Language Arts & Disciplines

Knights of the Quill offers a unique assessment of war correspondence in Southern newspapers during the American Civil War. The men and women who covered the battles and political developments for Southern newspapers were of a different breed than those who reported the war for the North. They were doctors, lawyers, teachers, editors, and businessmen, nearly all of them with college and professional degrees. Sleeping on beds of snow, dining on raw corn and burned bread, they exhibited a dedication that laid the groundwork for news gathering in the twenty-first century. Objectivity and accuracy became important news values, as shows that Southern war correspondence easily equaled in quality the work produced by reporters for Northern newspapers. With its emphasis on primary sources, the book offers an important and enduring historical perspective on the Civil War and also meets the highest standards of historical scholarship.  

Why are twentieth-century novelists from former British colonies in the Americas preoccupied with British Romantic poetry? In Romantic Revisions, Lauren Rule Maxwell examines five novels—Kincaid's Lucy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Harris's Palace of the Peacock—that contain crucial scenes engaging British Romantic poetry. Each work adapts figures from British Romantic poetry and translates them into an American context. Kincaid relies on the repeated image of the daffodil, Atwood displaces Lucy, McCarthy upends the American arcadia, Fitzgerald heaps Keatsian images of excess, and Harris transforms the albatross. In her close readings, Maxwell suggests that the novels reframe Romantic poetry to allegorically confront empire, revealing how subjectivity is shaped by considerations of place and power. Returning to British Romantic poetry allows the novels to extend the Romantic poetics of landscape that traditionally considered the British subject’s relation to place. By recasting Romantic poetics in the Americas, these novels show how negotiations of identity and power are defined by the legacies of British imperialism, illustrating that these nations, their peoples, and their works of art are truly postcolonial. While many postcolonial scholars and critics have dismissed the idea that Romantic poetry can be used to critique colonialism, Maxwell suggests that, on the contrary, it has provided contemporary writers across the Americas with a means of charting the literary and cultural legacies of British imperialism in the New World. The poems of the British Romantics offer postcolonial writers particularly rich material, Maxwell argues, because they characterize British influence at the height of the British empire. In explaining how the novels adapt figures from British Romantic poetry, Romantic Revisions provides scholars and students working in postcolonial studies, Romanticism, and English-language literature with a new look at politics of location in the Americas.

Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and image relations under the impact of modern technologies (avant-garde experiments, digital poetry).   The discussion encompasses pivotal fin de siècle, modernist, and postmodernist works and movements in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. A selected bibliography of work published in the field is also included. The volume will appeal to scholars of comparative literature, art history, and visual studies, and it includes contributions appropriate for supplementary reading in senior undergraduate and graduate seminars.   Contents: “Introduction to Text and Image in Modern European Culture” (Robert Lethbridge); Part One, Cross-Cultural Networks: “The Myth of Psyche in the Work of D'Annunzio and Burne-Jones” (Giuliana Pieri); “The Symbolist Context of the Siren Motif in Moreau's Painting and Bryusov's Poetry” (Natasha Grigorian); “Images of Paris in the Work of Brassaï and Miller” (Caroline Blinder); Part Two, Ekphrasis and Beyond:  “The Reciprocation of the Image in Two Poems by Rilke” (William Waters); “Photography and Painting in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu" (Thomas Baldwin); "Photography in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu" (Áine Larkin); Part Three, Text and Design: "Text and Image in Fashion Periodicals of the Second French Empire" (Kate Nelson Best); "Architecture and Utopia in Scheerbart's Rakkóx der Billionär" (Christine Angela Knoop); Part Four, Hybrid Texts: "Word and Image in Apollinaire's 'Lettre-Océan'" (Margaret Rigaud-Drayton); "Text-Image Relations in French and Spanish Surrealist Literary Reviews from the 1920s and 1930s" (Alicia Kent); "How to Read a Poetic Photo-Text" (Joanna Madloch); Part Five, Multimedia Encounters: "Constructivist and Futurist Multimedia Experiments in Russian Poetry" (Svetlana Nikitina); "Science and Symptom from Mallarmé to the Digital Poet" (Emile Fromet de Rosnay); Part Six, Thematic Bibliography: "Bibliography for the Study of Text and Image in Modern European Culture" (Natasha Grigorian).    

Epimetheus has largely been forgotten, and yet, he was once credited with bringing humans into the world naked, unshod, without bed, and unarmed. Rather than view this condition as one of deficiency to be covered over through some kind of technical artifice, Commemorating Epimetheus describes the human condition positively in terms of its state of origin. In other words, Amis seeks to articulate the goodness of fragility. The goodness of our fragility is approached phenomenologically and described in terms of sharing, caring, meeting, dwelling, and loving. These ways of existing with one another are not merely accidental characteristics of human beings or accidental characteristics of our relations with one another, but are inherently human. That is, we come into the world dependent on the care of others; we come to share in humanness through their care, and their care enables us to meet others, dwell with others, and, perhaps, love others. Commemorating Epimetheus investigates being human in terms of our relationships with one another.

