Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000 Books

Book SynopsisContinually attacked by government officials and educators, installment or colportage novels fascinated their underprivileged readers. Melodrama and sensation were essential ingredients. The hurriedly written, rambling plots sought to electrify fantasies of women with new turn-of-the-century aspirations. They also fused raw political ideas offering populist and paternalist solutions to society's challenges and tensions. Through the study of one rare, surviving colportage novel, Peter S. Fisher offers an unusual mental and visual panorama of a nearly vanished Wilhelmine world.

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Book SynopsisThis comprehensive volume analyzes the radical change in the nature of armed conflicts and in the way they are narrated and represented. Ever since the First World War has changed war itself, rendering meaningless the very vocabulary of war in terms such as "battle", "front", "non-combatant", "open city" and "hero", new words, new approaches, new theories and new texts had to be invented. The enemy became invisible: Submarines, tanks, mines, gas, long-range artillery, and airplanes made this war different from all the other that came before. A hundred years after the beginning of this terrible war, it is now time to recall different representations of the armed conflicts of the 20th century. The articles in this collection analyze representations of the Canudos Civil War in Brazil, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the colonial wars in Africa, and the war in Afghanistan, aiming to understand how war and the telling of war have changed during the most murderous hundred years in the history of mankind.

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Book SynopsisAlexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the Cold War's most iconic writers. This book offers an in-depth analysis of his reception in the US, UK, and Germany before and after 1991. Elisa Kriza skilfully explores how Solzhenitsyn's work can be understood with the paradigm of witness literature and uncovers the dynamics behind the politicised reception of his writing. From the mid-1980s onwards, Solzhenitsyn's popularity dwindled -- was this for ideological reasons? What about the rumours linking him with Russian nationalism? This study does not shy away from stretching beyond anti-communism and touching more contentious subjects -- such as anti-feminism, anti-Semitism, and revisionism -- in Solzhenitsyn's work and reception. Bringing Solzhenitsyn back from his 'critical exile' and redefining his work as memory culture, Kriza's book is a crucial scholarly intervention, unveiling the mechanism that can transform a controversial figure into a moral icon.Trade Review"The merits of this book are several and decisive. First of all it shows a solid and comprehensive grasp of Solzhenitsyn's work in its entirety and the huge body of criticism it has fostered, from books to articles and from political statements to reviews and debates in various media. Second, the ambition of making a reception study that redefines the field and, at the same time, exemplifies it through an investigation of a vast and complex material is innovative and represents a real scholarly achievement. Third, the comparative and interdisciplinary approach is organically embedded in the chapters in their detailed readings, and documents Elisa Kriza`s capacity to master a differentiated use of the vast material." -- Svend-Erik Larsen, Professor of Comparative Literature, Aarhus University"Revising by nature, Elisa Kriza`s study re-examines selected principal tendencies of Solzhenitsyn`s reception in the Anglophone and German-speaking world since the 1960s, and contextualizes his oeuvre within the framework of witness literature and representations of confinement. The main (and timely) question she posits is: Political factors notwithstanding, should Solzhenitsyn still be read in the West todayand if yes, why and how?" -- Andrei Rogatchevski, Professor of Russian Literature and Culture, University of Tromsø, NorwayTable of ContentsForeword, by Andrei Rogatchevski Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Solzhenitsyn as a Writer and a Witness 3. Solzhenitsyn's Oeuvre between Aesthetics and Politics 4. Solzhenitsyn in History Conclusions Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking collection from scholars and artists on the legacy of Beckett in contemporary art provides readers with a unique view of this important writer for page, stage, and screen. The volume argues that Beckett is more than an influence on contemporary arthe is, in fact, a contemporary artist, working alongside artists across disciplines in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. The volume explores Becketts formal experiments in drama, prose, and other media as contemporary, parallel revisions of modernisms theoretical presuppositions congruent with trends like Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Containing interviews with and pieces by working artists, alongside contributions of scholars of literature and the visual arts, this collection offers an essential reassessment of Becketts work. Perceiving Becketts ongoing importance from the perspective of contemporary art practices, dominated by installation and conceptual strategies, it offers a completely new frame through which to read perennial Beckettian themes of impotence, failure, and penury. From Becketts remains, as it were, contemporary artists find endless inspiration.

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Book SynopsisForming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Becketts creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices -- eyes, mirrors, windows -- point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres -- manifestations without origin -- reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Becketts use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Becketts creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan -- in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts -- offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

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Book SynopsisThis monograph examines Caryl Phillipss The Nature of Blood (1997),a novel exploring recurring expressions of exclusion and discrimination throughout history with particular focus on Jewish and African diasporas and the storytelling of its migrant characters. Particular attention is given to the analysis of characters revealing different facets of the Jewish question. Maria Festa also provides a historical excursus on the notion of race and considers another character alluding to Shakespeares Othello to expose the paradoxes of the relationship between subjugator and subjugated. The study makes the case that among the novels most remarkable achievements is Phillipss effort to redress the absence of the Other from our history, that by depicting experiences of displacement, and by confronting readers with seemingly disconnected narrative fragments, The Nature ofBloodis a reminder of the missing stories, the voicesmarginalised and often racializedthat Western history has consistently failed to include in its accounts of the past and arguably its present.Trade Review"""In her reading of Caryl Phillipss The Nature of Blood, Maria Festa studies the unique ways in which the narrative of racism, Nazi camps, traumatic memory, and black consciosness meet the issues of historical imagination. Literature and traumatic fiction are here once again the source of a tenacious counter-memory."" Roberto Beneduce, Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology, University of Turin, and co-author of Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics

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Book SynopsisThe discourse of self and other on which the classic horror novel was based was quickly applied to the circumstances of the colonial situation and projected onto the relationship between the colonial master and the colonial subject. Contemporary black Australian artists take on this colonial shower discourse, tear it to pieces through their sharp perspective and finally transform it into a discourse of Aboriginal Gothic. The present study develops the theoretical foundations of Aboriginal Gothic and uses the term thus concretized, to analyze novels by Vivienne Cleven, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Sam Watson and Alexis Wright as well as films by Beck Cole and Tracey Moffatt. The focus of the study is the extent to which the traditional European shower discourse is interspersed with elements of indigenous Australian culture in order to portray the current situation of Australian Aborigines and to describe a recovered cultural identity.

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Book SynopsisTagore's human prayer embraces the beauty of the world, fostering a sense of connection and compassion with all living beings. It emphasizes that man is never truly alone, finding solace and joy in the shared experiences of life with others.

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Book SynopsisThe book explores Tagore's prowess as a novelist, underscoring his overlooked fiction writing compared to his poetry and plays. It offers a critical evaluation of his novels, emphasizing his substantial literary impact.

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Book SynopsisA study of the use of history as political ammunition and literature as historical counter-discourse in Mongane Serote''s Gods of Our Time, Mike Nicol''s The Ibis Tapestry, and Zakes Mda''s Ways of Dying. Moslund shows how literary engagement with the past seeks to rupture the continuity of a strongly dichotomised epistemology and through that dissolve the inherited polarisation of society. Falsification of history is exposed as constructed discourse and past simplifications of reality as sharply demarcated into homogenous self-justifying, categorisations of, Us against Them, are challenged with paradox, doubt and introspection.

