Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929-2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn's verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers brings together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre.

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Combining formal poetic analysis with cultural history, Rudy demonstrates how poetic rhythm came increasingly to be understood throughout the nineteenth century as a physiological mechanism, as poets across class, sex, and national boundaries engaged intensely and in a variety of ways with the human body’s subtle response to rhythmic patterns. Whether that opportunity for transcendence was interpersonal or spiritual in nature, nineteenth–century poets looked to electricity as a model for overcoming boundaries, for communicating across the gaps between sound and sense, between emotion and thought, and—perhaps—between individuals in the modern world.

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This book introduces and discusses the works of leading feminist postcolonialist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, by exploring the key concepts and themes to emerge from them. Ray focuses on the key themes to emerge from Spivak's work, such as ethics, literature, feminism, pedagogy, postcoloniality, violence, and war. Ray also assesses Spivak's often contentious relationship with feminist and postcolonial studies and considers the significance of her work for other fields, such as ethnography, history, cultural studies and philosophy.

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Creolization describes the cultural adaptations that occur when a community moves to a new geographic setting. Exploring the consciousness of peoples defined as "creoles" who moved from the Old World to the New World, this collection of eighteen original essays investigates the creolization of literary forms and genres in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas facilitates a cross-disciplinary, intrahemispheric, and Atlantic comparison of early settlers' colonialism and creole elites' relation to both indigenous peoples and imperial regimes.

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This anthology makes available for the first time a selection of narrativesby and about prostitutes in the eighteenth century. These memoirs, some written by and some about eighteenth-century prostitutes, off important insights into female experience and class and gender roles in the period. Portraying the lives of women in both success and hardship, written in voices from repentant to bawdy, the memoirs show the complexibyt of the lives of the "nightwalkers."

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Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most -- through her letters. Smith and Vetter's new XML-based digital archive, available for purchase from University of Virginia Press, brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily's correspondence with her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. Users may search by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. Dating from the 1850s to the end of Dickinson's life, the work collected here shows all the characteristic's of the poet's mature art.

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This Companion to America's greatest woman poet showcases the diversity and excellence that characterize the thriving field of Dickinson studies. This landmark volume features new work being done in the critique of nineteenth-century American poetry generally, as well as new work being done. The Companion is designed to be used alongside the Dickinson Electronic Archives (of which Smith is Executive Editor and Coordinator), an online resource developed over the past ten years.

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Beginnings can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The authors, using diverse theoretical perspectives, ask what conventions structure our understanding of beginnings before we encounter them; how best to analyze and comprehend beginnings in historical, traditional, and postmodern works; and how endings are (often unexpectedly) related to beginnings.

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Pairing authors with major political and cultural events in the 19th century United States, Levine's book challenges the perceived cohesion of "American literary nationalism." According to the UNC Press website, Levine's study proposes that by examining the discordance in literature, our "American literary history helps us to better understand and learn from writers trying to make sense of their own historical moments."

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Hailed by The Washington Post as "obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant" and as a "model of readability," Plumly's biography of John Keats that ruminates on the most personal aspects of Keats's life: his love letters, his friendships, his vulnerabilities, his triumphs, and his own complicated relationship with the prospect of immortality.

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence. The organs of sensory perception were understood as routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

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Long considered marginal in early modern culture, women writers were actually central to the development of a Protestant literary tradition in England. Focusing primarily upon Katherine Parr, Anne Askew, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Anne Vaughan Lok, Coles argues that the writings of these women were among the most popular and influential works of sixteenth century England. This book is full of new material and fresh analysis for scholars of early modern literature, culture and religious history.

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On Fairy Stories, dated to 1939, is considered to be Tolkien's most studied and most quoted critical essay. According to Flieger, On Fairy-Stories "defined his conception of fantasy as a literary form, which led to the writing of The Lord of the Rings." Flieger and Anderson's new edition, published by HarperCollins, includes a history of the writing of the essay, extensive notes on Tolkien's allusions in the text, and commentaries.

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Logan identifies experiences of nineteenth-century African Americans that provided opportunities to develop effective communication and critical text-interpretation skills. Logan considers how nontraditional sites, which seldom involved formal training in rhetorical instruction, proved to be effective resources for African American advancement. Jacqueline Bacon has praised Logan's book as an "outstanding work that will make a significant contribution in the fields of rhetoric and composition."

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Cannibalism is a metaphor in the prevailing narratives of racial assimilation in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, argues Nunes in her new book. Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mário de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the black press, as well as work by visual artists including Magdalena Campos-Pons and Keith Piper.