Stephanie Hainsfurther, who has more than 600 articles in print, and Emily Esteron, the editor of the New Mexico Business Weekly, provide an insiders look at breaking into the writing world. Each chapter of Covering the Business Beat is packed full of tips and tried practices to clarify the path to journalistic success. To aid the reader, the authors have provided thoughtful "to do" lists, interviews with magazine editors and content collectors, concise chat boxes covering specific topics like "Myths and Truths About Query Letters," and an appendix listing additional reading sources. By "telling it like it is," Hainsfurther and Esteron have provided a roadmap to get your byline in print. A valuable resource for aspiring writers, writing students, and writers who need a new angle on the business of writing.

Interviews with some of the country's top literary figures, including Charles Baxter, Charles Simic, Donald Revell, Gerald Stern, Sandra Gilbert, Catherine Bowman, Campbell McGrath, and a previously unpublished interview with Russell Banks, are anthologized for the first time in this compelling collection

Craig Smith has provided an introduction and edition of John Macksoud's Other Illusions. This posthumous work, completed in 1973, reinforces a strain of relativistic theory that retrieves the Sophists and extends through Jacques Derrida to the present where many of us deal with constructed realities in our rhetorical theories. Macksoud was also offering a warning about pseudo-scientific research, a Philipic against the quantitative approach to communication theory. He not only attempted to reveal the rhetorical nature of their use of the scientific method, he tried to show that science itself was at base rhetorical. In form, the short book threatened the established order of the academic community. The book uses anecdotes, sayings, stories, and even jokes to mark off sections and to initiate new lines of thought. These devices were deemed subversive rather than performative because they are rarely, if ever, used in academic prose and because the messages they carry undercut normal ways of thinking.

The study of biography has leaped from surveys of biographical writing and statements of biographical, practice to semiotic and poststructaralist discussions of, the modality of biography without adequate consideration of what has already been done to the theory of biography. Professor Novarr has closed that gap with a comprehensive and judicious historical survey and assessment of a I the major (and many of the minor) statements made about biography in the crucial period 188D-1970. The Lines of Life describes the diversity and complexity of theories of biography in the thirty years prior to the publication of Eminent Victorians and makes clear the importance of the ideas of Lesile Stephen, Sidney Lee, Edmund Gosse, and William Roscoe Thayer. It provides for the exciting decade after Eminent Victorians, rigorous assessments of the work of Harold Nicolson, Andre Maurois, Virginia Woolf, and Hesketh Pearson. It shows how theorists and critics in the fifties hedged on the question of biography as art. It traces, in the work of writers like David Cecil, Leon Edel, Mark Schorer, Paul Murray Kendall, and others, the nature of the relation between biographer and subject, the concept that biography is essentially the interpretation of one mind by another, and the idea that the biographer's angle of vision is both inevitable and important

A compilation of Irving Howe’s interviews during the last fifteen years of his life, this book represents what could be viewed as the sequel to Howe’s intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope, which took the story of his life only up to the late 1970s. Many of these interviews were never published and have existed only as personal tapes in the hands of such scholars and activists as Todd Gitlin and Maurice Isserman. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World. Howe never organized his thoughts about the last fifteen years of his life, during which he gained renown for World of Our Fathers, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and became widely regarded as the leading left-liberal intellectual in the U.S. and, arguably, the leading literary critic in America following the deaths of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. During this time, Howe also struggled to redefine the American Left in an environment that discounted and marginalized it. Indeed, these interviews may have particular significance today, a period of new opportunities for the liberal Left, yet one in which it struggles to construct some coherent identity and compelling program. The editors worked with the full cooperation of Howe’s family. His daughter, Nina, contributed an afterword and provided a number of illustrations and photos that have never before appeared in print.

Merrell's specific focus in this interdisciplinary study is the modernism/postmodernism dichotomy and Peirce's precocious realization that the world does not lend itself to the simplistic binarism of modernist thought. In Merrell's examination of postmodern phenomena, the reader is taken through various facets of the cognitive sciences, philosophy of science, mathematics, and literary theory. Throughout this work, Merrell. is scrupulously aware that we are participants within, not detached spectators of, our signs. We understand them while we interact with them, during which process we, and our signs as well, invariably undergo change

Without Covers:// literary_magazines@the_digital_edge is a unique insider's look at how literary magazines have adapted to the arrival of the Internet age. Written by editors, writers, and poets, this authoritative collection covers a range of topics - from the overall financial challenges to the more mundane question of how to number the initial online volume of a 30-year old journal.Nineteen essays delve into the philosophical and practical issues surrounding the digital transformation of a variety of literary magazines. Essays include: "What is a Book?" "From Mimeograph to html: Literary Magazines Online," "the Editor in an Internet Age," "Epublishing and Literature: Challenge and Opportunity," "The Literary Magazine, the Web, and the Changing of the Avant-Garde," and much more.