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Book SynopsisMadison Jones is the author of eleven novels, among them are The Innocent, An Exile (film: I Walk the Line), A Cry of Absence, Season of the Strangle, and Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light winner of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing. His novel Herod''s Wife appeared in 2003. Madison Jones is a central figure in American literature, but paradoxically not well-known. He writes about conflicts between the native and the alien, tradition and progress, and innocence and experience. Like his fellow-novelists George Garrett and David Madden, who have contributed to this volume, Jones shares the regret at the loss of inherited values. He has been praised by the critics Ashley Brown, Monroe Spears, and Lewis P. Simpson, as an important transitional writer. And according to contemporary writers Madison Smartt Bell, William Hoffman, and Lee Smith, his novels are lessons in the possibility of the immediate. As the essays in this collection show, Madison Jones has a dark view of human experience, but also self-knowledge and compassion. He has succeeded in finding his own voice and has created an emphatically moral world that transcends its Southern particulars. Essays by Jewel Spears Brooker, George Garrett, Richard Gray, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Madison Jones, Lewis A. Lawson, David Madden, and Hans H. Skei. Plus interviews and a Madison Jones bibliography.

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Book SynopsisA collection of contemporary South Asian writing delves into freedom through nationalism, gender conflicts, and class struggles. The anthology highlights freedom's versatility in poetry, prose, fiction, drama, and autobiography, showcasing literature's role in envisioning a harmonious South Asia.

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Book SynopsisAn exuberant Angela’s Ashes meets When Did You Last See Your Father?; an intoxicating memoir of Ireland and being Irish (and Anglo-Irish as well) from one of literature’s most flamboyant characters.Trade Review‘A book to be relished’WILLIAM TREVOR ‘The reader should be warned that this is a book that makes you laugh out loud in public. A magnificent entertainment’Bernard O’Donoghue, Independent ‘The Falling Angels is a work of autobiography dominated by a single theme – the author’s love-hate relationship with his Irish-Catholic heritage. John Walsh’s father was a doctor from Galway and his mother was a nurse from Sligo. They came to England to find employment, met on a pilgrimage to Rome, married, and settled in the scruffy Battersea end of Clapham, where Walsh and his sister Madelyn were brought up… Anyone with even the slightest interest in or connection with Ireland will have a grand time with this book’DAVID LODGE, SUNDAY TIMES ‘A beautifully written book, a family memoir which is moving, honest and funny by turns… the description of the terrible evening in which Walsh insists that his father, mother and a visiting priest and nun watch a film about Ireland – only to find that it contains an explicit and embarrassing sex scene – made me cry with laughter… Anyone who has visited Ireland, or grew up there will feel serial tremors of recognition at the details he describes’JENNY MCCARTNEY, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ‘A warm, seamlessly well-written memoir… the prose is fluent, its craftsmanship meticulous. The dialogue is dead-on: the hungry father could “eat a reverend mother’s arse through a cane chair…” Walsh’s affection for his subject matter is infectious’LIONEL SHRIVER, GUARDIAN ‘In an age of unreliable fake-Irish memoirs, John Walsh’s The Falling Angels convincingly and hilariously anatomises the uncertain identities of the émigré Irish middle class…’ROY FOSTER, NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

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Book SynopsisBy turns, an unsparing and joyous account of life in a postwar London rooming house by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.

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Book SynopsisThis second superb collected work of one of Britain's best-loved comedians is an excellent companion to the sensational original, ‘The Essential Spike Milligan’. Spanning his 50-year career and incorporating a rich and varied range of material, this second anthology is as wonderfully unmissable as the first.Trade ReviewPraise for The Essential Spike Milligan: 'A wonderful anthology…a superbly sustained piece of comedy. Like so much else in this collection, these excerpts inspire a return to the source.' The Times 'Successfully shows why Spike Milligan deserves his place at the heart of British comedy.' TLS

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Book SynopsisIn a major publishing project, all of Brian Aldiss’ 300+ short stories are being collected together for the first time.Trade Review‘The titan of science fiction’ TELEGRAPH

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Book SynopsisLike the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they conftont the merciless frozen expanses of the north. Yet London breaks free of stereotypical figures and one-dimensional plots to explore deeper psychological and social questions of self-mastery, masculinity, and racial domination. The uneasy relationship between the Native Americans and whites lies at the heart of many of the stories, while others reflect London's growing awareness of the destruction wrought by the white incursion on Indian culture.Northland Stories comprises nineteen of Jack London's greatest short works, including An Odyssy of the North (London's major breakthrough as a young author), The White Silence, The Law of Life, The League of the Old Men, and the world classic To Build a Fire.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaTable of ContentsEdited with an Introduction and Notes by Jonathan AuerbachIntroduction by Jonathan AuerbachSuggestions for Further ReadingA Note on the TextNorthland StoriesThe White SilenceThe Son of the WolfIn a Far CountryTo the Man on TrailThe Wisdom of the TrailAn Odyssey of the NorthThe God of His FathersSiwashGrit of WomenWhere the Trail ForksThe Law of LifeKeesh, the Son of KeeshThe Death of LigounLi Wan, the FairThe League of the Old MenThe Story of Jees UckLove of LifeThe Sun-Dog TrailTo Build a FireExplanatory NotesAppendix

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Book SynopsisThis collection of poems by the rock lyricist Robert Hunter, best known for his songwriting contributions to legendary performers such as Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead, features rhythmic, philosophical meditations on art, authenticity, public perception, and love. Hunter delivers his lines with effective and deceptively simple language, the ideal vehicle for his timeless, wide-ranging observations about the relationships we have with our expectations, our mythology, and each other as we navigate modern life and ephemera.

