Literary companions, book reviews and guides Books
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One
Book SynopsisTeaching strategies for one of the world's most widely read collections of stories The Thousand and One Nights, composed in Arabic from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, is one of the world's most widely circulated and influential collections of stories. To help instructors introduce the tales to students, this volume provides historical context and discusses the many transformations of the stories in a variety of cultures. Among the topics covered are the numerous translations and their impact on the tales' reception; various genres represented by the tales; gender, race, and slavery; and adaptations of the stories in films, graphic novels, and other media across the world and under conditions of both imperialism and postcolonialism. The essays serve instructors in subjects like medieval literature, world literature, and Middle and Near Eastern studies and make a case for teaching the Thousand and One Nights in courses on identity and race.
£72.80
Modern Language Association of America Approaches to Teaching the Thousand and One
Book SynopsisTeaching strategies for one of the world's most widely read collections of stories The Thousand and One Nights, composed in Arabic from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, is one of the world's most widely circulated and influential collections of stories. To help instructors introduce the tales to students, this volume provides historical context and discusses the many transformations of the stories in a variety of cultures. Among the topics covered are the numerous translations and their impact on the tales' reception; various genres represented by the tales; gender, race, and slavery; and adaptations of the stories in films, graphic novels, and other media across the world and under conditions of both imperialism and postcolonialism. The essays serve instructors in subjects like medieval literature, world literature, and Middle and Near Eastern studies and make a case for teaching the Thousand and One Nights in courses on identity and race.
£33.11
University Press of Mississippi What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
Book SynopsisWhat Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ""Family and History,"" includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ""Writers and Writing,"" offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ""Politics and Society,"" includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers. Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin
Book SynopsisConversations with Ursula K. Le Guin assembles interviews with the renowned science-fiction and fantasy author of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Earthsea sequence of novels and stories. For nearly five decades, Le Guin (b. 1929) has enjoyed immense success--both critical and popular--in science fiction and fantasy. But she has also published well-received works in such genres as realistic fiction, poetry, children's literature, criticism, and translation. In the pieces collected here, Le Guin takes every interview not as an opportunity to recapitulate long-held views but as an occasion for in-depth intellectual discourse. In interviews spanning over twenty-five years of her literary career, including a previously unpublished piece conducted by the volume's editor, Le Guin talks about such diverse subjects as U.S. foreign policy, the history of architecture, the place of women and feminist consciousness in American literature, and the differences between science fiction and fantasy. Carl Freedman is professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction; The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture; and George Orwell: A Study in Ideology and Literary Form.
£999.99
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Anthony Burgess
Book SynopsisAlthough he did not start publishing until middle age, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) had over sixty published books to his credit by the time of his death. One of them, the short novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), was to bring him fame and notoriety outside England following the 1971 release of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation. The prominence of that single novel would impel its author to confront a public continually asking directly or by implication: What else have you written, Mr. Burgess? Burgess produced scores of novels, biographies, books of literary criticism, film scripts, and news articles. A linguist and polyglot who was fluent in eight languages, he invented the language used in the 1981 film Quest for Fire. He translated and adapted Bizet's Carmen, Weber's Oberon, and other operas for the English stage. His ReJoyce: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader remains a standard in Joycean criticism. Conversations with Anthony Burgess captures, through in-depth interviews, a writer of tremendous energy, inventiveness, and self-discipline. The collection brings together interviews from 1971 to 1989, including two pieces published for the first time. Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished professor emeritus of English at SUNY College at Brockport. He has written, edited, and coedited many books, including Conversations with May Sarton and Conversations with Rita Dove, both from University Press of Mississippi. Mary C. Ingersoll is a retired elementary school teacher who specialized in teaching humanities to gifted students.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Caryl Phillips
Book SynopsisConversations with Caryl Phillips collects nineteen interviews conducted over more than two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Caribbean. While Phillips (b. 1958) admittedly tends to hide behind his characters in his fiction, he is completely forthcoming in his interviews, where he describes in detail the personal experiences of migration and dislocation that inspired his writing.He shares ideas about his aesthetics, in particular his noted use of a fractured, polyphonic form. These exchanges demonstrate Phillips's knowledge about the contemporary world of politics and of writing while revealing his engaging humor, his sharp intelligence, and his deep commitment to the overarching aims of his work.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Octavia Butler
Book SynopsisOctavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur ""genius"" grant, the first for a science fiction writer, Butler created worlds that challenged notions of race, sex, gender, and humanity. Whether in the postapocalyptic future of the Parable stories, in the human inability to assimilate change and difference in the Xenogenesis books, or in the destructive sense of superiority in the Patternist series, Butler held up a mirror, reflecting what is beautiful, corrupt, worthwhile, and damning about the world we inhabit. In interviews ranging from 1980 until just before her sudden death in 2006, Conversations with Octavia Butler reveals a writer very much aware of herself as the ""rare bird"" of science fiction even as she shows frustration with the constant question,""How does it feel to be the only one?"" Whether discussing humanity's biological imperatives or the difference between science fiction and fantasy or the plight of the working poor in America, Butler emerges in these interviews as funny, intelligent, complicated, and intensely original.
£23.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Ian McEwan
Book SynopsisConversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Ian McEwan
Book SynopsisConversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the British author of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach. McEwan (b. 1948) discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with notable contemporary writers---Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, David Remnick, and Stephen Pinker---provide readers with the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.
