tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1058214850400703412009-11-23T07:26:11.516-05:00Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.comBlogger162125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-43613711632859070572009-11-05T10:35:00.002-05:002009-11-05T10:38:57.139-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SvLxg-hm4UI/AAAAAAAAAds/39-CPjpgvvU/s1600-h/Berthold-American.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SvLxg-hm4UI/AAAAAAAAAds/39-CPjpgvvU/s320/Berthold-American.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400644452012712258" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">American Risorgimento</h1> <h2>Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy</h2> <h3>Dennis Berthold</h3><br /><p>Although Herman Melville is typically considered one of America’s earliest cosmopolitan writers, scholarship has focused primarily on his involvement with the South Seas, England, and the Holy Land. In <i>American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy,</i> Dennis Berthold extends Melville’s transnational vision both geographically and historically by examining his many references to Italy and Rome in the context of the Risorgimento, Italy’s long quest for independence and political unity.</p> <p>Melville’s contemporaries, notably Margaret Fuller and Henry T. Tuckerman, recognized the similarities between the Risorgimento and America’s struggle for national identity, and the influx of exiles from the failed Italian revolutions of 1820 and 1831 made Melville’s New York a hotbed of Risorgimento sympathies. Literary and political expostulations on Italy’s plight combined to create a distinctively American view of the Risorgimento that Melville elaborated in his fiction through allusions, characterizations, and direct commentary on Roman history, Dante, Machiavelli, Pope Pius IX, and Giuseppe Mazzini.</p> <p>Melville followed the unfolding drama of Italian nationalism more closely than any other major American writer and found in it tropes and themes that fueled his turn to poetry, particularly after his visit to Italy in 1857. The Civil War, a crisis for American nationalism as urgent and profound as the Risorgimento, reinforced the symbolic parallels between the United States and Italy and led Melville to meditate on Giuseppe Garibaldi and other Italian patriots in one of his longest poems.</p> <p>Melville’s literary appropriations of Italian history, art, and politics demonstrate that transnational cultural exchanges are not confined to later American writing but originate with the country’s earliest authors and their recognition that any national literature worthy of the name must incorporate a broad international frame of reference.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-4361371163285907057?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-78407989365370002102009-10-29T13:04:00.002-04:002009-10-29T13:09:45.740-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SunMUnvWfkI/AAAAAAAAAdk/cAL2MOaEy8A/s1600-h/Wayson-American.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SunMUnvWfkI/AAAAAAAAAdk/cAL2MOaEy8A/s320/Wayson-American.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5398070283017289282" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">American Husband</h1> <h3>Kary Wayson</h3><br /><p>Life is a mystery, a puzzle, “a house of inscrutable signals,” leaving us “often stranded in the middle of a feeling.” With exquisite manipulation of language, the poems in this collection seek to unravel the mystery and solve the puzzle by parsing everyday experiences—observing life while lying about on the couch, on the floor, in bed and out—and everyday relationships—between the self and the mother, the self and the father, the self and the lover, the self and the self, and the self and god. English, “the telephone and the telephone book and the table with one vase and the cut rose,” is the means through which Wayson, drawing not only on her own wisdom but also on that of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Shajahana, Mother Goose, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edward Gorey, and others, enacts intersections between self and meaning. At each intersection, love’s loneliness forms and dissolves, expands and contracts, and then passes much like weather, or the mysterious changeable relationship between silence and words. Wayson may feel that she lives “with a desk where nothing gets done,” but with every poem she finds “some nook or cranny to plumb, some crook or nanny dumb enough to tell them what,” and another puzzle piece falls in place.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-7840798936537000210?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-53347250886411411942009-10-28T14:08:00.003-04:002009-10-28T14:12:01.422-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SuiJL9hyhTI/AAAAAAAAAdc/LRhyu4dPX_4/s1600-h/Ohara-Visions.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SuiJL9hyhTI/AAAAAAAAAdc/LRhyu4dPX_4/s320/Ohara-Visions.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397714991991391538" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading</h1> <h3>Daniel T. O’Hara</h3><br /><p>The forces of globalization have transformed literary studies in America, and not for the better. The detailed critical reading of artistic texts has been replaced by newly minted catchphrases describing widely divergent snippets and anecdotes—deemed mere documents—regardless of the critic’s expertise in the appropriate languages and cultures. <i>Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading</i> by Daniel T. O’Hara traces the origin of this global approach to Emerson. But it also demonstrates another, tragic tradition of vision from Henry James that counters the Emersonian global imagination with the hard realities of being human. Building on this tradition, on Lacan’s insights into the real, and on Badiou’s original theory of truth, O’Hara points to how we can, and should, reground literary study in critical reading.