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Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—of electronic writing and new media. Kirschenbaum argues that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between "forensic materiality" and "formal materiality," Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Alan Liu writes that this book "is the most rigorous, cohesive, historically informed, materially grounded, and theoretically interesting treatment of textual artifacts in the age of digital mutation that I have yet encountered."

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Professor Robert Levine
Editor, with Caroline Levander, Hemispheric American Studies
Rutgers University Press, 2008

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars address the urgent question of how we might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

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Douglass and Melville addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives. 

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Based on the life of an actual soldier who claimed to have fought at Bunker Hill, Israel Potter is unique among Herman Melville's books: a novel in the guise of a biography. In telling the story of Israel Potter's fall from Revolutionary War hero to peddler on the streets of London, where he obtained a livelihood by crying "Old Chairs to Mend," Melville alternated between invented scenes and historical episodes. This edition reproduces the definitive text and includes selections from Potter's autobiography.

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Like many of Howard Norman's celebrated novels, this intense and intriguingly unconventional love story begins with a crime. David Kozol has assaulted his father-in-law on a London street. What could possibly enrage David enough that he would strike the father of his new bride? Why would William, the gentle caretaker of an estate in Nova Scotia -- along with its flock of swans -- be so angry at the man who has just married his beloved daughter Maggie? And what would lead Maggie to believe that David has been unfaithful to her? At its core, Devotion is an elegantly constructed, unsparing examination of love in its various forms -- romantic, filial -- and of course, love for the vast open spaces of the natural world.

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The final book in Howard Norman's Canadian Trilogy: a novel about spirit-photographs, adultery, and greed. It is 1927, Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist, Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter arrives in Chruchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear -- and he sees more adn more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom. Howard Norman's The Haunting of L. is a chilling fable of moral blindness and artistic ambition, from a writer of "complexly tragic vision" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times).

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The Norton Anthology of American Literature is the classic survey of American literature. Among the works included in their entirety are Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Thoreau's Walden.

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Plumly's new collection of poetry, his tenth, confronts and celebrates mortality. Rita Dove calls Plumly "the successor to James Wright and John Keats, with a marvelous ear for the music of contemplation." Old Heart was named as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. You can read selected interviews with Plumly at Norton Poets Online.

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A controversial look at the most renowned person of African descent in the eighteenth century. In this widely acclaimed biography, Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Carretta's unprecedented archival research reveals previously unknown details of Equiano's life. A masterpiece of scholarship and writerly poise, this book redefines an extraordinary man and the turbulent age that shaped him.

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This original and compelling book places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake. Instead, Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema. Auerbach begins his analysis with films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about person on public display -- both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, and ordinary people caught by the movie camera in their daily routines.

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Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry's "complex of complaint and praise," Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son's baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.

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In her second volume of poetry, Arnold's poems move from politics and history to an intimate gesture, from ancient fragments and architectural facades to a father's face. The layers she excavates in the process are both archaeological and psychological; at the limits of civilization we find both silence and archaic force, "the white-noise light, a sand-storm whiteout."

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Meet the Hennarts: Samantha Hennart, a poet with writer's block; her husband, Bernard, obsessed with the life of a nineteenth-century Belgian mystic with stigmata; their son, Ryan, a mediocre rock musician; and their eighteen-year old daughter, Marguerite, who is quetly losing her mind. A meditation on family, faith, and mental illness, Genealogy is an operatic story of one family's unraveling and ultimate redemption. An Editor's Choice selection for the New York Times Book Review.

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In the fall of 1977, Howard Norman went to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate Inuit folktales, and there he met Helen Tanizaki, an extraordinary linguist translating the same tales into Japanese. In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures their intimacy, and the remarkable influence that she, and the tales themselves, would have on the future novelist. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Norman evokes with vivid immediacy their brief but life-shifting encounter, and the earthy, robust Inuit folklore that occasioned it.

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Rosenthal uses literature to explore the meaning of prostitution from the Restoration through the eighteenth century, showing how both reformers and libertines constructed the modern meaning of sex work during this period. From Grub Street's lurid "whore biographies" to the period's most acclaimed novels, the prostitute was depicted as facing a choice between abject poverty and some form of sex work. Prostitution, in Rosenthal's view, confronted the core controversies of eighteenth century capitalism: luxury, desire, global trade, commodification, social mobility, gender identity, imperialism, self-ownership, alienation, and even the nature of work itself.

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Richardson presents a study that explores in depth one of the most significant aspects of late modernist, avant-garde, and postmodern narrative. Unnatural Voices analyzes in depth the creation, fragmentation, and reconstitution of experimental narrative voices that transcend familiar first- and third-person perspectives. Going beyond standard theories that are based in rhetoric or linguistics, this book focuses on what Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett and more recent postmodernists, actually do with narration.