£25.46
University Press of Mississippi The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics
Book SynopsisIn The Story-Time of the British Empire, author Sadhana Naithani examines folklore collections compiled by British colonial administrators, military men, missionaries, and women in the British colonies of Africa, Asia, and Australia between 1860 and 1950. Much of this work was accomplished in the context of colonial relations and done by non-folklorists, yet these oral narratives and poetic expressions of non-Europeans were transcribed, translated, published, and discussed internationally. Naithani analyzes the role of folklore scholarship in the construction of colonial cultural politics as well as in the conception of international folklore studies.Since most folklore scholarship and cultural history focuses exclusively on specific nations, there is little study of cross-cultural phenomena about empire and/or postcoloniality. Naithani argues that connecting cultural histories, especially in relation to previously colonized countries, is essential to understanding those countries' folklore, as these folk traditions result from both internal and European influence. The author also makes clear the role folklore and its study played in shaping intercultural perceptions that continue to exist in the academic and popular realms today. The Story-Time of the British Empire is a bold argument for a twenty-first-century vision of folklore studies that is international in scope and that understands folklore as a transnational entity.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
Book SynopsisAbsalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, ""who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."" On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Jonathan Lethem
Book SynopsisConversations with Jonathan Lethem collects fourteen interviews, conducted over a decade and a half, with the Brooklyn-born author of such novels as Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and many others. Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Lethem (b. 1964) covers a wide range of subjects, from what it means to incorporate genre into literature, to the impact of the death of his mother on his life and work, to his being a permanent ""sophomore on leave"" from Bennington College, as well as his flight from Brooklyn to California and its lasting effect on his fiction. Lethem also reveals the many literary and pop culture influences that have informed his writing life.Readers will find Lethem as charming and generous and intelligent as his work. His examination of what it means to live a creative life will reverberate and enlighten scholars and fans alike. His thoughts on science fiction, intellectual property, literary realism, genre, movies, and rock 'n' roll are articulated with elán throughout the collection, as are his comments on his own development as a craftsman.
£25.46
Kent State University Press Darling Ro and the Benet Women
Book SynopsisThe first book-length study of a gifted American writer and her life during the 1920sThe Benét name immediately evokes Stephen Vincent and his older brother William Rose, Pulitzer Prize–winning poets and novelists during the first half of the twentieth century. Less well remembered are the remarkable women related to the Benét brothers, including Rosemary Carr, Stephen's wife; Laura, his sister; Elinor Wylie, William's second wife; and Kathleen Norris, the popular novelist who raised the children of her brother-in-law William.Darling Ro and the Benét Women presents a revealing glimpse of social and literary life in New York and Paris during the 1920s. Using a recently released collection of letters from the Benét Collection at Yale University, author Evelyn Helmick Hively extracts captivating anecdotes and impressions about a talented group of writers and impressive feminist figures. Written by Rosemary Carr Benét to her mother, Dr. Rachel Hickey Carr (one of Chicago's first women physicians), the compilation of letters and short dispatches from Paris provides the focus of the book.A gifted poet and journalist, Rosemary Carr was a prolific writer of articles for the New York Herald-Tribune, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue; of stories and poems for The New Yorker and other magazines; and hundreds of letters. She belonged to a remarkably skillful, social, and artistic group of men and women who bonded early in life, and her letters paint fascinating portraits of their lives, careers, and relationships.Darling Ro and the Benét Women offers an insider's perspective of a well-known cosmopolitan American family.
£28.46
Kent State University Press Hemingway and French Writers
Book SynopsisA collection of essays tracing seven decades of literary interaction between Hemingway and notable French authorsIn a 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay, Jean-Paul Sartre writes: "The greatest literary development in France between 1929 and 1939 was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Caldwell, and Steinbeck."When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1922, he was an unknown writer from America. The City of Light was where he learned his craft and gained legitimacy. Although much has been written about Hemingway's apprentice years in Paris, little has been published about his literary convergences with French writers. In Hemingway and French Writers, Ben Stoltzfus illuminates the connections between Hemingway and the most important French intellectuals, such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux, and Albert Camus. A distinguished scholar of both French literature and Hemingway studies, Stoltzfus compares Hemingway's major works in chronological order, from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and the Sea, with novels by French writers.While it is widely known that France influenced Hemingway's writing, Hemingway also had an immense impact on French writers. Over the years, American and French novelists enriched each other's works with new styles and untried techniques. In this comparative analysis, Stoltzfus discusses the complexities of Hemingway's craft, the controlled skill, narrative economy, and stylistic clarity that the French, drawn to his emphasis on action, labeled "le style américain."
£33.71
Kent State University Press A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary
Book SynopsisThe first extensive treatment of Sherwood Anderson's work from a postmodern perspectiveSherwood Anderson, remembered chiefly as a writer of short stories about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century, was acknowledged as an innovator of the short story form and a major influence on such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Valuable critical studies have examined his works from biographical, New Critical, or psychoanalytical approaches, but contemporary criticism on Anderson has been nearly nonexistent.A New Book of the Grotesques (the title is adapted from the first tale in Winesburg, Ohio) does not challenge previous studies of Anderson as much as it looks at Anderson's early fiction from contemporary interpretative methodologies, particularly from poststructuralist approaches. With this study, author Robert Dunne breaks new ground in Sherwood Anderson scholarship: his is the first sustained, full-length critical work on Anderson from a postmodern theoretical perspective and is the first study of a substantial body of Anderson's work to be published in more than thirty years.A New Book of the Grotesques is an important critical study that adds significantly to the field and to the understanding of Sherwood Anderson's fiction and the modernist period.
