Louise K. Barnett

Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women

Oxford University Press, 2007

Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own time concerning his relations with women and his representations of them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed never to have seen her alone...

• Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial, 2001
• Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer, 1997
• Authority and Speech: Language, Society, and Self in the American Novel, 1993
• Swift's Poetic Worlds, 1982
  
  

Emily C. Bartels

Speaking of the Moor: From "Alcazar" to "Othello"

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008

"Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? At the turn of the sixteenth century, when England was expanding its reach across the globe...

John Belton

Widescreen Cinema

Harvard University Press, 1992

The history of American widescreen cinema, like the history of American cinema itself, begins with notions of novelty. Indeed, the popular reception of the widescreen revolution looks back to attitudes surrounding the invention of the cinema; both were considered to be short-lived phenomena of minor cultural. . .

Wesley Brown

Darktown Strutters

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

This compelling and imaginative historical novel takes off from a 19th-century incident that gave birth to the term "Jim Crow": a white actor named Tom Rice gained fame performing in blackface a dance he learned from a slave named Jim Crow. The fiction follows Jim Crow's son, Jim Too, on his travels as a dancer. . .

Matthew S. Buckley

Tragedy Walks the Streets : The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

Tragedy Walks the Streets challenges the conventional understanding that the evolution of European drama effectively came to a halt during France’s Revolutionary era. In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Professor Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development...

Abena Busia

Women Writing Africa Volume 2: West Africa and the Sahel

The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005

The acclaimed Women Writing Africa project, co-edited by Professor Abena P.A. Busia, "opens up worlds too often excluded from the history books" (Booklist) and is an "essential resource for scholars and general readers alike" (Library Journal). It reveals the cultural legacy of African women in their own words, in never-before- published texts that include communal songs and lullabies, letters and speeches, poetry and fiction...

• Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region, 2003
• Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, 1993
  
  

Christine Chism

Alliterative Revivals

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002

Alliterative Revivals is the first full-length study of the sophisticated historical consciousness of late medieval alliterative romance.  Drawing from historicism, feminism, performance studies, and postcolonial theory, Professor Christine Chism argues that those poems animate British history by reviving and acknowledging potentially threatening figures from the medieval past. .

Ann Baynes Coiro

Robert Herrick's Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988

Because Robert Herrick has usually been regarded as a poet of brief, if brilliant, moments, the 1,130 poems of his Hesperides have never been treated as a coherent volume.  Professor Ann Coiro examines Herrick and Hesperides in a new context . . .

Harriet Davidson

T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land

Louisiana State University Press, 1985

Surveying the flurry of critical activity that The Waste Land inspired, T. S. Eliot commented, "I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and Holy Grail."  He preferred that readers try to perceive what he called the poem's "entelechy."  In T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land, Professor Harriet Davidson establishes a similar distinction. . .

Marianne DeKoven
Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern

Duke University Press, 2004

Professor DeKoven describes the Sixties as the dividing line between modernism and postmodernism. She considers the "long Sixties" (from the late Fifties to the early Seventies) as dominantly modern, with postmodernism as the emergent culture pivoting on feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the politics of subjectivity...

• Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism, 1991

Elin Diamond
Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater

Routledge, 1997

In Unmaking Mimesis, Professor Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theater and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic and materialist perspectives with readings of plays by such diverse dramatists as Ibsen, Brecht, and Aphra Behn. . .

Richard Dienst
Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television
Duke University Press, 1994

Television can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of Western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, as a fantastic construction of time.  Professor Richard Dienst engages each of these possibilities as he explores. . .

William C. Dowling

Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris: Medicine, Theology, and The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

University Press of New England, 2006

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s Breakfast Table Trilogy was a series of extremely popular essays published in The Atlantic Monthly from its first issue in 1857 to 1870. Speaking to the cultural and religious concerns of the period, these essays made Holmes famous on both sides of the Atlantic...

• The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory, 1999
• The Epistolary Moment, 1991
  
  

Kate Ellis

Crossing Borders: A Memoir

University Press of Florida, 2001

In her late teens, Professor Ellis left her upper-class Toronto family for New York City's bohemian subculture. She began as a dancer in the heady outer circles of Merce Cunningham and the Living Theater, but finally realized (thanks to some severe anorexic episodes) that she wasn't meant to be a dancer. So she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, amid the turmoil of 1968, although her first husband kept her from fully participating in the era's demonstrations. After their divorce, Ellis lived the single mom/academic life, which almost ended when she was attacked at knife point in her apartment building's lobby by a pair of black teenagers. She immediately. . .

Brad Evans

Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature 1865-1920
University of Chicago Press, 2005

In this book, Professor Brad Evans asks the question how artists, authors and social scientists understood and produced notions of social difference in a period before the anthropological notion of culture existed in the English language. The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910—more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America...

