Literary studies: general Books

Rediscovering the iconic writer's lost decade By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed...

Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these...

The SF iconoclast who became a grand master   Alfred Bester's classic short stories and the canonical novel The Stars My Destination made him a science fiction legend. Fans and scholars praise him as a genre-bending pioneer and cyberpunk...

By combining fantasy and realism, ""Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"" praises court life with an undercurrent of satire against a declining chivalric ideal. This edition focuses on the Middle English text, with a Modern English Verse translation on...

This volume examines the poems of T.S. Eliot, work by work.

These articles, orginally published in the American quarterly Salmagundi since 1983, provides a record of some of the thinking about a wide range of cultural, political and literary issues.

"We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive." So begins Jonah Raskin's The Mythology of Imperialism. When first...

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and...

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an...

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and...

"We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive." So begins Jonah Raskin's The Mythology of Imperialism. When first...

Much like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a...

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse-jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album's cover displays an...

Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such...

A salient take on psychoanalysis as a cultural phenomenon, intersecting with African American literatureThis thought-provoking cultural history explores how psychoanalytic theories shaped the works of important African American literary figures. Badia...

HD (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961) wrote Hermetic Definition at the height of her poetic powers. With her celebrated War Trilogy ('The Walls Do Not Fall', 'Tribute to the Angels', and 'Flowering of the Rod'), it transcends her earlier purist style,...

Against the Stream is the latest volume of Frederic Raphaels acclaimed memoirs Personal Terms, an unrivalled parade of the authors eventful and provocative life, opinions and times drawn from his living and breathing cahiers and journals. `Shrewd, funny,...

`The title of journalist is probably very noble, but I lay no real claim to it. I am, I think, a novelist and a musical composer manque: I make no other pretensions ...' (Anthony Burgess). Despite his modest claims, Anthony Burgess was an enormously...

In Enlightenment and Pathology Anne Vila surveys the various understandings of sensibility that passed back and forth between different professional modes of discourse in eighteenth-century France. The thrills of the nervous system, the delectations of...

Speak Like Singing honors talk-song visions for all relatives and seeks to plumb, if not to reconcile, Native and American poetics, tribal chorus, and solitary vision.

Speak Like Singing focuses on select Native American writers showcasing the distinct voices and tribal diversities of living Indians. Through the pan-tribal medium of English, a second language for some and now a mother tongue for most, many of these...

Hector A. Torres conducted these interviews with today's popular Chicano/a writers, asking each about language and life between languages, about the creative drive that has guided them in their craft and commits them to their art. In sharing their...

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: "I just want you to be happy"; "I'm happy if...

A major literary event, the publication of this masterful translation makes one of the towering works of twentieth-century German literature available to English-speaking readers for the first time. The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is...

The Brontes and the Fairy Tale is the first comprehensive study devoted to the role of fairy tales and folklore in the work of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Bronte. It intervenes in debates on genre, literary realism, the history of the fairy...

Explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative and critical religious poetics. This new study rethinks several assumptions in...

In Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing eminent Rossetti scholar Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates the cultural centrality of a neglected artifact: the Victorian illustrated gift book. Turning a critical lens on "drawing-room books" as both...

Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 1059-1133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text...

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European society struggled to adapt to numerous challenges to traditional knowledge systems. In response to an increasing confusion of standard forms, Victorian thinkers and writers developed and amplified the...

Rolando Hinojosa is a Texas writer with his sense of place centered in the Texas Valley, a world in itself and a place recognizable as a discrete community. But Hinojosa's work transcends the regional, transcends the Valley, transcends Texas, while it...

Originally published in 1925 with two purposes in mind: to provide a collection of material to prepare students to read ordinary medieval Latin texts and, to meet the need of advanced students by furnishing an anthology of medieval Latin prose and...

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1994. Barbara Hamby makes her poems out of jokes, Italian phrases, quotes from saints and philosophers, references to meals eaten and wines drunk. In a fluid, compelling voice, she sets a stage, peoples it...

The Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and...

This is a very interesting collection of topics that centers on critical methodologies and the central problems of medieval alterity.

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture...

In this new full-length study of Jane Rule's life and work, Marilyn Schuster argues that Rule's novels provide a way of "writing and reading lesbian" that resists and subverts dominant discourses of gender and sexuality-both those of mainstream culture...

From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to...

Buildings tell stories. Castles, country homes, churches, and monasteries are ''documents'' of the people who built them, owned them, lived and died in them, inherited and saved or destroyed them, and recorded their histories. Literature and Architecture...

This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Andrew S. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of eighteenth-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues,...

Fascination with the arcane is a driving force in this comprehensive survey of conspiracy fiction. Theodore Ziolkowski traces the evolution of cults, orders, lodges, secret societies, and conspiracies through various literary manifestations - drama,...

Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism investigates the entwined histories of the advertising industry and the gradual commodification of literature over the course of the Romantic Century (17501850). In this well-written and...

In The Fairy Way of Writing, Kevin Pask seeks to explain the origins and popularity of enchantment in Shakespeares plays. Writers John Dryden and Joseph Addison originated the phrase the 'fairy way of writing' to define the concept of an English creative...

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdainsto destroy us." --Rilke Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Beginning of Terror...

How is life possible in a world of evil, suffering, and chaos? Christians have historically been inept at offering adequate answers as to why people's lives are derailed by sudden chaos and, even worse, at equipping people to live in the throes, or...

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear, and we wonder at it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us." --Rilke Beginning with Rilke's 1910 novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The Beginning of...

In The Practice of Satire in England, 1658-1770, Ashley Marshall explores how satire was conceived and understood by writers and readers of the period. Her account is based on a reading of some 3,000 works ranging from one-page squibs to novels. The...

"The Proustian Quest" is a full-length study that explores the influence of social change on Proust's vision. "In Remembrance of Things Past", Proust describes how the machines of transportation and communication transformed fashion, social mores,...