£20.21
Kent State University Press Bandersnatch: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and
Book SynopsisAn inside look at the Inklings and their creative process C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's works-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance individual talent? And what can we learn from their example?Complemented with original illustrations by James Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford—and a seat at their table at the Eagle and Child pub. It shows how encouragement and criticism made all the difference in The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and dozens of other books written by the members of this literary group. You'll learn what made these writers tick and more: inspired by their example, you'll discover how collaboration can help your own creative process and lead to genius breakthroughs in whatever work you do."No one knows more than Diana Pavlac Glyer about the internal workings of the Inklings. In Bandersnatch, she shows us how they inspired, encouraged, refined, and opposed one another in the course of producing some of the greatest literature of the last one hundred years. A brilliant and beautifully clear case study of iron sharpening iron." —Michael Ward, coeditor of C. S. Lewis at Poets' Corner"The Inklings are about as important a group as ever existed in the literary world. This tremendous new book about them is much anticipated and hugely welcome!" —Eric Metaxas, New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Miracles"What a gift! Bandersnatch is a joy to read and helps dispel that dangerous myth that our greatest writers created in solitude. We all need community in order to do our best work, and this book will show you how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century did just that. You won't be able to read this book just once." —Jeff Goins, founder of Tribe Writers and author of The Art of WorkTrade Review“No one knows more than Diana Pavlac Glyer about the internal workings of the Inklings. In Bandersnatch, she shows us how they inspired, encouraged, refined, and opposed one another in the course of producing some of the greatest literature of the last one hundred years. A brilliant and beautifully clear case study of iron sharpening iron.”— Michael Ward, coeditor of C. S. Lewis at Poets’ Corner“The Inklings are about as important a group as ever existed in the literary world. This tremendous new book about them is much anticipated and hugely welcome!”— Eric Metaxas, New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Miracles“What a gift! Bandersnatch is a joy to read and helps dispel that dangerous myth that our greatest writers created in solitude. We all need community in order to do our best work, and this book will show you how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century did just that. You won’t be able to read this book just once.”— Jeff Goins, founder of Tribe Writers and author of The Art of Work"Besides being of interest to fans of Tolkien, Lewis, and the other Inklings, "Bandersnatch" also is also helpful to aspiring writers, artists, and inventors, providing suggestions on how to interact with others in the same kind of creative collaboration the Inklings did.'— Examiner.com
£20.21
Kent State University Press The Lion's Country: C.S. Lewis's Theory of the
Book SynopsisUsing a philosophical lens to more deeply examine, appreciate, and understand C. S. Lewis's writingsDrawing on C. S. Lewis's essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion's Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis's understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis's writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.For Lewis, reality is not simply a matter of what we can ascertain with our senses; the Real includes but also transcends the physical. Indeed, for Lewis, who is perhaps the most influential Christian writer of the 20th century, God is the most Real thing there is. Yet during the modernist era when Lewis lived, taught, and wrote, the prevailing view was that the only legitimate knowledge was that which could be derived from empirically provable facts. Lewis's rejection of such a narrow belief prompted him to ask, "What are facts without interpretation?" and led to his lifelong pursuit of experiencing and understanding the Real. Much of his fiction, including The Chronicles of Narnia, is fundamentally about how we can encounter reality and be certain of what we know.Starr's unique look at Lewis's philosophical and theological underpinnings extends even to a discussion of heaven and what it would be like to see the face of God. Including a never-before-released passage from Lewis's unpublished Prayer Manuscript, The Lion's Country is an essential contribution to Lewis studies.Trade Review"In The Lion's Country, Charlie Starr skillfully guides us through Lewis's theory of reality, a world of fine distinctions and conceptual and linguistic pitfalls. After finishing, readers will be well equipped to journey further on their own. Clear, engaging, and insightful." —Devin Brown, professor of English at Asbury University and author of A Life Observed: A Spiritual Biography of C. S. Lewis "Starr has provided us with a new thread to weave together the many different works in many different genres that flowed from Lewis's pen over a quarter century." —Louis Markos, professor of English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis for Beginners, The Myth Made Fact "Starr, a professor of English at Alderson Broaddus University who is also an expert on Lewis's handwriting, has a deep and intimate knowledge of Lewis's full body of work. In his new book, he marshals that knowledge for a single purpose: to tease out what Lewis had to say in his fiction, nonfiction, essays, letters, and sermons about the nature of reality. .... Such wonders await the reader who, guided by Starr, ventures into the realms of C. S. Lewis."—Christianity Today
£16.76
University of Iowa Press Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature
Book SynopsisWithin the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after.The first section of essays returns to the category of the “postmodern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recentpast. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern.Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.
£50.40
University of Iowa Press Whitman's Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution
Book SynopsisThe American nineteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history. New communications technologies seemed to be everywhere, offering opportunities and threats that seem powerfully familiar to us as we experience today’s digital revolution. Walt Whitman’s poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: “See, the many-cylinder’d steam printing-press,” he wrote, “See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan.”Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic media-saturated future Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman’s works sometimes ran through the “many-cylinder’d steam printing press” and were carried in bulk on “the strong and quick locomotive.” Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Even at the end of his life, in the 1890s as his fame was growing, the poet was selling copies of his latest works by hand to visitors at his small house in Camden, New Jersey. Mass media and centralization were only one part of the rich media world that Whitman embraced.Whitman’s Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Writers like Whitman spoke to the imagination inspired by media transformations by calling attention to connectedness, to how literature not only moves us emotionally, but moves around in the world among people and places. Studying that literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman’s works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion.Trade Review"Matt Cohen’s innovative new book, demonstrates convincingly that in spite of the technological advances contributing to this puzzle, matters were no less complex in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [...] Ultimately, as his title suggests, attempting to understand the process and significance of literary circulation, whether in the nineteenth century or in a world where readers can find the poet’s work with the click of a mouse, requires not only thorough research but also considerable imagination. This noteworthy new study features a great deal of both." — ALH Online Review, XXVI.1 (2018)
£50.40
University of Iowa Press Hope Isn't Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature
Book SynopsisHope Isn’t Stupid is the first study to interrogate the neglected connections between affect and the practice of utopia in contemporary American literature. Although these concepts are rarely theorized together, it is difficult to fully articulate utopia without understanding how affects circulate within utopian texts. Moving away from science fiction—the genre in which utopian visions are often located—author Sean Grattan resuscitates the importance of utopianism in recent American literary history. Doing so enables him to assert the pivotal role contemporary American literature has to play in allowing us to envision alternatives to global neoliberal capitalism.Novelists William S. Burroughs, Dennis Cooper, John Darnielle, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and Colson Whitehead are deeply invested in the creation of utopian possibilities. A return to reading the utopian wager in literature from the postmodern to the contemporary period reinvigorates critical forms that imagine reading as an act of communication, friendship, solace, and succor. These forms also model richer modes of belonging than the diluted and impoverished ones on display in the neoliberal present. Simultaneously, by linking utopian studies and affect studies, Grattan’s work resists the tendency for affect studies to codify around the negative, instead reorienting the field around the messy, rich, vibrant, and ambivalent affective possibilities of the world. Hope Isn’t Stupid insists on the centrality of utopia not only in American literature, but in American life as well.