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Book SynopsisAnxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author''s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman''s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño''s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and misencounters between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the common grounds approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.Trade Reviewan excellent study that succeeds both on the largest and smallest scales of analysis, in its close readings as much as in its hemispheric observations ... The book will work for readers of very different levels of expertise, as Lawrence knows how to introduce newcomers to a topic without sacrificing the level of abstraction that is to be expected of top-notch scholarship, and he is commendably careful and self-critical about his own argument and method. In short, this truly is a model of hemispheric literary scholarship * Sascha Pöhlmann, Amerikastudien *An exciting, lucid reframing of the interactions between North American and Latin American literatures over the course of the past two centuries, Anxieties of Experience shows the critical and conceptual gains to be made from rethinking the hemispheric through the lens of world literature. Moving nimbly between close analysis and distant views to map the shifting, dialogic, dialectical relation between literatures north and south, the book's central concern and achievement is to reboot and reorient hemispheric literary studies; stowed-away in its coda is a thrilling supplement, a mapping of an entirely new scene of the contemporary. Lawrence's is a witty, incisive, eloquent new voice in literary and cultural criticism. * Michelle Clayton, Brown University, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity *Anxieties of Experience offers an exceptionally bold and mind-expanding reconnaissance of the counterpoint and interweave between distinctive traditions of U. S. and Latin American literary thought and practice over the past two centuries. Anyone seriously interested in the past, the present, and the likely future of 'hemispheric literature' will want to read this book from start to finish. * Lawrence Buell, Harvard University, author of The Dream of the Great American Novel *A massively erudite and elegantly written book, Anxieties of Experience takes its readers on a hemispheric journey through modern times, leading up to the present. Comparing and contrasting the literatures of North and South America is ultimately, for Lawrence, a means of examining whether a bookish life is a life lived to the fullest. With its sustained line of inquiry across corpora, the volume makes a valuable contribution to several fields of study-while also introducing general readers to hemispheric studies. * Héctor Hoyos, Stanford University, author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Hemispheric Literary Divides Chapter 1: Cultural Divergence: The US Literature of Experience and the Latin American Literature of the Reader Chapter 2: An Inter-American Episode: Jorge Luis Borges, Waldo Frank, and the Battle for Whitman's America Chapter 3 Uncommon Grounds: The Representation of History in Absalom, Absalom!, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Song of Solomon Part II: The Literary Fields of the Americas Chapter 4: Full Immersion: Modernist Aesthetics and the US Literature of Experience Chapter 5 Voracious Readers: The Latin American Lettered City and the US Literature of Experience Epilogue: After Bolaño: Toward a Literature of the Americas Notes

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Book SynopsisTense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war''s portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book''s introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on critical futurities, Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwarTrade ReviewBy moving our vision from earth to sky, from soldiers in the trenches to civilians under air raids, Paul Saint-Amour makes rich and surprising our understanding of the twentieth-century and its literature. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and we ourselves emerge in the arresting light of this first modern collective anxiety. * Elaine Scarry, author of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom *This book is a tour de force, introducing an entirely new approach to the modernist imagination. Saint-Amour makes us hear the undertones of menace in interwar literature, thereby reconfiguring modernist fiction as meditations on disasters to come. * Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History *Paul Saint-Amour reinterprets culture during the years between World War I and World War II as an era of anxious anticipation. Thoughtful, penetrating, and important, Tense Future expands our understanding of war's destructive power. * Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences *Tense Future moves fluently through the cultural records of the First World War, interwar, Second World War, and Cold War. Creating a wholly new archive, Saint-Amour does nothing less than shift the tense of imaginative action in the literature of major record: from memory, which Paul Fussell established as its primary imaginative circumstance, to anticipation; from reverie to dread. Our way of reading the literature of a century of war will be changed by this comprehensive and compelling account. * Vincent Sherry, author of Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence *Intricately crafted and thoroughly documented, Tense Future not only redefines the modern epic but also lays the groundwork for reconceptualizing the interwar period and perspectives on temporality. * W. T. Martin, CHOICE *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; Introduction: Traumatic Earliness ; I. Bukimi ; II. The Precincts of Time ; III. Collective Psychosis ; Facing Trauma ; Critical Futurities ; Three Interwars ; Weak Modernism ; Part One ; 1. On the Partiality of Total War ; The Case of L. E. O. Charlton ; Intimations of Totality ; Interwar Air Power Theory ; Rival Preemptions of Law and War ; National Totality and Colonial Air Control ; Bombing Display I ; Bombing Display II ; 2. Perpetual Suspense: Virginia Woolf's Wartime Gothic ; Morphologies of Suspense ; Mark Time ; Mrs. Dalloway and the Gaze of Total War ; The Years: Immunities Lost and Found ; <"Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid>" ; 3. Fantasias of the Archive: Hamilton's Savage and Jenkinson's Manual ; A Promise of Terror to Come ; Savage Foreclosures ; Declining Fertility ; Jenkinson's Manual ; War Archives: Theory and Performance ; Thoughts on Archives in an Air Raid ; The Death Drive of the Archive ; Part Two ; 4. Encyclopedic Modernism ; Against Epic ; Revisiting the Encyclopedie ; The Eleventh ; Encyclopedic Narrative ; Modern Epic ; Pace Bersani ; 5. The Shield of Ulysses ; Ulysses' Encyclopedism ; Encyclopedia Prophetica ; Urban Violence and Amity Lines ; Theater of Total War ; Scattering ; 6. War Shadowing: Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End ; Uncyclopedia Britannica ; Total Worry ; Futures in Furniture ; Conclusion: Perpetual Interwar ; Appendix: Chapter Abstracts ; Bibliography ; Index

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Book SynopsisThe Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout,Trade ReviewAssembling thought-provoking essays that encompass a vast range of poetry and poetics, The Oxford Handbook succeeds admirably at offering readers some of the best current approaches to reading modern and contemporary American poetry ... It is hard to envision a volume that would better take account of the present state of criticism and scholarship of American poetry. * Stephen Fredman, Modern Language Review *Table of ContentsList of Contributors ; Part I ; 1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present ; Cary Nelson ; Part II ; 2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies ; Rachel Blau DuPlessis ; 3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism ; Robert Dale Parker ; 4. "Jeweled Bindings": Modernist Women's Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality ; Melissa Girard ; 5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem ; John Marsh ; 6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore ; Linda A. Kinnahan ; 7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond ; Peter Nicholls ; 8. Cezanne's Ideal of "Realization": A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry ; Charles Altieri ; 9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry's Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues ; Edward Brunner ; 10. Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture ; Tim Newcomb ; 11. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry Scene, 1920-1960 ; Susan Rosenbaum ; 12. Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America ; Mike Chasar ; 13. "With Ambush and Stratagem": American Poetry in the Age of Pure War ; Philip Metres ; 14. The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry ; Karen Jackson Ford ; 15. Asian American Poetry ; Josephine Park ; 16. "The Pardon of Speech": The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry ; Walter Kalaidjian ; 17. American Poetry, Prayer, and the News ; Jahan Ramazani ; 18. The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry ; Michael Thurston ; 19. The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960 ; Al Filreis ; 20. Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse ; Lytle Shaw ; 21. "Do our chains offend you?": The Poetry of American Political Prisoners ; Mark W. Van Wienen ; 22. Disability Poetics ; Michael Davidson ; 23. Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism ; Lynn Keller ; 24. Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry ; Timothy Yu ; 25. "Internationally Known": The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop ; James Smethurst ; 26. Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface ; Adalaide Morris ; Index