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Auerbach edits and provides a new introduction of Jack London's The Iron Heel. Part science fiction, part dystopian fantasy, part radical socialist tract, London offers a grim depiction of warfare between the classes in America and around the globe. Originally published in 1908, The Iron Heel anticipates many features of the past century, including the rise of fascism, the emergence of domestic terrorism, and the growth of centralized government surveillance and authority. 

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Drawing on extensive archival research, Chico argues that the dressing room, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century, embodies contradictory connotations, for it is linked to the eroticism and theatricality of the playhouse tiring-room as well as the to the learning and privilege of the gentleman's closet. As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women establishes the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature as redefining the gendered constitution of private spaces.

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This new volume of essays explores what waste reveals about the culture that creates it. From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression.

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The content of J.R.R. Tolkien's mytholgoy, The Silmarillion, has been the subject of considerable exploration and analysis for many years, but the logistics of its development have been mostly ignored and deserve closer investigation. Tolkien made a continuous effort over six decades to construct a comprehensive mythology, to include not only the stories themselves but also the storytellers, scribes, and bards who were the offspring of his thought. In Interrupted Music Flieger illuminates the structure of Tolkien's work, allowing the reader to appreciate its broad, overarching design and its careful, painstaking construction.

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Hamilton offers a major revisionist reading of the works of Anthony Munday, one of the most prolific authors of his time, who wrote and translated in many genres, including polemical religious and political tracts, poetry, chivalric romances, history, and drama. Long dismissed as a hack, Munday is here restored to his rightful position as an historical figure at the centre of many important polital and cultural events in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

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Working at an elevation of 16,000 feet, Quechua-speaking miners in Potosi, Bolivia, dig out zinc, tin, and silver much like their Incan ancestors did more than five centuries ago. This poignant documentary film, produced, directed, and film by Harrison, explores the lives and work of the miners as the veins of ore become increasingly depleted.

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In twelve graceful, sensual short stories, Lewis traces the line between the real and the imaginary, acknowledging the painful ghosts of the past in everyday encounters. Written in a style that has been acclaimed by Edward P. Jones, Nikki Giovanni, and Dave Eggers, I Got Somebody in Staunton is one of the most highly praised literary events to take on contemporary America.

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This volume offers thirteen original essays by leading scholars of a major American modernist novelist. Willa Cather's luminous prose is 'easy' to read yet surprisingly difficult to understand. The essays collected here cover the full range of Cather's career, including most of her twelve novels, situating her work in a broad range of critical, cultural, and literary contexts. Lindemann's introduction explores current trends in Cather scholarship as well as the author's place in contemporary culture.

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Author and compiler Barry Lee Pearson calls this volume a "blues quilt." These stories, collected over thirty years, are told in the blues musicians' own words. Pearson interviewed over one hundred musicians, recording and transcribing their stories. These are stories from well-known musicians such as John Lee Hooker, Koko Taylor, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, and Little Milton, and from more obscure artists such as Big Luck Carter, Henry Dorsey, Joseph Savage, and J.T. Adams. Pearson provides an introduction to the world of blues and the genre of blues stories as well as brief biographies of the musicians.

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On the day of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a man begins writing down things said by his family and friends. This elegantly understated memoir explores how the events of September 11 affected one family. It records thoughts, feelings, and interactions as David Wyatt reflects on his own emotions and those around him that unforgettable autumn.

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The Jewish Study Bible is an innovative volume that offers readers of the Hebrew Bible a resource specifically tailored to meet their needs. The JSB presents the cente of gravity of the Scriptures where Jews experience it -- in Torah. It presents the fruits of various schools of Jewish traditionsof biblical exegesis (rabbinic, medieval, mystical, etc.) and a wealth of ancillary materials that aids in bringing the ancient text to life. The nearly forty contributors to the work represent the cream of Jewish biblical scholarship from the world over.

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A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power.

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When it was first published in 1982, A Rhetoric of Argument developed a ground-breaking new approach to teaching argument. The "stasis approach" pioneered by Fahnestock and Secor distinguished among the four basic questions that arguments are written to answer: What is it? (Definition arguments); How did it get that way? (Causal arguments); Is it good or bad? (Evaluation arguments); What should we do about it? (Proposal arguments). These four questions, now standard in many argument texts, give students a constructive, engaging way to analyze readings by other writers and to construct their own arguments.