£50.40
University of Iowa Press The Whitman Revolution: Sex, Poetry, and Politics
Book SynopsisThe Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila's phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman's songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila's writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman's revolutionary poetry and his conception of democracy itself - an insight that was all but suppressed during the mid-twentieth century emergence of American literature as a field of study.Highlights of this collection include Erkkila's essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila's remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.Trade Review"In this outstanding collection of essays, Betsy Erkkila situates Whitman within the global struggle for democracy, and confirms her place as the preeminent scholar of Whitman's politics."— Kenneth M. Price, author Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City"For those working in Whitman studies, Erkkila needs no introduction. [...] Erkkila’s seminal analysis changed how we may interpret not only “Calamus” but also its counterpart, the “Children of Adam” sequence, and makes for striking reading in 2021. [...] Even so, this rich, multifaceted theorizing of “the Whitman revolution” and why poetry matters will be immensely valuable both to Whitman scholars and to readers more generally. It issues a call to action, asking us as readers to fulfill the most radical and inclusive aspects of Whitman’s democratic imaginings." — ALH Online
£40.80
University of Iowa Press Ecospatiality: A Place-Based Approach to American Literature
Book SynopsisEcospatiality explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein. Building on the work of scholars in geography, sociology, ecocriticism, and geocriticism, this book articulates the theory of ecospatiality: an understanding of place as simultaneously spatial, ecological, and historical. In our current historical moment, which is characterized by ongoing ecological collapse and a not-unrelated increase in social disorder, few issues are more urgent than the human relationship with our environments. Whether we characterize this new epoch as the climate change era or the Anthropocene, we can no longer ignore the fact that the places we live are rapidly changing in response to economic and environmental pressures. Rather than thinking of place as a neutral site for social interaction, we should recognize how it underpins and intertwines with human experience.Fortunately, literature can help us think through how place operates. Lowell Wyse shows that texts can be understood as works of literary cartography. Focusing on works of nonfiction and fiction whose primary settings are on the North American continent, Ecospatiality demonstrates how these narratives rely on realistic literary geography to invoke, and sometimes retell, important aspects of environmental history within particular communities and bioregions.Trade ReviewIn the past, I have found it hard to recommend any single work that seemed like a comprehensive introduction to the field of place-conscious literary studies. This book is it." - Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska "Ecospatiality is a tour de force of literary cartography. Ranging across histories, bioregions, and communities-Indigenous, Latinx, African American, European American-Wyse introduces the concept of ecospatiality into the lexicon of the deep map. In a study that is impressively comprehensive, he contributes innovative readings of American authors and American landscapes." - Susan Naramore Maher, coeditor, Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time
£69.30
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Chuck Palahniuk
Book SynopsisEver since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a “shock jock” engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk’s fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer’s outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a “minimalist” writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer’s novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed).Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.
£26.96
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Gary Shteyngart
Book SynopsisUnderstanding Gary Shteyngart, the first comprehensive examination of Shteyngart’s novels and memoir, introduces readers to one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful contemporary American authors. Born in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979, attended Oberlin College and the City University of New York, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University. His novels include Super Sad True Love Story, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Absurdistan, chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Geoff Hamilton studies three broad, overlapping elements of Shteyngart’s work: his construction of Russian-Jewish identity in the United States, his appraisal of communism’s imaginative legacy for the wider East European diaspora and former Soviet republics, and his representation of the deadening effects of late capitalism. Focusing on Shteyngart’s themes of the fracturing and decay of ethnic identities, the limits and pitfalls of multiculturalism, and the decline of privacy and civility against the creeping power of technological mediation, Hamilton also tracks the author’s playful manipulation of literary traditions and his incisive revision of seminal mythologies of Russian, Jewish, and American selfhood. Although Shteyngart has sometimes been pigeon-holed as an immigrant author working a rather marginal ethnic shtick, Hamilton demonstrates that Shteyngart’s work deserves attention for its remarkable centrality, that is, its relevance to core questions of identity formation and the conditions of belief common to globalized societies.
£26.96
Purdue University Press Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846-2018
Book Synopsis Song of Exile: A Cultural History of Brazil's Most Popular Poem, 1846–2018 is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Antônio Gonçalves Dias's "Canção do exílio." Written in Coimbra, Portugal, in 1843 by a homesick student longing for Brazil, "Song of Exile" has inspired thousands of parodies and pastiches, and new variations continue to appear to this day. Every generation of Brazilian writers has adapted the poem's Romantic verses to glorify the wonders of the nation or to criticize it via parody, exposing a litany of issues that have plagued the country's progress over the years. Based on a core of five hundred texts painstakingly gathered over a five-year span, this book catalogs the networks of the poem's reinvention as pastiche and parody in Brazilian print culture from nineteenth-century periodicals to new media. Mapping the reoccurrences of the original's keywords and phrases over time, the book uncovers how the poem has been used by successive generations to write and rewrite the nation's history. This process of reinvention has guaranteed the permanency of "Song of Exile" in Brazilian culture, making it not only the nation's most popular poem, but one of the most imitated in the world.Table of Contents Acknowledgments Chapter One: "Minha terra tem palmeiras" : A Brief Introduction to Brazil's Most Popular Poem Chapter Two: "Adeus Coimbra inimiga": Precedents and Contexts Chapter Three: "Onde canta o rouxinol": Early Portuguese Responses Chapter Four: "Onde canta o periquito": The First Republic to the Vargas Era (1889–1945) Chapter Five: "Minha terra só tem tanques": The Military Regime (1964–1985) Chapter Six: "As sirenes que aqui apitam": Twenty-First-Century Songs of Exile (1999–2015) Chapter Seven: "Sou ali": Variations by Female Authors (1867–2015) Chapter Eight: "As aves que aqui twittam": Twitter, Instagram, and Beyond Chapter Nine: The Word, the Database, and the Algorithm Afterword: Literary Research as Data Art: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Manuel Portela) Appendix: Table of 500 Texts Notes Works Cited Index
£73.10
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with James Ellroy
Book SynopsisAs a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous ""Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction"" persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image.Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother, to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim.In Conversations with James Ellroy, Ellroy talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.