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Book SynopsisModernism''s Other Work challenges deeply held critical beliefs about the meaning-in particular the political meaning-of modernism''s commitment to the work of art as an object detached from the world. Ranging over works of poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, and film, it argues that modernism''s core aesthetic problem-the artwork''s status as an object, and a subject''s relation to it-poses fundamental questions of agency, freedom, and politics. With fresh accounts of works by canonical figures such as William Carlos Williams and Marcel Duchamp, and transformative readings of less-studied writers such as William Gaddis and Amiri Baraka, Siraganian reinterprets the relationship between aesthetic autonomy and politics. Through attentive readings, the study reveals how political questions have always been modernism''s critical work, even when writers such as Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis boldly assert the art object''s immunity from the world''s interpretations. Reorienting our undeTrade ReviewIn moving nimbly between modernism and postmodernism, accounting for a politics of aesthetics, and negotiating multiple media, this is modernist criticism at its athletic best. Siraganian's stringent argument for meaning's autonomy not only makes for provocative groupings but can change the way we understand autonomy and what it bequeaths. Moreover, Siraganian writes like the best prosecuting attorney you could hope for-or fear. * Jessica Burstein, University of Washington *Modernism's Other Work represents a real advance in how we read some major writers, and in how we understand their own views of their art. Lisa Siraganian argues that important modernists pursued a vision of art at odds with our assumptions about what they believed. She is a fine guide to artists like Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and others. Anyone interested in what modernists did, in what modernists thought, in what their successors can do, about writing and bodies and visual art, will surely learn much from Siraganian's good book." * Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry *Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Theorizing Art and Punctuation: Gertrude Stein's Breathless Poetry ; Satirizing Frameless Art: Wyndham Lewis's Defense of Representation ; Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos Williams and Company ; Challenging Kitsch Equality: William Gaddis's and Elizabeth Bishop's "Neo" Rear-Garde Art ; Administering Poetic Breath for the People: Charles Olson and Amiri Baraka ; Coda: Universal Breath

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Book SynopsisCommonwealth of Letters examines midcentury literary institutions integral to modernism and postcolonial writing. Several organizations central to interwar modernism, such as the BBC, influential publishers, and university English departments, became important sites in the emergence of postcolonial literature after the war. How did some of modernism''s leading figures of the 1930s--such as T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender--come to admire late colonial and early postcolonial literature in the 1950s? Similarly, why did late colonial and early postcolonial writers--including Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Claude McKay, and Ngugi wa Thiong''o--actively seek alliances with metropolitan intellectuals? Peter Kalliney''s original and extensive archival work on modernist cultural institutions demonstrates that this disparate group of intellectuals had strong professional incentives to treat one another more as fellow literary professionals, and less as political or cultural antTrade ReviewIt is the mapping of the literary networks, rivalries, allegiances and collaborations that marks Kalliney's book out as an important contribution in this turn of postcolonial studies to interaction with modernist periodicity and aesthetics ... Kalliney offers a truly expansive study of the importance of migration in the developmental history of modernism. * Robert McLaughlan and Neelam Srivastava, Years Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *Commonwealth of Letters is an original and revisionist account of the historical encounter between the writers and institutions of English modernism and late colonial intellectuals, informed by solid archival research and refreshing new readings of the postcolonial canon, and keenly attuned to the complex history of cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. * Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste *For too long, modernist autonomy and postcolonial politics were thought to be antithetical. This book's splendid research deals this dichotomy a convincing blow. With illuminating insights into crossracial networks in radio, publishing, and other cultural institutions, Kalliney brilliantly shows how modernism enriched African and Caribbean literatures and was itself sustained by them. * Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics *A fascinating study which explores how modernist ideas influenced a generation of black and white writers-often working sideby-side-and created international networks of affiliation which rise up above race or geography. An illuminating and convincing examination of Anglophone literary history in the second half of the twentieth century. * Caryl Phillips, author of Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11 *This densely argued study covers a lot of ground, from literary modernism to postcolonial Anglophone literature from the West Indies and Afria. The book's bibloiography testifies to Kalliney's prodigious research." -M.S. Vogeler, emerita, California State University, Fullerton, CHOICEKalliney's argument is extensive, meticulously researched, and compellingly revisionist... Kalliney provides a startling and thorough reimagining of the complex lines of aesthetic, philosophic, and institutional affiliation between metropolitan and colonial authors in the period 1930-70. * Novel *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments and Permissions ; 1. Modernist Networks and Late Colonial Intellectual ; 2. Race and Modernist Anthologies: Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Ezra Pound ; 3. For Continuity: FR Leavis, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o ; 4. Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors ; 5. Developing Fictions: Amos Tutuola at Faber and Faber ; 6. Metropolitan Publisher as Postcolonial Clearinghouse: The African Writers Series ; 7. Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual ; Conclusion ; Bibliography