</p> <p>In Emerson’s classic essay “Experience” (1844), America appears in and as a symptom of the critic’s self-making that sacrifices the power of love to this visionary project—a literary version of the American self-made man. O’Hara rescues critical reading using James’s late work, especially <i>The Golden Bowl</i> (1904), and builds on this vision with examinations of texts by St. Paul, Emerson, Wallace Stevens, James Purdy, John Cheever, James Baldwin, John Ashbery, and others.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-5334725088641141194?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-38151104395900200502009-10-27T13:19:00.003-04:002009-10-27T13:22:40.253-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SucsUR3UGwI/AAAAAAAAAdU/tJ69YYNbnBU/s1600-h/Morgan-Narrative.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SucsUR3UGwI/AAAAAAAAAdU/tJ69YYNbnBU/s320/Morgan-Narrative.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397331405331241730" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Narrative Means, Lyric Ends</h1> <h2>Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem</h2> <h3>Monique R. Morgan</h3><br /><p>How did nineteenth-century poets negotiate the complex interplay between two seemingly antithetical modes—lyric and narrative? <i>Narrative Means, Lyric Ends</i> examines the solutions offered by four canonical long poems: William Wordsworth’s <i>The Prelude,</i> Lord Byron’s <i>Don Juan,</i> Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s <i>Aurora Leigh,</i> and Robert Browning’s <i>The Ring and the Book.</i> Monique Morgan argues that each of these texts uses narrative techniques to create lyrical effects, effects that manipulate readers’ experience of time and shape their intellectual, emotional, and ethical responses. To highlight the productive tension between the modes, Morgan defines narrative as essentially temporal and sequential, and lyric as creating an illusion of simultaneity. The poems reinforce their larger narrative strategies, she suggests, with their figurative language.</p> <p>Through her readings of these texts, Morgan questions lyric’s brevity and a-sociability, interrogates retrospection’s importance for narrative, examines the gendered implications of several genres, and determines the dramatic monologue’s temporal structure. <i>Narrative Means, Lyric Ends</i> offers four case studies of the interactions between broad modes and among specific genres, changes our aesthetic and ideological assumptions about lyric and narrative, expands the domain of narratology, and advocates a renewed formalism.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-3815110439590020050?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-26355387917955465562009-10-27T12:56:00.004-04:002009-10-27T13:28:25.439-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sucm7q8ma9I/AAAAAAAAAdM/QZIHrM3ZzJ8/s1600-h/Watters-Freshwater.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 237px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sucm7q8ma9I/AAAAAAAAAdM/QZIHrM3ZzJ8/s320/Watters-Freshwater.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5397325485009431506" border="0" /></a><br /><h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio</span></h1><h3>G. Thomas Watters, Michael A. Hoggarth, and David H. Stansbery</h3><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><p>Nearly 200 years ago, a naturalist named Rafinesque stood on the banks of the Ohio River and began to describe the freshwater mussels he found there. Since that time these animals have become the most imperiled animals in North America. Dozens of species have become extinct, and it is estimated that two-thirds of the remaining freshwater mussels face a similar fate. Yet, despite their importance, the mussels of Ohio remain a poorly documented and largely mysterious fauna.</p><p><i>The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>by G. Thomas Watters, Michael A. Hoggarth, and David H. Stansbery brings together, for the first time, the most up-to-date research on Ohio’s mussels. Designed for the weekend naturalist and scientist alike, it synthesizes recent work on genetics, biology, and systematics into one book. Each species is illustrated to a degree not found in any other work. Full-page color plates depict shell variation, hinge detail, and beak sculpture. Full-page maps show the distribution of each species based upon the collections of numerous museums (with historical distributions dating from the 1800s). In addition to species accounts, the book has a substantive introduction that includes information on basic biology, human use, and conservation issues. Extensive synonymies, a key to all species, and an illustrated glossary are included as well.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p></span></span><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;font-family:'Times New Roman';font-size:medium;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""><br /></span></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-2635538791795546556?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-14140130972729096932009-10-07T13:36:00.002-04:002009-10-07T13:39:33.378-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SszSHU_AEbI/AAAAAAAAAdE/AI01roFV2ik/s1600-h/Boyer-Fallout.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SszSHU_AEbI/AAAAAAAAAdE/AI01roFV2ik/s320/Boyer-Fallout.