£25.46
University Press of Mississippi Personal Souths: Interviews from the Southern Quarterly
Book SynopsisPersonal Souths, a collection of 20 interviews with famous southern writers, will mark the 50th anniversary of The Southern Quarterly, one of the oldest scholarly journals (founded in 1962) dedicated to southern studies. The figures interviewed range from Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams (all from the 1970s), to a virtual Who's-Who of southern literature in the second half of the twentieth century. All of these interviews were originally published in the journal in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and are collected here for the first time. The South is represented broadly, with writers from eight states; at least four represent the ""mountain South"" (Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Lee Smith), while another four typify a ""cosmopolitan South"" (Reynolds Price, Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Spencer, Tennessee Williams). The greatest number of voices, at least eight of the authors, speak for or from the ""poor white South"" (Larry Brown, Erskine Caldwell, Harry Crews, Donald Harrington, Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Morgan, Del Shores, Lee Smith). Though there is only one African American writer, Ernest J. Gaines, another interview (William Styron, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Confessions of Nat Turner) also focuses on a conversation about African American literature.The interviews are all fascinating. Not only do they reveal the personalities of these southern literary stars, they also represent a self-conscious community of writers. It is a testament to the quality of The Southern Quarterly that many of these writers, when discussing their most important contemporaries, often refer to other writers whose interviews are also in this collection. These first-hand discussions will continue to illuminate and inform our understanding of their creative work.
£27.96
University Press of Mississippi C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction
Book SynopsisThis study of C. L. R. James's writings is the first to look at them as literature and not as theory. This sustained analysis of his major published works places them in the context of his less well-known writings and offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora's most significant thinkers and writers.Here the author of Black Jacobins, World Revolution, A History of Pan-African Revolt, , Beyond a Boundary, and the lyric novel Minty Alley is seen not only as among the great political philosophers but also as the literary artist that he remained, from his first writings in his native Trinidad through his underground years in America, to his final essays and speeches in London.The writings of James have inspired revolutionaries on three continents. They have altered the course of historiography, shown that way toward independent black political struggles, and established a base for much of today's study of culture. This study evaluates them as powerful works of literature.
£29.71
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Edna O'Brien
Book SynopsisWho's Afraid of Edna O'Brien?"" asks an early interviewer in Conversations with Edna O'Brien. With over fifty years of published novels, biographies, plays, telecasts, short stories, and more, it is hard not to be intimidated by her. An acclaimed and controversial Irish writer, O'Brien (b. 1932) saw her early works, starting in 1960 with The Country Girls, banned and burned in Ireland, but often read in secret. Her contemporary work continues to spark debates on the rigors and challenges of Catholic conservatism and the struggle for women to make a place for themselves in the world without anxiety and guilt. The raw nerve of emotion at the heart of her lyrical prose provokes readers, challenges politicians, and proves difficult for critics to place her.In these interviews, O'Brien finds her own critical voice and moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the ""once infamous Edna"" toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna O'Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often cited in interviews such as Phillip Roth's description of The Country Girls as ""rural Dubliners."" While Joyce is the centerpiece of O'Brien's literary pantheon, allusions to writers such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, and Woolf become a medium for her critical voice. Conversations with contemporary writers Phillip Roth and Glenn Patterson reveal Edna O'Brien's sense of herself as a contemporary writer. The final interview included here, with BBC personality William Crawley at Queen's University, Belfast, is a synthesis of her acceptance and fame as an Irish writer and an Irish woman and an affirmation of her literary authority.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights
Book SynopsisFrom 30 Americans to Angry White Boy, from Bamboozled to The Boondocks, from Chappelle's Show to The Colored Museum, this collection of twenty-one essays takes an interdisciplinary look at the flowering of satire and its influence in defining new roles in black identity. As a mode of expression for a generation of writers, comedians, cartoonists, musicians, filmmakers, and visual/conceptual artists, satire enables collective questioning of many of the fundamental presumptions about black identity in the wake of the civil rights movement. Whether taking place in popular and controversial television shows, in a provocative series of short internet films, in prize-winning novels and plays, in comic strips, or in conceptual hip hop albums, this satirical impulse has found a receptive audience both within and outside the black community. Such works have been variously called ""post-black,"" ""post-soul,"" and examples of a ""New Black Aesthetic."" Whatever the label, this collection bears witness to a noteworthy shift regarding the ways in which African American satirists feel constrained by conventional obligations when treating issues of racial identity, historical memory, and material representation of blackness. Among the artists examined in this collection are Paul Beatty, Dave Chappelle, Trey Ellis, Percival Everett, Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino), Spike Lee, Aaron McGruder, Lynn Nottage, ZZ Packer, Suzan Lori-Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Touré, Kara Walker, and George C. Wolfe. The essays intentionally seek out interconnections among various forms of artistic expression. Contributors look at the ways in which contemporary African American satire engages in a broad ranging critique that exposes fraudulent, outdated, absurd, or otherwise damaging mindsets and behaviors both within and outside the African American community.
£81.75
University of Tennessee Press Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors,
Book SynopsisWhen the New York Times published the first print interview with Cormac McCarthy in 1992, the author was barely known outside a small group of academics, writers, and devoted readers. None of his books up to that point, among them Suttree and Blood Meridian, had sold more than five thousand copies in hardcover. But that same year McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses made the best-seller lists, and over the next two decades, with the publication of such books as No Country for Old Men, the basis for the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning film, and The Road, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, McCarthy became a household name. In Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King traces McCarthy’s journey from cult figure to literary icon. Drawing extensively on McCarthy’s papers and those of Albert Erskine, his editor and devoted advocate at Random House, as well as the latest in McCarthy scholarship, King investigates the changes that McCarthy’s work as a novelist, his writing methods, and the reception of his novels, both inside and outside the publishing industry, have undergone over the course of his career. Taking several of McCarthy’s major novels as case studies, King explores the lengthy process of their composition through multiple drafts and revisions, the signal contributions of the author’s agents and publishers, and McCarthy’s growing confidence as a writer who is strongly attentive to tone and repeated metaphors and images. This work also reveals the wide range of McCarthy’s reading and research, especially of historical and scientific materials, as well as key intertextual connections between the novels. Part literary biography, part archival investigation, and part study of print culture, this book is particularly revealing of how one talented writer, properly nurtured by dedicated allies, went on to gain a huge measure of recognition and respect, which has become increasingly difficult for serious authors to achieve in today’s profit-driven publishing world.