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Book SynopsisPoetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades afTrade ReviewAndrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture is perhaps the most dazzling work on American poetry this year and can justly be read as the culmination of several years of work on American poetry and the everyday ...Epstein's work is, quite genuinely, the culmination of this fine red thread of scholarly work. [The first two chapters] summarize and clarify work on poetics and the everyday decisively. Readers seeking a complete and concise overview of the state of the field should turn to these two chapters as well for a rehearsal of the increasing use of Henri Lefebvre in contemporary literary studies and the leveraging of his form of Marxism in tension with French theory and the Situationists. ... Epstein's nuanced close readings, critical acumen in theorizations of the everyday, and fluid movement through diverse poetic visions are deeply impressive. * Year's Work in English Studies *Andrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture is a sharply focused contribution to the field of everyday life studies that underscores the rhetorical stakes of daily life and the role of poetry to channel attention in an age of distraction. * Journal of Modern Literature *Attention Equals Life contributes meaningfully to a growing body of critical work on avant-garde literary conceptualism and its precursors and will be of interest to a wide range of readers with and without specifically academic interests in contemporary poetry; the book is accessibly written and makes a propitious introduction to twentieth-century theories and poetries of everyday life. Like the extravagantly inclusive long poems Epstein favors in his study, poems that awaken us to the elusive textures of habitual experience, Attention Equals Life will awaken its audience to the exhilarating formal experiments that the everyday, fraught with inexhaustible paradoxes, has lately inspired. * Nikki Skillman, Modern Philology *Epstein's Attention Equals Life (2016) offers a powerful account of the preoccupation with the everyday and the construction of what he calls a "skeptical realism" in postwar US poetry. ... Epstein's argument is not only original but persuasive too. It has that quality that only the best arguments do of cutting through an already well-plowed field in order to reveal similarities and affinities between otherwise aesthetically disparate materials. * Christopher Breu, American Literary History *The book is extremely readable for broad audiences and makes a compelling extension of discussions of the everyday, both from an American standpoint and with a focus on mid-century literary production. The nuanced attention to poetic language is convincing and the theoretical and philosophical argumentation is bested only by detailed analyses of poems, which are frequent and efficient. Close attention to the text itself is always diligently related to the American philosophical tradition so that textual analyses do not operate as mere illustrations but signal a new step in scholarship. This study challenges our perception of poetry as a genre and as a form - it raises new questions in terms of poetics, aesthetics, and ethics, and particularly how poetry works as a form of cultural and political action. Attention Equals Life is a completely convincing work. * citation for Modernist Studies Association Book Prize shortlist *As Andrew Epstein deftly explains in 'Attention Equals Life,' the preoccupation with everyday life is a relatively new impulse in American poetry, especially as practiced in more deliberate, persistent, and extreme forms ... Epstein delivers essays on the intentions and works of representative poets - James Schuyler, A.R. Ammons, Bernadette Mayer, and Ron Silliman. His astute readings of their work relative to the ordinary provide timely insights into why, how, and where this immersion in the everyday gained speed, depth and variety after 1945... Epstein's study clears a path to the recent past that helps us understand why genre- and syntax-busting techniques are now much more visible in American poetry. The ordinary is as wild and provocative as ever. * Ron Slate, On the Seawall *Attention Equals Life provides an innovative, eloquent account of how 20th- and 21st-century poets' conceptions (and/or representations, and/or performative embodiments) of attention have overlapped with a philosophically inflected form of everyday-life theory as developed by figures like Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. Epstein's expansive scope stretches from the psychological formulations of William James, to the cinematic essays of Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, to contemporary everyday-life poetic experiments by Brenda Coultas, Claudia Rankine, and Harryette Mullen. Perhaps most importantly, Attention Equals Life offers the galvanizing example of an omnivorous yet meticulous scholarly study that poses direct questions to readers about how best to live out one's own everyday. * Andy Fitch, Los Angeles Review of Books *Attention Equals Life is a significant contribution to the study of how this modern contradiction continues to play out in contemporary culture, and offers a clear way of talking about how a "redistribution of the sensible" might be achieved through a recognition of the inherently mediated nature of perception. In seeking to situate its subject within the widest possible context, though, it offers a choice to the reader, between attending to what unites a disparate set of poets, and focusing on particular work and ideas to the exclusion of others. * Nick Lavery, Roundtable *The erudition Epstein brings to Attention Equals Life makes the book a worthwhile, if sometimes complicated, read. It provides an introduction to a number of contemporary poets and poetic schools. The fact that this reader disagrees with the author's basic premise does not preclude an enthusiastic recommendation to anyone interested in placing poetry since 1945 in a broader philosophical and aesthetic context. * Marc Jampole, American Book Review *A book of enormous breadth and ambition, Attention Equals Life is at once astonishing and reaffirming, challenging and clarifying. It engages more broadly than its scholarly focus would suggest. Epstein (Florida State Univ.) explores contemporary poetry's obsession with the quotidian, setting that obsession in literary context (both historical and current) and identifying it as contemporaneous with cultural interest in the ordinary, the commonplace, the "real." His argument is persuasive, the information is abundant and compelling, the endnotes and bibliography are extensive if not exhaustive, and the style is accessible. This book has something for everyone-poets, critics, teachers of literature and contemporary culture, fans of contemporary poetry, and even those who think that no poetry of value has emerged in the US since Robert Frost...Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * J. A. Zoller, Choice *Theoretically adept, poetically alert, and socially perceptive * serious about ethics as about aestheticsthis book reveals how the quotidian and its immersive immediacies are fundamental to contemporary cultural practices. Epstein keenly traces the anti-sublime practices of skeptical realism with acute attention.Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work *Andrew Epstein has written a wonderful book that sensitizes us to the way that a strain of experimental poetry has sought to attend to daily life in all its complexity and obscurity without desiring to transcend it. Theoretically nuanced, historically compelling, and politically astute, Epstein writes about the skeptical realism of everyday life poetry with energy, wit, and perspicacity. * Ben Highmore, author of Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics *Is poetry the most potent remedy for our Age of Distraction? If so, Andrew Epstein argues, then it works most effectively not through escaping into transcendence or imaginative transfiguration but through a rigorous attention to the everyday. In Attention Equals Life, he demonstrates brilliantly how several generations of American poets (from James Schuyler and A.R. Ammons to Bernadette Mayer, Ron Silliman, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Claudia Rankine) join together with theorists of the everyday (the American Pragmatists and continental thinkers such as Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Lefebvre, Debord, and de Certeau) to probe the promise and limits of the quotidian. By inventing a variety of constraints, techniques, and projects, the poets succeed in revealing directly what the theorists can only assert: that the ordinary is extraordinary. * Stephen Fredman, author of Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art *[An] expansive new book..."A significant contribution to the study of post-World War II literature and western thinking. * Journal of Poetics Research *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Life Since 1945 Chapter 1: The Crisis of Attention, Everyday Life Theory, and Contemporary Poetry Chapter 2: "Each Day So Different, Yet Still Alike": James Schuyler and the Elusive Everyday Chapter 3: "The Tiny Invites Attention": A. R. Ammons's Quotidian Muse Chapter 4: Writing the Maternal Everyday: Bernadette Mayer and her "Daughters" (Hoa Nguyen, Susan Holbrook, Laynie Browne) Chapter 5: "There is No Content Here, Only Dailiness": Poetry as Critique of Everyday Life in Ron Silliman's Ketjak Chapter 6: Everyday Life Projects in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Kenneth Goldsmith, Claudia Rankine, Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen) Conclusion: Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Beyond Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisA new and illuminating critique of the narrative, ethical and aesthetic strands in Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses.

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Book SynopsisA book about the meaning of travel, about how important the topic has been for writers for two and a half centuries, and about how excellent the literature of travel happened to be in England and America in the 1920s and 30s.Trade Review"This is the most interesting and insightful book that I have read on travel writing, and my students seem to agree."--Jonathan Smith, Texas A & M University"Abroad is an exemplary piece of criticism. It is immensely readable. It bristles with ideas. It disinters a regal lost masterpiece from the library stacks. It admits a whole area of writing-at last!-to its proper place in literary history."--The New York Times Book Review"What Fussell has done-brightly, wittily, with bravura display of critical methods-is to reclaim for travel writing a large measure of literary respectability."--Newsweek"[Fussell's] book is a fitting substitute for the real thing; it is a journey in time and space, offering the serendipitous pleasure of the open road."--Time"An absolutely dazzling continent of sociology, literary criticism, cultural history, biography and amusing anecdote, so borderlessly fused that we hardly realize what great intellectual distances we are covering."The New York Times"[A] witty book that bristles with outrageous assertions....Fussell obviously enjoys the act of writing about his reading, which is what makes the book so lively."--The Tribune (London)

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Book Synopsis''A truly masterful biography, wise in its completeness. If Joyce be a great writer, then this is a great book.'' Sunday Times''The greatest literary biography of the century.'' Anthony Burgess, The ObserverTrade Review'major scholarly work ... a new bench-mark for biography as a major vehicle of literary scholarship' John Batchelor, British Book News, September 1993