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389913877389513138" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Fallout</h1> <h2>A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons</h2> <h3>Paul Boyer</h3>The “fallout” from the nuclear arms race with its atmospheric tests, civil defense drills, superpower confrontations, and ever-present specter of mass annihilation was not limited to strontium-90 and other deadly substances: it also includes the mental and imaginative world of an entire generation, adults and children alike. It produced not only nightmares, worried conversations, and activist campaigns but also a diverse array of cultural artifacts, ranging from poems, novels, and paintings to popular songs, slang, movies, advertisements, radio shows, and TV specials. Without understanding this larger impact of the nuclear reality, large swaths of American thought and culture in the half century after 1945 become opaque and incomprehensible. <p>The essays range widely, from a discussion of the shattering impact of the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a warweary nation in 1945 to ruminations on the 1995 <i>Enola Gay</i> controversy, when a proposed fiftieth-anniversary commemorative exhibit of the atomic bombing of Japan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History generated bitter controversy. </p><p>The book makes clear that even though the Cold War and the superpower nuclear arms race have ended, images of nuclear menace, and troubled memories of the atomic past, continue to stir uneasily in the American consciousness and to provide a fertile theme for mass culture productions, from video games to Hollywood films to best-selling thrillers. <i>Fallout</i> offers a fresh, readable, and timely look at a central shaping force in American culture over the past half century.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-1414013097272909693?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-73581741682584718772009-10-06T16:40:00.003-04:002009-10-06T16:47:36.744-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SsusCW-3bdI/AAAAAAAAAc8/FhVi5bzuvdc/s1600-h/Anthony-Paper.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SsusCW-3bdI/AAAAAAAAAc8/FhVi5bzuvdc/s320/Anthony-Paper.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5389590535607905746" /></a><br /><h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#CC0000;">Paper Money Men</span></h1><h2>Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America</h2><h3>David Anthony</h3><div><i>Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America</i> by David Anthony outlines the emergence of a “sensational public sphere” in antebellum America. It argues that this new representational space reflected and helped shape the intricate relationship between commerce and masculine sensibility in a period of dramatic economic upheaval. Looking at a variety of sensational media—from penny press newspapers and pulpy dime novels to the work of well-known writers such as Irving, Hawthorne, and Melville—this book counters the common critical notion that the period’s sensationalism addressed a primarily working-class audience. Instead, <i>Paper Money Men</i>shows how a wide variety of sensational media was in fact aimed principally at an emergent class of young professional men. “Paper money men” were caught in the transition from an older and more stable mercantilist economy to a panic-prone economic system centered on credit and speculation. And, Anthony argues, they found themselves reflected in the sensational public sphere, a fantasy space in which new models of professional manhood were repeatedly staged and negotiated. Compensatory in nature, these alternative models of manhood rejected fiscal security and property as markers of a stable selfhood, looking instead toward intangible factors such as emotion and race in an effort to forge a secure sense of manhood in an age of intense uncertainty.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-7358174168258471877?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-2558591634416521652009-08-31T09:30:00.002-04:002009-08-31T09:39:04.949-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SpvSXvF7cyI/AAAAAAAAAc0/pIk7pa-SL-4/s1600-h/Goodwin-Modern.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SpvSXvF7cyI/AAAAAAAAAc0/pIk7pa-SL-4/s320/Goodwin-Modern.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376121885416977186" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Modern American Grotesque</h1> <h2>Literature and Photography</h2> <h3>James Goodwin</h3><br /><p><i>Modern American Grotesque</i> by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O’Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century.</p> <p>A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O’Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin’s book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-255859163441652165?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-62916686116865097932009-08-12T12:24:00.003-04:002009-08-12T12:29:37.131-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SoLtQh-x89I/AAAAAAAAAcs/vR8EjpYUkAk/s1600-h/Bolus-Reichert-Age.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SoLtQh-x89I/AAAAAAAAAcs/vR8EjpYUkAk/s320/Bolus-Reichert-Age.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369114574034432978" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">The Age of Eclecticism</h1> <h2>Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885</h2> <h3>Christine Bolus-Reichert</h3><br /><p>“The burden of the past” invoked by any discussion of eclecticism is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of literature. <i>The Age of Eclecticism: Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885</i> by Christine Bolus-Reichert aims to reframe that dynamic and to place it in a much broader context by examining the rise of a manifold eclecticism in the nineteenth century. Bolus-Reichert focuses on two broad understandings of eclecticism in the period—one understood as an unreflective embrace of either conflicting beliefs or divergent historical styles, the other a mode of critical engagement that ultimately could lead to a rethinking of the contrast between creation and criticism and of the very idea of the original. She also contributes to the emerging field of transnational Victorian studies and, in doing so, finds a way to talk about a broader, post-Romantic nineteenth-century culture.