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The stories in Merrill Feitell’s award-winning collection, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, examine the fleeting and unexpected moments of human connection, reminding us of the indelible impact we have on one another no matter how insignificant or anonymous we might feel under our huge, collective sky. Funny, big-hearted, and deft, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes navigates the reader through the life that happens when you’re planning other things. It is a collection of experiences, roads not taken, and the intense and unforeseen sparks of connection we hope for.

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Conrad in the Twenty-First Century is a collection of original essays by leading Conrad scholars that rereads Conrad in light of his representations of post-colonialism, of empire, imperialism, and of modernism and modernity-questions that are once again relevant today.The collection concludes with anextensive interview with Edward Said (one of his final interviews before his death on September 25, 2003, the most prominent postcolonial critic-addressing his lifelong fascination with Conrad.

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This intense 1907 thriller -- a precursor to works by Graham Greene and John le Carre -- concerns a British double agent who infiltrates a cabal of anarchists. Conrad explores political and criminal intrigue in a modern society, building to a climax that the critic F.R. Leavis deemed "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."

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A groundbreaking illumination of the creation and reception of extant erotic poetry written in Latin during the Middle Ages. His study describes the intellectual and social context from which the great erotic songs of the twelfth century emerged, and examines a variety of erotic poems, from school exercises to the magnificent lyrics found in Arundel 384. He also illuminates the influence of neoplatonic philosophy on this poetry, explicating key neoplatonic texts and applying that analysis in close readings of erotic lyrics from the same period and milieu.

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Bauer presents a comparative investigation of colonial prose narratives in Spanish and British America from 1542 to 1800. He discusses narratives of shipwreck, captivity and travel, as well as imperial and natural histories of the New World in the context transformative early modern scientific ideologies and investigates the inter-connectedness of literary evolutions in various places of the early modern Atlantic world. Bauer positions the narrative models promoted by the 'New Sciences' during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the context of the geopolitical question of how knowledge can be centrally controlled in outwardly expanding empires.

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The classic account of the slave trade by native Africa, former slave, and loyal British subject, Olaudah Equiano. An exciting and often terrifying adventure story, as well as an important precursor to such famous nineteenth-century slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, The Interesting Narrative recounts Equiano's kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten through his later life as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England. The Interesting Narrative is a work of enduring literary and historical value.

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Imagine Otherwise is an incisive critique of the field of Asian American studies. Recognizing that hte rubric "Asian American" ellides crucial differences, Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims abotu race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth.

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Set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, Victory tells the story of a disillusioned Swede, Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young English musician, from the clutches of a brutish German hotel owner. Seeking refuge at Heyst's remote island retreat on Samburan, the couple is soon besieged by three villains dispatched by the enraged hotelier. The arrival on the island of this trio of fiends sets off a terrifying series of events that ultimately ends in catastrophe. Edited, with notes and introduction, by Peter Mallios.

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This volume collects fifteen of Plumly's previously published essays on poetry and art, including the seminal "Chapter and Verse," "Sentimental Forms," and "The Abrupt Edge." Meditating on poems by Keats, Stevens, James Wright, Plath, and Matthews, on Emily Brontë's prose, and paintings by Whistler, Plumly returns again and again to essential matters: the impulses, occasions, and places of which art arises and the forms by which imagination gives it shape.

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In this accessible, lucid volume, Berlin brings her considerable knowledge of Hebrew poetry to bear upon the study of Lamentations. She explicates the book's five poems, their 'theology of destruction,' their expression of suffering without limits, and she builds a convincing case for Lamentations' immense power to address violence and grief. In our current cultural climate of anger and sorrow, Berlin's book will be of interest to all thinking people.

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Meet the college graduate working in a whole-body donation clinic; a young woman obsessed with Benedictine monks; a middle-aged woman who becomes a stand-in talk-show guest; unlikely friends who meet in a domestic violence shelter; a young girl and the father who stole her away to escape his wife's mental illness; a graduate student from a suburban family who believes her physical connection to the world is deteriorating. Casey explores how we survive modern crises of loss and love through the lives of emotional and geographic nomads. Each flirts with madness and self-destruction while reaching toward life. These simple gestures of optimism and vitality, gorgeously rendered, make Drastic an unforgettable collection.

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Fahnestock breaks new ground in the rhetorical study of scientific argument as the first book to demonstrate how figures of speech other than metaphor have been used to accomplish key conceptual moves in scientific texts. Examples, both verbal and visual, range across disciplines and centuries to reaffirm the positive value of these once widely-taught devices.

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Flieger's expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien's fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield's linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien's use of Barfield's concept throughout his fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphore for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.