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Book SynopsisThis collection of Abiola Irele's essays examines African literary traditions in the broad sense, and places the work of individual authors in context. Irele presents critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Kamau Braithwaite, Amadou Hapae Ba, and Amadou Kourouma, among others.Trade ReviewAn interesting collection of essays...Well worth the reading time. * African Studies Review *Table of Contents1: The African Imagination 2: Orality, Literacy, and African Literature 3: African Letters: The Making of a Tradition 4: Dimensions of African Discourse 5: A Study in Ambiguity: Amadou Hampaté Bâ's The Fortunes of Wangrin 6: Narrative, History and the African Imagination: Amadou Kourouma's Monnè, outrages et défis 7: The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart 8: The Return of the Native: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Masks 9: A National Voice: The Poetry and Plays of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo 10: Parables of the African Condition: The New Realism in African Fiction Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAn anthology featuring 130 poets from ten countries and translated from fifteen languages, including Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Yiddish. Translated by ninety translators it focuses on poetry from the 1960s and 70s.Trade Review"Extremely useful and timely edition."--Joseph Conte, State University of New York at Buffalo "A nice anthology with a wonderful selection of poets."--Lily Phillips, Duke University "Very timely and worthwhile!"--John Felstiner, Stanford University "This is a valuable compilation, especially for the up date section, and should be of compelling interest to any course on poetry, or in courses on Comparative Literature, European Studies, Humanities, etc., in which all readings are in English. . . . This anthology opens a world unknown to most of us, but well worth looking into, for reasons both literary and cultural."--Murray Sachs, Brandeis University "An indispensable text for students in translation and creative writing programs; offers a unique and inviting introduction to the poetry of the region."--Seymour Mayne, University of Ottawa "A praiseworthy attempt to mount a travelling exhibition of East European Poetry....This anthology offers exciting glimpses of poetic worlds still to be fully mapped."--The Times Literary Supplement "Though a very few East European poets, like Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert of Poland, hjave come to international attention, even the most proficient and prolific have reputations largely restricted, by language as much as politics, to their own countries. All the more welcome, then, is this very large representation of 130 poets from 10 Eastern bloc countries writing in 15 languages....In making this fresh compilation, Professor George has been aided by several expert consultants, and the validity of the translations is confirmed by the many very distinguished names among the 90 who rendered these diverse tongues into English."--Booklist "This ambitious anthology has long been overdue....Emery George and all the contributors to this anthology are to be congratulated for an excellent introduction to Slavic and East European poetry. Here is a work that can be used in poetry and translating courses and, at the same time, can stand as a mini-reference to non-Western poets."--World Literature Today "A good anthology, rich in the range off reading experience, attractive in the warm understanding of the editors who chose the pieces and certainly unique as a store of knowledge about East European poetry."--Journal of Baltic Studies "Wow! This is just what I want. It picks up where Postwar Polish Poetry and other anthologies stop."--Sam Garner, North Carolina A&T State University "A must for everybody interested in European literature."--Peter Steiner, University of Pennsylvania "A high-quality collection of poetry in translation. The poetry in this collection succeeds wonderfully in giving Western readers a sense of the variety of East European poetry, but just as important, a sense of the profound difference in voice and vision between East European poetry and its Western counterpart."--Thomas C. Carlson, The Commercial Appeal

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Book SynopsisWilliam Faulkner more than any other writer is intimately associated with the South about which he wrote. This book reveals the man and his family and the ways in which southern culture and his own life were wound around one another in his greatest works.Trade Reviewa rewarding piece of scholarship about a mysterious man * Observer *

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Book SynopsisSchuchard''s critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how T.S. Eliot''s personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also erodes conventional attitudes toward Eliot''s intellectual and spiritual development, showing how early and consistently his classical and religious sensibility manifests itself in his poetry and criticism. The book examines his reading, his teaching, his bawdy poems, and his life-long attraction to music halls and other modes of popular culture to show the complex relation between intellectual biography and art.Trade ReviewStands out as one of the best books on Eliot in recent years ... Revealing the complexity of Eliot's life and work - against a simplistic, critical consensus - is a strength of each one of these essays. * Review of English Studies *Excellent monograph ... Schuchard's book ranks among the most considerable contributions of the year for significantly revising some central planks of the standard biographical narrative, let alone the discourse ... This is a book to be savoured. * Years Work in English Studies *This book ... is a major landmark in Elio scholarship and criticism. * The Glass *

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Book SynopsisThis is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a particular literary form - the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. The text explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, and asks how African-American intellectuals made use of this form.Trade ReviewRushdy's book tells us a great deal not just about the four novels he reads closely, but also about the American conceptions of slavery and race in the second half of the Twentieth century; we walk away from Neo Slave Narratives with a multilayered sense of what Rushdy calls the social logic of the form, a logic which demonstrates that form is not extrinsic to historical understanding but rather constitutive of it. In short, Rushdy approaches his texts as complex objects circulating in many intersecting exchanges and listens carefully for the whistling and humming around him. * Eric Gardner, Theory and Cultural Studies *

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Book Synopsis"Ceremony" is one of the most widely taught and studied Native American literature texts. This casebook includes theoretical approaches and information, especially on Native American beliefs, that should enhance their understanding and appreciation of this contemporary classic.Table of Contents1: Introduction 2: Peter G. Beidler: Animals and Theme in Ceremony 3: Robert C. Bell: Circular Design in Ceremony 4: Elaine Jahner: An Act of Attention: Event Structure in Ceremony 5: Kenneth Lincoln: Blue Medicine 6: John Purdy: The Transformation: Tayo's Genealogy in Ceremony 7: Reed Way Dasenbrock: Forms of Biculturalism in Southwestern Literature: The Work of Rudolfo Anaya and Leslie Marmon Silko 8: Paula Gunn Allen: Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony 9: Louis Owens: "The Very Essence of Our Lives": Leslie Silko's Webs of Identity 10: Catherine Rainwater: The Semiotics of Dwelling in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony 11: Robert M. Nelson: The Function of the Landscape of Ceremony 12: James Ruppert: No Boundaries, Only Transitions: Ceremony 13: Rachel Stein: Contested Ground: Nature, Narrative, and Native American Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony 14: Jace Weaver: Leslie Marmon Silko 15: Kenneth M. Roemer: Silko's Arroyos as Mainstream: Processes and Implications of Canonical Identity 16: Laura Coltelli: Leslie Marmon Silko 17: Robin Cohen: Of Apricots, Orchids, and Wovoka: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko 18: Selected Bibliography

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Book SynopsisLangston Hughes has been an inspiration to generations of readers and writers seeking a passionate, intelligent, and socially responsible art. In this volume, Steven C. Tracy has gathered a broad range of critics to produce an interdisciplinary approach to the important historical and cultural elements reflected in Hughes's work.Trade ReviewA Historical Guide to Langston Hughes is an excellent tool for both scholars and undergraduates alike, for it provides critical details and scholarly readings in a manner that is approachable and readable. * The Langston Hughes Review *Table of ContentsSteven C. Tracy: Introduction: Hughes in Our Time 1: R. Baxter Miller: Langston Hughes, 1902-1967: A Brief Biography 2: James de Jongh: The Poet Speaks of Places: A Close Reading of Langston Hughes's Literary Use of Place 3: Steven C. Tracy: Langston Hughes and Afro-American Vernacular Music 4: Joyce A. Joyce: Hughes and Twentieth-Century Genderracial Issues 5: James Smethurst: The Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes from the Popular Front to Black Power 6: Illustrated Chronology 7: Dolan Hubbard: Bibliographical Essay 8: Contributors