Lynn M. Festa

Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

In this ambitious and original study, Professor Festa examines how and why sentimental fiction became one of the primary ways of representing British and French relations with colonial populations in the eighteenth century. Drawing from novels, poetry, travel narratives, commerce manuals, and philosophical writings, Professor Festa shows how sentimentality shaped communal and personal assertions of identity in an age of empire. Read in isolation, sentimental texts can be made to tell a simple story about the emergence of the modern psychological self.

Kate Flint

The Victorians and the Visual Imagination
Cambridge University Press, 2000

In this book, Professor Kate Flint presents an interdisciplinary study that explores the Victorians' attitudes toward sight. She draws on writers as diverse as George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rudyard Kipling as well as pre-Raphaelite and realist painters including Millais, Burne-Jones, William Powell Frith and Whistler, and a host of Victorian scientists, cultural commentators and art critics ...

• Woman Reader,1837-1914, 1995
  
  

 Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
To Desire Differently: Feminism & The French Cinema
Columbia University Press, 1996

In this book, Professor Sandy Flitterman-Lewis presents an exploration of the impact of three French women filmmakers: Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, and Agnes Varda. A most important work, its sustained commitment to textual analysis--and the close readings here are superbly written--and to a historical (and national) consideration of female authorship makes it a valuable contribution to feminist film scholarship...

William H. Galperin

The Historical Austen
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003

In this book, Professor William H. Galperin reads the history of the reception of Jane Austen’s novels through other histories—literary, aesthetic, and social. In contrast to interpretations that stress the conservative aspects of the realistic tradition that Austen helped to codify, Professor Galperin takes his lead from Austen’s contemporaries, who were struck by her detailed attention to the dynamism of everyday life. . .

Marcia Ian

Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish

Cornell University Press, 1996

In this provocative reinterpretation of the history of fetishism as a concept, Professor Marcia Ian traces the significance of the trope of the "phallic mother" from early psychoanalytic discourse through Klein, Kristeva, and Lacan; across key works of. . .

Colin Jager

The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

The Book of God is a penetrating study of the argument from design as it emerged and circulated in the romantic era. This argument holds that the intricacy and complexity of the natural world points to a divine designer and that nature is to be read as God’s book...

Myra Jehlen

Readings at the Edge of Literature
University of Chicago Press, 2002

Professor Myra Jehlen's aim in this book is to read for what she calls the edge of literature: the point at which writing seems unable to say more, which is also, for her, the threshold of the real. . .

• The English Literatures of America: 1500-1800, 1996 (co-editor with Michael Warner)
  
  

Stacy S. Klein

Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature
University of Notre Dame Press, 2006
In Ruling Women, Stacy S. Klein explores how queens functioned as
imaginative figures in Anglo-Saxon texts. Focusing on pre-Conquest works ranging from Bede to Ælfric, Klein argues that Anglo-Saxon writers drew upon accounts of legendary royal wives to construct cultural ideals of queenship during a time when that institution was undergoing profound change...

Richard Koszarski

Fort Lee: The Film Town (1904-2004)

John Libbey Publishing, 2005

Professor Richard Koszarski re-creates the rise and fall of Fort Lee filmmaking in a remarkable collage of period news accounts, memoirs, municipal records, previously unpublished memos and correspondence, and dozens of rare posters and photographs—not just film history, but a unique account of what happened to one New Jersey town hopelessly enthralled by the movies. . .

• An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928 (History of the American Cinema), 1991
•  Von: The Life and Films of Erich Von Stroheim, 2001

Jonathan Brody Kramnick

Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural past, 1700-1770

Cambridge University Press, 1999

This book offers an original examination of the formation of the English canon during the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, looking in particular at the treatment of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Through close readings. . .

John Kucich

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class

Princeton University Press, 2006

British imperialism's favorite literary narrative might seem to be conquest. But real British conquests also generated a surprising cultural obsession with suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia. "There was," writes Professor John Kucich, "seemingly a different crucifixion scene marking the historical gateway to each colonial theater."

George Levine (Introduction)

The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Barnes & Noble Books, 2004

On December 27, 1831, the young naturalist Charles Darwin left Plymouth Harbor aboard the HMS Beagle. For the next five years, he conducted research on plants and animals from around the globe, amassing a body of evidence that would culminate in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind—the theory of evolution. . .

• Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, 2002
• Lifebirds, 1995
  
  

John McClure

Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison

University of Georgia Press, 2007

Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that the characters in them who are converts are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity...

• Late Imperial Romance, 1994

Meredith L. McGill, ed.

The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange
Rutgers University Press, 2008

The transatlantic crossing of people and goods shaped nineteenth-century poetry in surprising ways that cannot be fully understood through the study of separate national literary traditions. American and British poetic cultures were bound by fascination, envy, influence, rivalry, recognition, and piracy, as well as by mutual fantasies about and competition over the Caribbean.

