Faculty Bookshelf
 

Table of Contents

Fall/ Winter 03

 

Faculty Bookshelf, by Nicole Warren and John Koblin

In the last year or so, two faculty books won awards, and thirteen English professors published books:


Kate Flint won the British Academy's Mary Rose Crawshay Prize in 2002, for her book The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. The prize is awarded annually to two women who have published outstanding historical or critical work on English literature. Professor Flint's book examines a wide variety of Victorian visual and textual materials, arguing that emphasis on nineteenth-century realism has obscured the Victorians' equal and opposite stress on vision, whether imaginative or "supernatural."

Jonah Siegel won the Northeast Victorian Studies Association's Sonya Rudikoff Prize for the Best First Book of the Year, for his book Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art. The prize is given annually to the best book on Victorian literature or culture by a first-time author. Professor Siegel's book explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, arguing that artistic controversies commonly associated with the modernist and postmodernist movements have their roots in the Victorian era.


Christine Chism published Alliterative Revivals, a study of late medieval alliterative romance that shifts focus away from the formal aspects of these works to examine how the poems brought British history to life for their original audiences.

Anne Cotterill published Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature, an examination of digressive speakers and verbal technique in nondramatic texts by Donne, Marvell, Browne, Milton, and Dryden.

Marianne DeKoven edited Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, a collection of essays looking to the future of feminist theory and practice in various postmodern contexts.

Brent Edwards published The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (see article).

David L. Eng edited, with David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, a collection of essays by political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists that explores the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy.

William H. Galperin published The Historical Austen, a reconsideration of Austen's place and role in the history of the English novel that argues for the oppositional nature of her works.

Myra Jehlen published Readings at the Edge of Literature, a collection of essays demonstrating the crucial role of the writing process in unfolding the opposing ideals of the American project, like universal equality and the pursuit of empire, or self-reliance and social responsibility.

George L. Levine published Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (see article).

Marc Manganaro published Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept, in which he traces the intellectual and institutional uses of the concept of culture through the first half of the twentieth century, examining opposing notions of culture as elite knowledge and culture as a set of common, shared values.

Meredith L. McGill published American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853, an analysis of the way literary piracy during the antebellum period contributed to the structure of the American publishing market.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker published The Volcano Sequence, her tenth book of poems (see article).

Kurt Spellmeyer published Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-First Century, a social history of the humanities and a proposal for the future arguing that education needs to escape the "culture wars" in order to address the major crises of the next century.

Michael Warner published Publics and Counterpublics, an investigation into how the idea of a public as a central fiction of modern life informs our literature, politics, and culture.

Related Links
Meet the Faculty lists the research interests and projects of all English Department members

   
Rutgers University home page