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Book SynopsisFebruary 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American writer. In young adulthood Hughes possessed a nomadic but dedicated spirit that led him from Mexico to Africa and the Soviet Union to Japan, and countless other stops around the globe. Associating with political activists, patrons, and fellow artists, and drawing inspiration from both Walt Whitman and the vibrant Afro-American culture, Hughes soon became the most original and revered of black poets. In the first volume''s Afterword, Rampersad looks back at the significant early works Hughes produced, the genres he explored, and offers a new perspective on Hughes''s lasting literary influence. Exhaustively researched in archival collections throughout the country, especially in the Langston Hughes papers at Yale University''s Beinecke LibraTrade ReviewRampersad's two-volume biography, re-released to commemorate Hughes' centennial, is the definitive account of the poet, playwright, and novelist who was the leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. New afterwords offer perspective on Hughes' literary legacy. * The Orlando Sentinel *Arnold Rampersad's biography of Langston Hughes sweeps up the reader like a novel does....Rampersad's book serves as a foundational introduction to the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as to others in politics, literature, and the arts. Its dramatic, even painful, last chapter will lead you straight out to search for the second volume. * Topica Tip World *Excellent....Mr. Rampersad [leaves] you eager to see what he makes of the rest of the story, and confident that his second volume will be as good as his first. * John Gross, The New York Times *Throughout this comprehensive and enthralling account of Hughes's life and his development as a writer, Rampersad offers a precise assessment of his work and its importance...This may be the best biography of a black writer we have had. * David Nicholson, The Washington Post Book World *An exquisite orchestration of the fully lived life. * Michael S. Harper, The Boston Globe *

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Book SynopsisFebruary 1, 2002 marks the 100th birthday of Langston Hughes. To commemorate the centennial of his birth, Arnold Rampersad has contributed new Afterwords to both volumes of his highly-praised biography of this most extraordinary and prolific American writer. The second volume in this masterful biography finds Hughes rooting himself in Harlem, receiving stimulation from his rich cultural surroundings. Here he rethought his view of art and radicalism, and cultivated relationships with younger, more militant writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Amiri Bakara. Rampersad''s Afterword to volume two looks further into his influence and how it expanded beyond the literary as a result of his love of jazz and blues, his opera and musical theater collaborations, and his participation in radio and television. In addition, Rempersad explores the controversial matter of Hughes''s sexuality and the possibility that, despite a lack of clear evidence, Hughes was homosexual. Trade ReviewRampersad's two-volume biography, re-released to commemorate Hughes' centennial, is the definitive account of the poet, playwright, and novelist who was the leading light of the Harlem Renaissance. New afterwords offer perspective on Hughes' literary legacy. * The Orlando Sentinel *Excellent....Mr. Rampersad [leaves] you eager to see what he makes of the rest of the story, and confident that his second volume will be as good as his first. * John Gross, The New York Times (on Volume I) *Throughout this comprehensive and enthralling account of Hughes's life and his development as a writer, Rampersad offers a precise assessment of his work and its importance...This may be the best biography of a black writer we have had. * David Nicholson, The Washington Post Book World *An exquisite orchestration of the fully lived life. * Michael S. Harper, The Boston Globe *

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Book SynopsisChinua Achebe is Africa''s most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. Translated into close to sixty languages, Things Fall Apart is the novel that inaugurated the long and continuing tradition of postcolonial inquiry into the problematic relations between the West and the countries of the Third World that were once European colonies. This collection explores the artistic, multicultural, and global significance of Things Fall Apart from a variety of critical perspectives. The essays selected for this casebook represent the most important and well-established critical work written on the novel to date. This volume also contains an editor''s introduction, an interview with Chinua Achebe, and suggestions for further reading.Trade ReviewOkpewho has been particularly successful in the careful selection of these essays which make the novel as relevant as it ever has been. What is most satisfying is not only the high quality of most of the essays, but also their overall arrangement so that they seem to be in dialogue with one another. This creates a logical thread throughout the book, and it makes for an engaging read. * African Studies Quarterly *Okpewho has been particularly successful in the careful selection of these essays which make the novel as relevant as it ever has been. What is most satisfying is not only the high quality of most of the essays, but also their overall arrangement so that they seem to be in dialogue with one another. This creates a logical thread throughout the book, and it makes for an engaging read. * African Studies Quarterly *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1: Chinua Achebe: The African Writer and the English Language 2: Clement Okafor: Igbo Cosmology and the Parameters of Individual Accomplishment in Things Fall Apart 3: Damian U. Opata: Eternal Sacred Order versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart 4: Harold Scheub: "When a Man Fails Alone": A Man and his chi in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart 5: Neil ten Kortenaar: How the Center is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart 6: Clayton G. MacKenzie: The Metamorphosis of Piety in Things Fall Apart 7: Rhonda Cobham: Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart 8: Biodun Jeyifo: Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse 9: Bu-Buakei Jabbi: Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart 10: Ato Quayson: Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart with an evaluation of Criticism Relating To It 11: Charles H. Rowell: An interview with Chinua Achebe Suggested Reading 1: The African Writer and the English Language: Chinua Achebe 2: Clement Okafor: Igbo Cosmology and the Parameters of Individual Accomplishment in Things Fall Apart 3: Damian U. Opata: Eternal Sacred Order versus Conventional Wisdom: A Consideration of Moral Culpability in the Killing of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart 4: Harold Scheub: When a Man Fails Alone: A Man and his Chi in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart 5: Neil ten Kortenaar: How the Center is Made to Hold in Things Fall Apart 6: Clayton G. MacKenzie: The Metamorphosis of Piety in Things Fall Apart 7: Rhonda Cobham: Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart 8: Biodun Jeyifo: Okonkwo and His Mother: Things Fall Apart and Issues of Gender in the Constitution of African Postcolonial Discourse 9: Bu-Buakei Jabbi: Fire and Transition in Things Fall Apart 10: Ato Quayson: Realism, Criticism, and the Disguises of Both: A Reading of Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart with an Evaluation of Criticism Relating To It 11: Charles H. Rowell: An interview with Chinua Achebe Suggested Reading

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Book SynopsisFrom images of the 19th- and 20th-century stereotypical Jew in literature, this book goes on to explore the unexpected parallels and ironic reversals between a cultural dispensation that had ambivalent responses to Jews and Jews who became exponents of that very tradition.Trade ReviewWhere The Temple of Culture differs markedly from the usual accounts of literary anti-Semitism is that it also explores the response of Jewish individuals (academics, publishers and New York freethinkers) to the manifold discourses which brought together Jews and culture in increasingly odd conjunctions ... Achieves a great deal in a relatively short but remarkably intelligent book ... has, it is to be hoped, changed the terms of debate away from the many heated and fruitless exchanges which have steadfastly ignored the fundamental ambivalences which remain at the heart of Anglo-American culture. * Times Literary Supplement *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements ; Preface ; 1. The Jew in the Museum ; 2. The Temple of Culture and the Market for Letters:The Jew and the Way We Write Now ; 3. The Mania for the Middlebrow: Trilby, the Jew, and the Middlebrow Imaginary ; 4. Henry James and the Discourses of Anti-Semitism ; 5. Henry James among the Jews ; Afterword: Beyond the Battle of the Blooms