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This insightful documentary, filmed in the small tropical forest community of Capirona, in Ecuador, serves as an incisive case study of the many issues and potential problems surrounding eco- and ethnic tourism. Those issues are shown to be simultaneously cultural, economic, and environmental, and are complexly intertwined for both indigenous communities and tourists.

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What happens when, in the wake of postmodernism, the old enterprise of bibliography, textual criticism, or scholarly editing crosses paths and processes with visual and cultural studies? In Reimagining Textuality, major scholars (Jerome McGann, David Greetham, Johanna Drucker, et al) map out a new discipline, drawing on and redirecting a host of subfields concerned with the production, distribution, reproduction, consumption, reception, archiving, editing, and sociology of texts.

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Joseph Conrad's first novel is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes the introduction.

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Bringing together eight previously published stories the bestselling author of The Bird Artist explores the lives of characters who share a sense of loneliness and obsession. In the title story Tokyo-born Mrs. Moro is driven every day by her chauffeur, Tuttle Albers, so that she can walk the beach in hope of seeing white pelicans while her driver reads the Japanese authors she lends him and falls in love with a zoologist; in "Jenny Aloo" an Eskimo woman believes her missing son's soul is trapped inside a jukebox; and in "Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad" the narrator keeps track of a woman by whom he once spurned for nearly a decade while everything around him changes.

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This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. Includes essays by E.M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; M.M. Bakhtin on the chronotope; Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility; Edward Said on beginnings; Jacques Derrida on the frame; among others.

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Monstrous Dreams of Reason explores of the most enduring and intriguing paradoxes of the British Enlightenment: how reason gives rise to both the beneficial and the monstrous. This collection of essays explores the conflicts sparked by the extraordinary range of new ideas and material possibilities in the eighteenth-century British Empire, reading the Enlightenment less a set of axioms then as a variety of cultural and ideological formations. The essays explore a wide range of texts to demonstrate how profoundly eighteenth-century formulations of gender, race, class, and sexuality set the terms for debates in the centuries that followed.

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Berlin provides an informative and fresh commentary on the Book of Esther, locating as diaspora literature and interrogating its comedy. Berlin's commentary, which accompanies the Hebrew biblical text and the JPS translation. It includes essays entitled "When and Where Was the Book of Esther Written?"; "Sex and Spies"; and "Rabbinic Interpretation."

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In 1761, a young girl arrived in Boston on a slave ship, sold to the Wheatley family, and given the name Phillis Wheatley. Struck by Phillis' extraordinary precociousness, the Wheatleys provided her with an education that was unusual for a woman of the time and astonishing for a slave. Phillis published her first poem in 1767 at the age of 14, winning much public attention and considerable fame. This volume collects both Wheatley's letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions.

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Isabelle, a woman in her thirties without any of the trappings of a grown-up life, has just been fired from her job at a San Francisco phone company. Returning to the midwestern suburb of her childhood, Standardsville, Illinois, she contends with her dating single mother, a neighbor who onced appeared on The Honeymooners, and an ex-boyfriend. She also become a mystery shopper for a temp agency, posing as a variety of potential tenants for newly built suburban communities to access their exclusive services. Enchanted by the possibilities of disguise, Isabelle spins a web of lies that keeps the world at a distance until she unearths long-kept secrets that force her to rethink everything she thought she knew.

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In the frozen wilderness of northern Manitoba, fourteen-year old Noah Krainik lives with his mother and cousin. With his quirky, cheerful best friend, Pelly Bay, he explores this exotic, lonely land - the domain of Cree Indians, trappers, missionaries, and fugitives from the modern world. When tragedy strikes, Noah must go on alone, discovering a new life in the south and the bustling of Toronto. It is there in the Northern Lights movie theatre -- with a Cree family taking up residence in the projection booth, and the reappearance of his elusive father - that Noah becomes an adult.

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Professor Stanley Plumly
Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000
Ecco, 2001

A collection of thirty years of visionary verse from one of America's most memorable lyric. From the pastoral to the familial, from the mundance to the transcendent, Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me is a musical, multifaceted, and deeply moving series of poems, presenting a panoramic view of Plumly's three decades of poetic inquiry.

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The World's Room is a dynamic first collection in which the literary and the personal, the elevated and the slangy, the sacred and the profane are beautifully intertwined. From nursery rhymes to riddles to prose poems, Joshua Weiner's work displays boundless imaginative and linguistic possibilities.

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"Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in The Ledge are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. The artistry and directness of The Ledge confirm his place among the most significant poets of his generation.