£35.96
University of Tennessee Press Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America: The
Book SynopsisRace, Manhood, and Modernism in America offers the first extended comparison between American writers Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and Jean Toomer (1894-1967), examining their engagement with the ideas of “Young American” writers and critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, and Waldo Frank. This distinctively modernist school was developing unique visions of how race, gender, and region would be transformed as America entered an age of mass consumerism.Focusing on Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Toomer’s Cane (1923), Race, Manhood, and Modernism in America brings Anderson and Toomer together in a way that allows for a thorough historical and social contextualization that is often missing from assessments of these two literary talents and of modernism as a whole. The book suggests how the gay subcultures of Chicago and the traumatic events of the Great War provoked Anderson’s anxieties over the future of male gender identity, anxieties that are reflected in Winesburg, Ohio. Mark Whalan discusses Anderson’s primitivistic attraction to African American communities and his ambivalent attitudes toward race, attitudes that were embedded in the changing cultural and gendered landscape of mass mechanical production.The book next examines how Toomer aimed to broaden the racial basis of American cultural nationalism, often inspired by the same cultural critics who had influenced Anderson. He rejected the ethnographically based model of tapping the “buried cultures” of ethnic minorities developed by his mentor, Waldo Frank, and also parted with the “folk” aesthetic endorsed by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, Toomer's monumental Cane turned to discourses of physical culture, machine technology, and illegitimacy as ways of conceiving of a new type of manhood that refashioned commonplace notions of racial identity.Taken together, these discussions provide a fresh, interdisciplinary appraisal of the importance of race to “Young America,” suggest provocative new directions for scholarship, and give new insight into some of the most crucial texts of U.S. interracial modernism.
£27.71
University of Tennessee Press The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an
Book SynopsisFound in scores of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American narratives, the action-adventure heroine leaves the domestic space to pursue an independent adventure. This bold heroine tramps alone through the forests, demonstrates tremendous physical strength, braves dangers without hesitation, enters the public realm to earn money, and even kills her enemies when necessary. Despite her transgressions of social norms, the narrator portrays this heroine in a positive light and lauds her for her bravery and daring. The Action-Adventure Heroine offers a wide-ranging look at this enigmatic character in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature.Unlike the “tomboy” or the American frontierswoman, this more encompassing figure has been understudied until now. The action-adventure heroine has special relevance today, as scholars are forcefully challenging the once-dominant separate-spheres paradigm and offering alternative interpretations of gender conventions in nineteenth-century America. The hard-body action heroine in our contemporary popular culture is often assumed to be largely a product of the twentieth-century television and film industries (and therefore influenced by the women’s movement); however, physically strong, agile, sometimes violent female figures have appeared in American popular culture and literature for a very long time.Smith analyzes captivity narratives, war narratives, stories of manifest destiny, dime novels, and tales of seduction to reveal the long literary history of female protagonists who step into traditionally masculine heroic roles to win the day. Smith’s study includes such authors as Herman Mann, Mercy Otis Warren, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Edward L. Wheeler, and many more who are due for critical reassessment. In examining the female hero—with her strength, physicality, and violence—in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American narratives, The Action-Adventure Heroine represents an important contribution to the field of American studies.Trade Review“This book makes a very significant contribution in our understanding of the action-adventure heroine as a distinctive tradition in American popular print culture. Sandra Wilson Smith’s examination of thematically related texts and genres—published over the course of two hundred years—fills a meaningful gap in the scholarship of a literary character more recognized and accepted in contemporary writing. As such, this study will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of American literature, American cultural history, and women’s and gender studies.” —Daniel A. Cohen, editor of “Hero Strong” and Other Stories: Tales of Girlhood Ambition, Female Masculinity, and Women’s Worldly Achievement in Antebellum America
£44.25
University of Tennessee Press Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since
Book SynopsisAlthough Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird has attracted a great deal of scholarly and popular attention due to its engaging narrative and broad appeal to a sense of justice, little has been done to examine the modern classic through the lens of Lee's controversial novel Go Set a Watchman, published unexpectedly a year before the author's death. In Mockingbird Grows Up Cheli Reutter and Jonathan S. Cullick assemble a team of scholars to take on the task of interpreting, contextualising, and deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird in the wake of Go Set a Watchman. The essays contained in this groundbreaking volume cover a range of literary topics, such as race, sexuality, language, and reading contexts. Critically, the volume revisits the question of African-American characterisation in Lee's work and reexamines the development of Atticus Finch, a character long believed to be an exemplar of justice and virtue in Lee's fiction. The editors also take on questions regarding the publication of Go Set a Watchman, and Holly Blackford contributes an essay that places Watchman within the pantheon of American literature.Literary scholars, educators, and those interested in southern literature will appreciate the new light this publication sheds on a classic American novel. Mockingbird Grows Up offers a deeper understanding of a canonical American work and prepares a new generation to engage with Harper Lee's appealing prose, complex characters, and influential metaphors.
£48.75
University of Massachusetts Press Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study
Book SynopsisPulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) is part of a notable literary cohort, American poets who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Wilbur's verse is esteemed for its fluency, wit, and optimism; his ingeniously rhymed translations of French drama by Moliére, Racine, and Corneille remain the most often staged in the English-speaking world; his essays possess a scope and acumen equal to the era's best criticism. This biography examines the philosophical and visionary depth of his world-renowned poetry and traces achievements spanning seventy years, from political editorials about World War II to war poems written during his service to his theatrical career, including a contentious collaboration with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman.Wilbur's life has been mistakenly seen as blessed, lacking the drama of his troubled contemporaries. Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur corrects that view and explores how Wilbur's perceived ""normality"" both enhanced and limited his achievement. The authors augment the life story with details gleaned from access to his unpublished journals, family archives, candid interviews they conducted with Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, and his correspondence with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, John Malcolm Brinnin, James Merrill, and others.
£999.99
University of Massachusetts Press From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and
Book SynopsisLiterary tourism has existed in the United States since at least the early nineteenth century, and now includes sites in almost every corner of the country. From Page to Place examines how Americans have taken up this form of tourism, offering an investigation of the places and practices of literary tourism from literary scholars, historians, tour guides, and collectors. The essays here begin to trace for the first time the histories of some of these sites, the rituals associated with literary tourism, and the ways readers and visitors consume popular literature through touristic endeavors.In addition to the editors, contributors include Rebecca Rego Barry, Susann Bishop, Ben de Bruyn, Erin Hazard, Caroline Hellman, Michelle McClellan, Mara Scanlon, and Klara-Stephanie Szlezak.