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Book SynopsisThis reissue of Menand''s classic intellectual history of T.S. Eliot and the singular role he played in the rise of literary modernism features an updated Afterword by the author, as well as a detailed critical appraisal of the progression of Eliot''s career as a poet and critic. Menand shows how Eliot''s early views on literary value and authenticity--and his later repudiation of those views--reflect the profound changes regarding the understanding of literature and its significance that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. The new Afterword was adapted from Menand''s critically lauded essay on Eliot in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume Seven: Modernism and the New Criticism.Trade Reviewa very welcome second appearance for a small classic of Eliot criticism * Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThis casebook assembles historical and theoretical materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of Joseph Conrad's best-knowen and most controversial work, with texts by Conrad himself, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Max Beerbohm, and distinguished scholars such as Zdzislaw Najder and Ian Watt.Trade ReviewMoore has assembled something new and valuable, deliberately avoiding some of the usually anthologized material while pushing the boundaries of critical commentary.... Not only are all of the selected works provocative and substantive in their own way, each inviting us to reconsider the text's contexts and our own assumptions, so too the collection as a whole - by juxtaposing historical tidbit and serious study, theoretical meditation and comic relief - brims with a life which will gratify the hungry curiosity of the general reader and prompt the more reticent student to exclaim, 'Cool!? * Joseph Conrad Today *Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. An Outpost of Progress ; 2. Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent ; 3. From The Crime of the Congo ; 4. Joseph Conrad's First Cruise in the Nellie ; 5. To the End of the Night ; 6. The Typescript of 'The Heart of Darkness' ; 7. The Feast, by J*s*ph C*nr*d ; 8. Conrad's Impressionism ; 9. Narratological Parallels in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now ; 10. The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ; 11. Heart of Darkness Revisited: The African Response ; 12. Jungle Fever ; 13. A Chat with Joseph Conrad ; Suggested Reading

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Book SynopsisClive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was a distinguished scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. His desire for a fruitful, interactive relationship between Christianity and culture sharply distinguishes him from neo-orthodox theology and many contemporary Christian rejections of culture. This book talks about him.Trade Review"Taking a broad look at Lewis's weaving together of Christianity and culture, Kort offers a refreshing new reading of Lewis's life and work...Kort provides perhaps the most challenging reading of Lewis now available."Publishers Weekly"[Kort] penetrated Lewis's world in a way that few before him had."--America"Wesley Kort has given us a literary Rosetta Stone to update and understand some of Lewis' themes that are pertinent to contemporary life."--Presbyterian Outlook"This book should contribute to a greater appreciation of C.S. Lewis by all levels of readers."Choice"Wesley Kort takes the opportunity of C.S. Lewis's recent centenary to assess the author's ongoing appeal, to examine his critique of modern culture, and to explore the varied riches he has personally found in decades of rereading. Taking into account a wide-ranging legacy of fiction, autobiography, and essay, he concentrates his attention on Lewis's ability to imagine a rich, collective life --a shared communal vision. Kort argues that the post-modern world in which we live is ripe for a writer so adept at building bridges between various constituencies, so versatile in his mastery of different kinds of writing. After years of teaching Lewis to Duke undergraduates, he now brings his smart, timely discoveries to the rest of us."--Peter S. Hawkins, Boston University"C. S. Lewis Then and Now promises to make Lewis compelling not only to many lay people, but also to the kind of academic religious studies reader who (unlike millions of lay readers, many of them Christians of various sorts) has not been able to appreciate him. Kort shows that Lewis was not only criticizing 'modern culture' but looking for a fruitful, interactive relationship between Christianity and culture."--Larry D. Bouchard, University of Virginia"If you last read something written by C.S. Lewis during your student days, or if you have never read anything at all by him, you may want to pick up C.S. Lewis Then and Now by Wesley A. Kort....Kort has given us a literary Rosetta Stone to update and understand some of Lewis' themes that are pertinent to contemporary life. This well-written book houses many ideas that should be entertained in sermons and studies throughout congregations that take seriously solid thinking to the glory of God."--The Presbyterian Outlook

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Book SynopsisWorshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life underTrade ReviewBurns has crafted a superb biography that traces her influence, places Rand in historical context, avoids both condemnation and hagiography, and undercuts the view, fostered by Rand herself, that she was a self-created genius. * Lewis A. Erenberg, Journal of Historical Biography *a pleasure to read * Political Studies Review *[an] important study * Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement *A smart assessment of Rand's life and ideas and how they influenced each other... As Ms. Burns successfully demonstrates, Rand's ideas have remained an important part of the American ideological mix, especially in how she honored the creative powers of American business in a free market to improve human lives. Ms. Burns' readers will see Rand still has the power to instruct on the meaning and scary implications of government growth in the age of Barack Obama. * Brian Doherty, The Washington Times *Burns has the edge, though, in identifying Rand's intellectual legacy. She describes Rand as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right" elaborating: "Just as Rand had provided businessmen with a set of ideas that met their need to feel righteous and honorable in their professional lives, she gave young people a philosophical system that met their deep need for order and certainty. * Washington Monthly Magazine *Burns, a professor of history, more ably situates Rand within and against the world of American conservatism * The New Yorker *A well-written and absorbing biography of Rand, it also places her ideas and influence in three overlapping contexts. Goddess of the Market goes a long way toward explaining both the popularity of Rand's ideas and their somewhat marginalized status. * U.S. Intellectual History *This is a significant contribution to Rand scholarship and an engaging read for anyone interested in Rand or 20th-century politics and intellectual life * M. L. Jackson, CHOICE *balanced and engaging * Alex Goodall, Literary Review *At last! A well-balances book about Ayn Rand (1905-82), the guru of selfishness. After all the attack memoirs and right-wing adulation, Jennifer Burns has finally given us an intellectual biography * Tribune *a well researched and readable account of Objectivist philosophy, Rand's life and accounts of the sometimes misanthropic personalities if not the philosophy involved. * Martin Jenkins, Chartist *Excellent * Time magazine *Burns contributes so much to understanding the philosophies behind Rand's literature, libertarian thinking, and the philosophical underpinnings of the American right, that this book is sure to be of interest to many. * John Krueckeberg, Literature & History *Table of ContentsI. THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905-1943 ; 1. From Russia to Roosevelt ; 2. Individualists of the World, Unite! ; 3. A New Credo of Freedom ; II. FROM NOVELIST TO PHILOSOPHER, 1944-1957 ; 4. . The Real Root of Evil ; 5. . A Round Universe ; III. JOHN GALT SPEAKING, 1957-1968 ; 6. . Big Sister is Watching You ; 7. . Radicals for Capitalism ; 8. . Love is Exception Making ; IV. CODA: 1968 AND EVERYTHING AFTER ; 9. . It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand ; 10. The Ayn Rand School for Tots

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