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William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel written by an African American, was published in London while Brown was still legally regarded as 'property' within the borders of the United States. The novel was inspired by the story of Thomas Jefferson's purported sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Brown fictionalizes the stories of Jefferson's mistress, daughters, and granddaughters -- all of whom are slaves -- in order to demythologize the dominant U.S. cultural narrative celebrating Jefferson's America as a nation of freedom and equality for all. The documents in this edition include excerpts from Brown's sources for the novel -- fictio, political essays, sermons, and presidential proclamations; selections that illuminate the range of contemporary attitudes concerning race, slavery, and prejudice; and pieces that advocate various methods of resistance and reform.

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Stowe's second antislavery novel was written partly in response to the criticims of Uncle Tom's Cabin by both white Southerners and black abolitionists. In Dred (1856), Stowe attempts to explore the issue of slavery from an African American perspective. In his introduction, Robert Levine outlines the antislavery debates in which Stowe had become deeply involved before and during her writing of Dred. Levine shows that in addition to its significance in literary history, the novel remains relevant to present-day discussions of cross-racial perspectives.

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En-Gendering India offers an innovative interpretation of the role that gender played in defining the Indian state during both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Focusing on both British and Indian literary texts -- primarily novels -- produced between 1857 and 1947, Sangeeta Ray examines representations of 'native' Indian women and shows how these representations were deployed to advance notions of Indian self-rule as well as to defend British imperialism.

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Focusing on the convergence of Romantic studies and literary theory over the past twenty-five years, Wang pairs a series of contemporary critics with 'originary' Romantic writers in order to illuminate the work of both the contemporary theorist and earlier Romantic. Wang examines Paul de Man's deconstructive use of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jerome McGann's Marxist-influence appropriation of Heinrich Heine, and Harold Bloom's pragmatic reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through these examinations, along with commentary on Keats, Jameson, Lovejoy, and Spitzer, Fantastic Modernity attempts a series of new readings of both the theory being used by the various critics and the primary Romantic texts under consideration.

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Arnold's first book of poems documents her struggle with cancer. A book-length sequence of poems, The Reef rockets the reader through a Heraclitean chute of accelerated life experience by way of anecdote, satire, facts from medical science, and lyrical sweep. This multilayered work explores the depths of illness, investigating the way one's attitude toward it changes over time and how one gathers and processes information in order to make sense of it.

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Born in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in 1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before being freed in England. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery is the most direct criticism of slavery by a writer of African descent. Cugoano refutes pro-slavery arguments of the day, including slavery's supposed divine sanction; the belief that Africans gladly sold their own families into slavery; that Africans were especially suited to its rigors; and that West Indian slaves led better lives than European serfs. Exploiting his dual identity as both an African and a British citizen, Cugoano daringly asserted that all those under slavery's yoke had a moral obligation to rebel, while at the same time he appealed to white England's better self.

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English drama at the beginning of the sixteenth century was allegorical, didactic and moralistic; but by the end of the century theatre was censured as emotional and even immoral. How could such a change occur? Cartwright suggests that some theories of early Renaissance theatre - particularly the theory that Elizabethan plays are best seen in the tradition of morality drama - need to be reconsidered. He proposes instead that humanist drama of the sixteenth century is theatrically exciting - rather than literary, elitist and dull as it has often been seen - and socially significant, and he attempts to integrate popular and humanist values rather than setting them against each other. Taking as examples the plays of Marlowe, Heywood, Lyly and Greene, as well as many by lesser-known dramatists, the book demonstrates the contribution of humanist drama to the theatrical vitality of the sixteenth century.

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Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollman; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

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This study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand's new readings of texts by and about Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, the Earl of Suffolk, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and Lionel Cranfield reveal a blend of affect and cognition concerning finance that includes nostalgia, anger, contempt, embarrassment, tenacity, bravado and humility.

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Although it has been proven posthumously by scholars that Cather had lesbian relationships, she did not openly celebrate lesbian desires, and even today is sometimes described as homophobic and misogynistic. What, then, can a reassessment of this contentious first lady of American letters add to an understanding of the gay identities that have emerged in America over the past century? As Lindemann shows in this study of the novelist's life and work, Cather's sexual coming-of-age occurred at a time when a cultural transition was recasting love between women as sexual deviance rather than romantic friendship. At the same time, the very identity of "America" was characterized by great instability as the United States emerged as a modern industrial nation and imperial power. 

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Logan analyzes the distinctive rhetorical features in the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women, concentrating on the public discourse of club and church women from 1880 until 1900. Logan develops each chapter in this illustrated study around a feature of public address as best exemplified in the oratory of a particular woman speaker of the era. Analyzing speeches, editorials, essays, and letters, Logan focuses on Maria Stewart, Frances Harper, Ida Wells, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Cooper. The book includes an appendix with little-known speeches and essays by representative rhetoricians.