£23.70
University of Massachusetts Press Literature and Criminal Justice in Antebellum
Book SynopsisThe United States set about defining and reforming its criminal justice institutions during the antebellum years, just as an innovative, expanding print culture afforded authors and publishers unprecedented opportunities to reflect on these important social developments. Carl Ostrowski traces the impact of these related historical processes on American literature, identifying a set of culturally resonant narratives that emerged from criminal justice-related discourse to shape the period's national literary expression.Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including newspaper arrest reports, prison reform periodicals, popular literary magazines, transatlantic travel narratives, popular crime novels, anthologies of prison poetry, and the memoirs of prison chaplains, Ostrowski analyzes how authors as canonical as Nathaniel Hawthorne and as obscure as counterfeiter/poet/prison inmate Christian Meadows adapted, manipulated, or rejected prevailing narratives about criminality to serve their artistic and rhetorical ends. These narratives led to the creation of new literary subgenres while also ushering in psychological interiority as an important criterion by which serious fiction was judged. Ostrowski joins and extends recent scholarly conversations on subjects including African American civic agency, literary sentimentalism, outsider authorship, and the racial politics of antebellum prison reform.
£24.65
University of Massachusetts Press Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World
Book SynopsisWhat does censorship do to a culture? How do censors justify their work? What are the mechanisms by which censorship - and self-censorship - alter people's sense of time and memory, truth and reality? Thomas Bass faced these questions when The Spy Who Loved Us, his account of the famous Time magazine journalist and double agent Pham Xuan An, was published in a Vietnamese edition. When the book finally appeared in 2014, after five years of negotiations with Vietnamese censors, more than four hundred passages had been altered or cut from the text.After the book was published, Bass flew to Vietnam to meet his censors, at least the half dozen who would speak with him. In Censorship in Vietnam, he describes these meetings and examines how censorship works, both in Vietnam and elsewhere in the world. An exemplary piece of investigative reporting, Censorship in Vietnam opens a window into the country today and shows us the precarious nature of intellectual freedom in a world governed by suppression.
£22.75
University of Massachusetts Press Book Anatomy: Body Politics and the Materiality
Book SynopsisFrom the marginalia of their readers to the social and cultural means of their production, books bear the imprint of our humanity. Embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, Indigenous books are contested spaces. A constellation of nontextual components surrounded Native American–authored publications of the long nineteenth century, shaping how these books were read and understood—including illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more. Centering Indigenous writers, Book Anatomy explores works from John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Pretty Shield, and D’Arcy McNickle published between 1854 and 1936. In examining critical moments of junction between Indigenous books and a mainstream literary marketplace, Amy Gore argues that the reprints, editions, and paratextual elements of Indigenous books matter: they embody a frontline of colonization in which Native authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous books, negotiate representations of Indigenous bodies, and fight for authority and ownership over their literary work.Trade ReviewGore’s writing is consistently clear and engaging, a pleasant, informative read. In fact, I was frequently struck by the ease with which Gore made her points." - Cari M. Carpenter, author of Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians"In this eloquently argued study, Gore reveals how Native American authors used not just their words but also book covers, dust jackets, copyright statements, illustrations, and even blank space to contest negative stereotypes and claim a kind of publishing sovereignty over their narratives. This book opens pathways for teachers, students, tribes, and scholars to see Native-authored texts in richer ways." - Matt Cohen, author of The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized
£72.25
University Press of Mississippi Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning
Book SynopsisToni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author's literary production and including her very latest works--the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison's career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison's fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison's focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove's ""The Buckeye"" and Sonia Sanchez's ""Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.""
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Steve Martin
Book SynopsisConversations with Steve Martin presents a collection of interviews and profiles that focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the course of more than four decades in show business. While those less familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the ""wild and crazy guy"" with an arrow through his head, this book makes the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work, tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days, starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer, musician, and art critic.""Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years of experience into 20 minutes of new material.,"" Martin says. But commenting on his fiction writing, he says. ""I think you have to be able to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are. That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself--just remember you can always throw it away--that's when the good stuff comes out.""The selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in
Book SynopsisBlack and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre.This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.
£81.75
University Press of Mississippi Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna: A Children's Classic at 100
Book SynopsisAppearing first as a weekly serial in The Christian Herald, Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna was first published in book form in 1913. This popular story of an impoverished orphan girl who travels from America's western frontier to live with her wealthy maternal Aunt Polly in the fictional east coast town of Beldingsville went through forty-seven printings in seven years and remains in print today in its original version, as well as in various translations and adaptations. The story's enduring appeal lies in Pollyanna's sunny personality and in her glad game, her playful attempt to accentuate the positive in every situation. In celebration of its centenary, this collection of thirteen original essays examines a wide variety of the novel's themes and concerns, as well as adaptations in film, manga, and translation.In this edited collection on Pollyanna, internationally respected and emerging scholars of children's literature consider Porter's work from modern critical perspectives. Contributors focus primarily on the novel itself but also examine Porter's sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, and the various film versions and translations of the novel. With backgrounds in children's literature, cultural and film studies, philosophy, and religious studies, these scholars extend critical thinking about Porter's work beyond the thematic readings that have dominated previous scholarship. In doing so, the authors approach the novel from theoretical perspectives that examine what happens when Pollyanna engages with the world around her--her community and the natural environment--exposing the implicit philosophical, religious, and nationalist ideologies of the era in which Pollyanna was written. The final section is devoted to studies of adaptations of Porter's protagonist.
