treated as fossilized and untouchable cultural treasures.

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Book SynopsisConsiders the ways in which the Irish canon not only represents an ongoing awareness of trauma as a literary and cultural force, but also how this representation has shifted since the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsCreditsIntroduction1. "My Memory Gropes in Search of Details"2. "A Whole Fucking Country--Drowning in Shame"3. "Surmises Held Up against the Truth"4. "Stories Are a Different Kind of True"5. "Nothing is Entirely by Itself"6. Trauma, Recovery, and Intertextual Redemption in Colm Toibin's Nora WebsterNotesWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisJazz in the Time of the Novel argues that a culture's understanding of the concept of time plays a central role in its economic, social, and aesthetic affairs and that a culture arrives at its conception of time through its artistic practices. Bruce Barnhart, in Jazz in the Time of the Novel, shows that American culture of the first three decades of the twentieth century was shaped by the kindred rhythms and movements of two particular art forms: jazz and fiction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, widespread changes in America's social, demographic, and economic norms threatened longstanding faith in a unified and inevitable movement towards a better future. As Barnhart shows both jazz and novels of the period address these temporal uncertainties, inserting themselves into arguments about the proper unfolding of an affirmative American future. Barnhart proposes that these two aesthetic forms can be viewed as co-participants in an ongoing discussion about the way in which the

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Book SynopsisTintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James?how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton's confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially forThe Age of Innocence. Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton's work. Wharton's response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton's sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti's revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel,The Buccaneers, and the importance of home inThe Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton's use of Tiepolo'sTrade Review“Adeline Tintner, the author of eight books on Henry James, has drawn on her formidable knowledge to place Edith Wharton in many different literary contexts. Sixteen of the 29 essays in her book examine the affinities and literary debts linking Wharton and writer of her era. Tintner’s book is certain to lead even the most widely read scholar to new facts and more detailed knowledge of Wharton’s literary relationships.” —Edith Wharton Review| “In an age of academic obfuscation, master scholar Adeline Tintner not only presents clear ideas but also augments them with welcome background.” —Helen Killoran, Ohio University at Lancaster |“Every library and every lover of Wharton will have to have this rich new resource. Adeline Tintner’s work is always impeccably researched, vastly informative, and bears the stamp of Tintner’s invariable scholarly integrity.” –Krisin Lauer, FordhamUniversity

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Book SynopsisChronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II - creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to these landscapes after the madness and destruction. What monsters and magic surface then?

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Book SynopsisProbes the metaphor of environmental catastrophe in American literature of the last 150 years. In each instance, Lee Rozelle finds evidence that the ‘ecosublime’ profoundly reflects spiritual and political responses to the natural world, America’s increasingly anti-ecological trajectory, and the ascendance of a post-natural landscape.Trade ReviewEcosublime is a genuinely engaging and provocative demonstration of contemporary ecocritical practice, pushing the edges of the discipline in a variety of exciting ways. . . . Rather than arguing simply that certain contemporary authors such as Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez are extending the classical tradition of the sublime aesthetic in their recent environmental fiction and poetry, Rozelle shows how the particular forms of awe and horror that accompany the ecosublime force the human subject into radical new psychological and political stances and may serve to force not only literary characters but real-world authors and audiences to rethink their lives and their relation to the Earth."—Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"In this brief but intriguing eco-critical analysis, Rozelle (Univ. of Montevallo) focuses on a variety of works, ranging from 19th-century writers (Edgar Allan Poe, Isabelle Bird) to postmodern and millennial work including the television series Twin Peaks and the Unabomber Manifesto. Rozelle begins by defining the 'ecosublime,' which he says derives from a Kantian, rather than a Burkean, understanding of the awe and terror inspired by contact with nature. The ecosublime is a balance between apprehension of uncertainty and comprehension of potential environmental unity. Tracing the experience of the ecosublime through increasingly technological, depletionist, and globally aware time periods, the author illustrates the ways in which experiences in a rapidly changing world lead characters either to a spiritual or political awakening concerning the fragility of the world, or to terror and fragmentation. Rozelle is interested in creating criticism that leads beyond deep understanding all the way to advocacy. Experiencing the ecosublime, he argues, has the potential to lead the reader through intellectual enlightenment to direct action--action that is necessary if one wishes to save the world from acts of ecocide, including strip mining, overdevelopment, and toxic spills. Recommended."—CHOICE

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Book SynopsisThe first in-depth study in English to analyse post-utopian historical novels written during and in the wake of brutal Latin American dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.Trade ReviewThere is a timeliness to this study given the current events taking place in each of the four countries under consideration and perhaps a sense that the post-utopianism of previous decades is giving way to a renewed and sustained critique of neoliberalism." - Jason A. Bartles, author of Arteletra: The Sixties in Latin America and the Politics of Going Unnoticed “This topic is of importance to the field because there has been a strong utopian impulse in Latin American fiction throughout the 20th century as well as a tradition of historical fiction. Explaining the trend . . . is valuable because it broadens the concept of historical fiction beyond previous scholarly frameworks. Moreover, given that her analysis is firmly rooted in the historical and socio-political circumstances from which these texts emerge, it affords a deeper understanding of how this recent variant of the historical novel critiques the pernicious effects of neoliberalism in Latin American societies.”—Adrian Kane, author of Central American Avant-Garde Narrative: Literary Innovation and Cultural Change (1926–1936)

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