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DeFoe Russet works with his uncle Edward as a guard in Halifax's three-room Glace Museum. He and his uncle disturb the silence of the museum with heated conversations that prove them to be "opposites at life." Away from the museum, DeFoe courts the affection of Imogen Linny, the young caretaker of the small Jewish cemetery. Everything changes when Imogen, inspired by the arrival of a painting, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, abandons Halifax for the ennobled life she imagines for the painting's subject - even amid the gorwing perilousness of being a Jew in Amsterdam. Set against the impending events of World War II, The Museum Guard, the second book of his Canadian trilogy, explores the mysteries of identity and self-determination, and the desire to step our of the ordinary into an alluring and dangerous sphere of action.

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This book analyzes the influence of major cultural developments, as well as significant events in the lives of Renaissance poets, to show how specific narratives  characterize distinctive conceptions of the self in relation to historical action. Focusing on the narrative poetry of the English Renaissance, Grossman relates subjectivity to the nature of language, using the theories of Lacan to analyze the concept of the self as it encounters a transforming environment. He shows how ideological tensions arose from the reorganization and "modernization" of social life in revolutionary England and how the major poets of the time represented the division of the self in writings that are suspended between lyric and narrative genres.

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Lanyer was a middle-class Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chamberlain. But she is remembered today as the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems (1611). Her output is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. The essays in this volume establish the intrinsic merit of Lanyer's poetry and use her work to interrogate her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. As a whole the collection offers a sustained discussion of the processes of canonization and the construction of literary history.

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The essays herein have been specially commissioned for this voluem, and provide a critical introduction and comprehensive overview of Melville's career. All of Melville's key works, including Moby-Dick, Typee, White Jacket, The Tambourine in Glory and The Confidence Man, are examined, as well as most of his poetry and short fiction. Written at a level both challenging and accessible, the volume provides fresh prerspectives on one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America whose work continues to fascinate readers and stimulate new study.

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For the first time, letters from Emily Dickinson's 36-year correspondence to her neighbor and sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, are compiled in a single volume. Open Me Carefully overcomes a century of censorship and misinterpretation, allowing readers to understand Dickinson's poems in the context of her daily life and bringing to light Susan Huntington Dickinson as teh central source of the poet's passion and inspiration, and Emily's primary reader and poetic collaborator. The letters literally unfold Dickinson's life and art through expressions of longing and desire interspersed with discussions of literature, politics, and family concerns.

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Written shortly after Jack London's return from the goldfields of the Klondike in 1898, these stories bring to life the harrowing hardships and rugged codes of behavior by which men defined themselves in the lawless wilderness. Like the characters in the popular dime novels of the time, London's heroes display such manly virtues as courage, loyalty, and steadfastness as they confront 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. Northland Stories comprises nineteen of Jack London's greatest short works.

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Beginning with the birth of science fiction in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Jane Donawerth takes a broad look at science fiction and utopian literature written by women. In a creative close reading of Frankenstein, Donawerth pinpoints the gender problems that reside in the male-oriented science fiction genre. Employing feminist, social and cultural theory, Donawerth identifies new forms of science fiction that emerge from women writers as they address the problems of the genre. The range of works by women makes this volume an invaluable scholarly review of the entire field of feminist science fiction and criticism.

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Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Flieger uses them here to shed new light on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing. Tolkien's concern with time - past and present, real and "faërie" - captures the wonder and peril of travel into other worlds, other times, other modes of consciousness. Reading his work, we "fall wide asleep" into a dream more real than ordinary waking experience, and emerge with a new perception of the waking world. A Question of Time places Tolkien firmly in the mainstream of modern writers, and should appeal to anyone interested in imaginative fiction.

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The differences between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany have been historically reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the othe's political vision. Though each saw himself as the single best representative of his race, Douglass has been accorded that role by history -- while Delany, according to Levine, has suffered a fate typical of the black separatist: marginalization. In restoring Delany to his place in literary and cultural history, Levine makes possible a fuller understand of the politics of antebellum African American leadership.

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Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. By placing a strong, self-reliant woman at the center of her tale, Cather gives the quintessentially American novel of the soil a radical cast. Yet, although influenced by the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, O Pioneers! is more than merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, the novel testifies to the cultural politics of the Progressive Era, the period of massive social and economic transformations that helped to modernize the United States in the years between the Civil War and World War.