£81.75
University of South Carolina Press Harry Potter and Beyond: On J. K. Rowling's Fantasies and Other Fictions
Book SynopsisHarry Potter and Beyond explores J. K. Rowling's beloved best-selling series and its virtuoso reimagining of British literary traditions. Weaving together elements of fantasy, the school-story novel, detective fiction, allegory, and bildungsroman, the Harry Potter novels evade simplistic categorization as children's or fantasy literature. Because the Potter series both breaks new ground and adheres to longstanding narrative formulas, readers can enhance their enjoyment of these epic adventures by better understanding their place in literary history.Along with the seven foundational novels of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and Beyond assesses the extraordinary range of supplementary material concerning the young wizard and his allies, including the films of the books, the subsequent film series of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the theatrical spectacle Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and a range of other Potter-inspired narratives. Beyond the world of Potter, Pugh surveys Rowling's literary fiction The Casual Vacancy and her detective series featuring Cormoran Strike, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Through this comprehensive overview of Rowling's body of work, Pugh reveals the vast web of connections between yesteryear's stories and Rowling's vivid creations.Trade ReviewContextualizing Rowling's works within and beyond the Harry Potter franchise in terms of genre, ideology, critical response, and artistic achievement, Tison Pugh's new book offers an informed, appreciative, and approachable assessment."—Claudia Nelson, Texas A&M University"In his eminently readable Harry Potter and Beyond, Tison Pugh offers keen insights into race, gender, queerness, and especially genre as he illuminates Rowling's fantasy fiction and also her mystery novels."—Beverly Clark, Wheaton College"This engaging and well-researched book explains how J. K. Rowling builds on five key literary genres and does a brilliant job illuminating those genres, such that the book is both an overview of Harry Potter as literature and an introduction to literature by way of Harry Potter. Highly recommended."—Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida
£70.83
University of South Carolina Press Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal
Book SynopsisThe first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated women writers in the world. In Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Geneva Cobb Moore explores how Morrison captures and mirrors the tragedy experienced by and transformation of African Americans, using parody and pastiche, semiotics and metaphors, and allegory to portray black life in the United States, teaching untaught history to liberate Americans.In this short and accessible book, originally published as part of Moore's Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature, she covers each of Morrison's novels, from The Bluest Eye to Beloved to God Help the Child. With a new introduction and added coverage of Morrison's final book, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Bodily Evidence will be essential reading for scholars, students, and readers of Morrison's novels.
£16.16
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Joseph Roth
Book SynopsisA writer described as a ""Jew in search of a fatherland"" and a ""wanderer in flight toward a tragic end,"" the Austrian writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) spent his life in pursuit of a national and cultural identity and his final years writing in fervent opposition to the Third Reich. In this introduction to Roth's novels, which include Job and The Radetzky March, Sidney Rosenfeld demonstrates how the experience of homelessness not only shaped Roth's life but also decisively defined his body of work. Rosenfeld suggests that more than any other component of Roth's varied fiction, his skillful portrayals of uprootedness and the search for home explain his international appeal, which has grown in recent decades with the translation of his works into English.Rosenfeld examines Roth's obsession with the question of belonging, tracing it to his boyhood in the Slavic-Jewish Austrian Crown land of Galicia. Illustrating how Roth's quest determined his most typical themes and gave rise to the Jewish-Slavic melancholy that permeates his narratives, Rosenfeld includes readings of the early novels. Through this fiction Roth quickly established his reputation as a literary chronicler of both the final years of the Habsburg monarchy and the lost world of East European Jewry.Rosenfeld describes Roth's flight from Berlin upon Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933, and his precarious existence as an exile. While copies of Roth's works went up in flames in Nazi book burnings, the novelist moved from one European city to another, living in hotels and writing at cafe tables. From the time of his exile until his death in Paris just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Roth produced six novels, as well as shorter works of fiction and a steady flow of journalism denouncing the Third Reich. Rosenfeld's critical readings of the novels written during Roth's exile connect them with the novelist's prescient estimate of Hitler's intentions and his own longing for a sovereign Austria.Trade ReviewThoughtful and carefully written … a useful, up-to-date guide to Roth Scholarship."—German Studies Review"Rosenfeld explores the causes of Roth's apartness and alienation from society, his feelings of nonidentity, and the inner conflicts that led to his premature death--and in the process, he brings the reader ever closer to this remarkable writer without a homeland."—Choice Reviews"Rosenfeld includes not only synopses of Roth's numerous works but also a valuable biographical list, a nearly exhaustive bibliography, and a brilliant epilogue dealing with the enigma of Roth's ambivalent attitude toward his Galician/Jewish background and his patriotism-engendered attraction to Catholicism."—World Literature Today
£17.05
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Stewart O'Nan
Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of Stewart O'Nan's work offers a comprehensive introduction to his writings and carefully examines recurring thematic concerns and stylistic characteristics of his novels. The author of eighteen novels, several works of nonfiction, and two short-story collections, O'Nan received the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society's Gold Medal for best novel for Snow Angels and the Drew Heinz Prize for In the Walled City. In 1996 Granta magazine named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.In Understanding Stewart O'Nan, Heike Paul appraises O'Nan's oeuvre to date, including his popular multigenerational trilogy of novels--Wish You Were Here; Emily, Alone; and Henry, Himself--that received enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, and the Guardian.Paul argues that O'Nan is not only a writer of popular fiction but also has developed into a major literary voice worthy of canonical status and of having a firm place in school, college, and university curricula. To this end Paul analyzes his use of formulas of long-standing popular American genres, such as the Western and the gothic tale, as he re-invents them in innovative and complex ways creating a style that Paul describes as ""everyday gothic."" She also offers a critical examination of O'Nan's treatment of American myths and vivid descriptions of struggling middle class settings and individuals who lead precarious lives. Paul believes this first critical study of O'Nan's collected works will be instrumental in building a critical archive and analysis of his oeuvre.Trade ReviewThe Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries will have an immediate and important impact on the rapidly developing field of Atlantic history. Peter Coclanis and the volume's contributors have assembled a collection of first-rate scholarship, well written and nicely executed."" - Russell R. Menard, University of Minnesota""Should any doubt the richness of 'Atlantic History' as an approach to our understanding of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, let them turn to this perceptive collection. Herein a host of respected scholars engage fully in a breadth of topics encompassing the Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and British Empires, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to illuminate the interconnected nature of the Atlantic economy during the two hundred years prior to the Age of Revolutions. This work is essential for anyone interested in the early modern Atlantic World."" - John J. McCusker, Trinity University
£17.05
University of South Carolina Press Understanding Colson Whitehead
Book SynopsisIn 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine and frequently defy accepted notions of truth.Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.
£17.05