• American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 , 2003

Michael McKeon

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret History of Domesti city asks how the modern notion of the public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the modern division of knowledge, Professor Michael McKeon narrates its pre-history along with that of its essential component, domesticity...

• The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740  (Fifteenth Anniversary Edition), 2002
• Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, 2000
  
  

Jacqueline T. Miller

Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts

Oxford University Press, 1987

This study investigates the sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting concepts of literary authority and authorship, and the forces that work either to merge or separate them in several medieval and Renaissance contexts. Arguing that the idea of authorial authority is a central artistic concern in these periods. Poetic License explores the various practical techniques and the oretical considerations by which writers mediate between the related demands of creative autonomy and those of authoritative sanction, examining the formative influence of the tensions that result...

Richard E. Miller

Writing at the End of the World

University of Pittsburg, 2005

In this book, Professor Richard E. Miller addresses a set of provocative and timely questions about the humanities and the literate arts. What do the humanities have to offer in the twenty-first century? Are there compelling reasons to go on teaching the literate arts when the schools themselves have become battlefields? Does it make sense to go on writing when the world itself is overrun with books that no one reads? In these simultaneously personal and erudite reflections on the future of higher education, Professor Miller moves from the headline to the classroom, focusing in on how teachers and students alike confront the existential challenge of making life meaningful.

• The New Humanities Reader (with Kurt Spellmeyer), 2002
• As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education, 1998
  
  

Alicia Ostriker

No Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series)

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

A long-prominent poet and feminist critic (Stealing the Language), Ostriker further plumbs subjects of previous work: sectarian violence, urban geography, family history, easel painting and Jewish identity. If Ostriker sacrifices verbal nuance for moral clarity, she nonetheless makes her persona and views appealingly present on every page. Clean, unambiguous lines (reminiscent of Robert Pinsky's) present her speaker as an explainer, a bringer of news: "Sometimes I feel like a mailman who faithfully visits each door in his district,/ Sometimes like a mermaid out of water. . .

• Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, 1987
  

Evie Shockley

A Half-Red Sea

Carolina Wren Press, 2006

In a half-red sea, Evie Shockley is ‘dreaming the lives of the ancestors.’ Navigating against prevailing currents, these poems sail on eddy and backflow, taking inspiration from knots and twists of American history and culture. Whether improvising between the lines of a slave narrative in ‘henry bibb considers love and livery,’ amplifying Lady Day’s most devastating blues in ‘you can say that again, billie,’ or going freestyle with ‘double bop for ntozake shange,’ Shockley’s imagination travels every which away...

Jonah Siegel

The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources
Oxford University Press, 2007

In 1820 less than a handful of museums existed on the British Isles, and both their form and function were far from what a visitor today would expect. By the beginning of the first world war, not only had over 400 museums been founded in Great Britain, but their place in culture was recognizably close and often identical to the modern one - whether considered in terms of content, forms of display, or modes of access. Although there has never been a single simple and uncontested amount of the character and function of the museum, it is to this period of inception. . .

• Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art - Romance Tradition, 2005
• Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art, 2000
  

Kurt Spellmeyer

Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century
State University of New York Press, 2003

In this book, Professor Kurt Spellmeyer points out that at the beginning of the 20th century, rhetoric and classics formed the core of the humanities curriculum. Though English and history now securely enjoy those exalted position, they may follow their ancestors into university terminal-care facilities unless they are dusted off and reformed for the next century. . .

• The New Humanities Reader, 2002 (with Richard Miller)
  

Henry S. Turner

Shakespeare's Double Helix
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008

What does it mean to make life? This book focuses on one of the key questions for culture and science in both Shakespeare's time and our own. Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream during a period when the 'new science' had begun to unsettle the foundations of knowledge about the natural world. Through close analysis of the play..

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• The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts, 2006

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation
Columbia University Press, 2006; paperback, 2007

Cosmopolitan Style argues that modernist literary style has been crucial to new ways of thinking and acting beyond the nation. Walkowitz suggests that conceiving of style expansively as attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness helps to explain many other, nonliterary formations of cosmopolitanism in history, anthropology, sociology, transcultural studies, and media studies ...

Cheryl A. Wall, ed. (with Linda J. Holmes)

Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara

Temple University Press, 2007 (with Linda J. Holmes)

The extraordinary spirit of Toni Cade Bambara lives on in Savoring the Salt, a vibrant and appreciative recollection of the work and legacy of the multi-talented, African American writer, teacher, filmmaker, and activist. Among the contributors who remember Bambara, reflect on her work, and examine its meaning today are Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Pearl Cleage, Ruby Dee...

• Worrying the Line: Black Women Writer, Lineage, and Literary Tradition, 2005

• Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 1995

Carolyn Williams

Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism

Cornell University Press, 1989

Exploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Professor Carolyn Williams asserts. . .