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Many of the poems in Plumly's sixth book of poetry concern the passing of the author's parents. They have the power of the deeply personal, and are clearly, in their wisdom and mastery of form and language, the work of a mature poet, one of our finest. Images of trees and birds dominate these poems. Birds, whether remembered from childhood or spotted in a rain shower at Union Square, frequently inspire Plumly's lyrical meditations. They serve as symbols of the vitality at the abrupt edges of life. Trees stand watch over these poems as they do over the life around us, symbols of permanence amid the transience of life. Memory, history, and family are powerful presences here, the past infusing the present with questions and with meaning.

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This first book-length study of causality and narrative investigates the complex web of causal issues present in all narratives and regularly probelmatized in twentieth century works. These include the shifting laws of probability that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront central characters, the contested relations between philosophic theories and fictional practices, and the role of cause in determining just what constitutes a narrative.

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In this wholly original study, Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of California. Wyatt focuses on this catastrophic history of his native state on five events of social combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical and political landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature. Wyatt begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the 1770s, a process that had its human parallel in the Spanish invaders. He then explores the impact of four other significant events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake and fire, and the post-World War II defense-industry boom, and the fire of race that erupted in Watts in 1965. From the the journals of a Gold Camp mineress to Amy Tan's novels, from Ansel Adams's photography to Roman Polanski's films, Wyatt brings into dialogue a wide range of powerful, moving voices.

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When Jack London died in 1916 at age forty, he was one of the most famous writers of his time. Eighty years later he remains one of the most widely read American authors in the world. Male Call analyzes the nature of his appeal by closely examining how the struggling young writer soguht to promote himself in his early work as a sympathetic, romantic man of letters whose charismatic masculinity could carry more significance than his words themselves. Auerbach shows that London's personal identity was not a basis of his literary success, but rather a consequence of it. Unlike previous studies of London that are driven by the author's biography, Male Call examines how London carefully invented a trademark "self" in order to gain access to a rapidly expanding popular magazine and book market that craved authenticity, celebrity, power, and personality.

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Caramello argues that James and Stein performed biographical acts in two sense of the phrase: they wrote biography, but as a cover for autobiography. Constructing literary genealogies while creating original literary forms, they used their biographical portraits of precursors and contemporaries to portray themselves as exemplary modern artists. In doing so, they actually became exemplars, and Caramello advances his argumetn through close readings of four works that explore themes of artistry and influence and that experiment with forms of biographical portraiture.

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Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, capturing the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic -- America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa -- between 1760 and 1798. 

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Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages -- and never has its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. Whether discussing George Eliot's lesbian readers, Anthony Trollope's whorish heroines, or Charles Dickens's masturbating characters, Cohen's study explodes the decorum of mainstream nineteenth-century fiction. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness. Scandal, then as now, makes public the secret indiscretions of prominent people, engrossing its audience in salacious details that violate the very code of propriety its aims to enforce.

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Passage of the first copywright law in 1710 marked a radical change in the perception of authorship. According to Laura J. Rosenthal, the new construction of the author as the owner of literary property bore different consequences for women than for men, for amateurs than for professionals, and for playwrights than for other authors. Rosenthal explores distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of literary appropriation in drama from 1650 to 1730. In considering the alleged plagiarists Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Colley Cibber, and Susanna Centlivre, Rosenthal maintains that accusations had less to do with the degree of repetition in texts than with the gender of the authors and the cultural location of the plays. Questions of literary property, then, became not just legal matters but part of a discourse aimed at conferring or withholding cultural authority.

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The Neighbor is a book of portraits and portraiture. Like the eccentric and mysteriously heroic citizens of E.A. Robinson's Tilbury Town, Collier's figures haunt a startlingly familiar neighborhood. In clear, rich language, Collier reveals the complexities that emerge from his characters' seemingly uneventful lives.

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Here -- in the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American women -- is the battle of words these brave women waged to address the social ills of their century. While there have been some scattered references to the unique roles these early "race women" played in effecting social change, until now few scholars have considered the rhetorical strategies they adopted to develop their powerful arguments. In this anthology, Logan highlights the public addresses  of these women beginning with Maria W. Stewart's speech at Franklin Hall in 1832, believed to be the first delivered to an audience of men and women by an African-born woman. Introductory essays focus on each speaker's life and rhetoric, considering the ways in which these women selected evidence and adapted language to particular occasions, purposes, and audiences in order to persuade.

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Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James - "doers of the word" - nineteenth-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the United States. They preached, lectured, and wrote on issues of religious evangelicism, abolition, racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights, thereby defining themselves as public intellectuals. In situating these women wtihin the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon.

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The Bird Artist, the first book of Norman's Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: he draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime -- a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women.

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