</p> <p>By reviving eclecticism as a critical term, Bolus-Reichert historicizes the theoretical language available to us for describing how Victorian culture functioned—in order to make the terrain of Victorian scholarship international and comparative and create a place for the Victorians in the genealogy of postmodernism. <i>The Age of Eclecticism</i> gives Victorianists—and other students of nineteenth-century literature and culture—a new perspective on familiar debates that intersect in crucial ways with issues still relevant to literature in an age of multiculturalism and postmodernism.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-6291668611686509793?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-28103730327250147532009-07-20T14:31:00.002-04:002009-07-20T14:34:40.004-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS4rMnDicI/AAAAAAAAAck/3Hsz2q4Fbk8/s1600-h/Baker-Realisms.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS4rMnDicI/AAAAAAAAAck/3Hsz2q4Fbk8/s320/Baker-Realisms.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360612508736653762" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Realism’s Empire</h1> <h2>Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel</h2> <h3>Geoffrey Baker</h3><br /><p>If realist novels are the literary avatars of secular science and rational progress, then why are so many canonical realist works organized around a fear of that progress? Realism is openly indebted, at the level of form and content, to imperialist and scientific advances. However, critical emphasis on this has obscured the extent to which major novelists of the period openly worried about the fate of mystery and the dissolution of tradition that accompanied science’s shrinking of the world. Realism’s modernization is inseparable from nostalgia.</p> <p>In <i>Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,</i> Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that realist fiction’s stance toward both progress and the foreign or supernatural is much more complex than established scholarship has assumed. The work of Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane explicitly laments the loss of mystery in the world due to increased knowledge and exploration. To counter this loss and to generate the complications required for narrative, these three authors import peripheral, usually colonial figures into the metropolitan centers they otherwise depict as disenchanted and rationalized: Paris, London, and Berlin. Baker’s book examines the consequences of this duel for realist narrative and readers’ understandings of its historical moment. In so doing, Baker shows Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane grappling with new realities that frustrate their inherited means of representation and oversee a significant shift in the development of the novel.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-2810373032725014753?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-27096239129437728472009-07-20T14:27:00.002-04:002009-07-20T14:30:58.172-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS3w07KWVI/AAAAAAAAAcc/TAm2KuZ4PQc/s1600-h/Shires-Perspectives.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS3w07KWVI/AAAAAAAAAcc/TAm2KuZ4PQc/s320/Shires-Perspectives.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360611505946122578" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Perspectives</h1> <h2>Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England</h2> <h3>Linda M. Shires</h3><br /><p><i>Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England</i> reopens the question of classical perspective and its vicissitudes in aesthetic practice with a focus on texts of the 1830s to the end of the 1870s. Linda M. Shires demonstrates why and how artists and writers across media experimented with techniques of dissolution, combination, and multiple viewpoints much earlier in the century than intellectual historians generally assume.</p> <p>Arguing for a relationship between what she calls the disappearing “I” in poetry, a compromised omniscience, and the testing of a mastering eye in painting and photography, Shires argues that art forms themselves, rather than new technologies alone, reshaped the period by educating readers and viewers into new ways of knowing. In chapters on visual and verbal art and a waning theocentrism; D.G. Rossetti; Henry Peach Robinson and Lady Clementina Hawarden; and Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, Shires revitalizes the currently available scholarship on connections among nineteenth-century art forms.</p> <p>This interdisciplinary study offers nuanced, close readings in order to rebut assertions of delayed artistic responses to the decreasing influence of traditional perspective. It shows how vision is bound up with all the senses of a viewer and it supports current concepts of modernism as transitional, rather than radical.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-2709623912943772847?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-19270799582498675332009-07-20T14:23:00.003-04:002009-07-20T14:26:46.188-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS2mn7j81I/AAAAAAAAAcU/V0mOCh3b3A8/s1600-h/Blackwell-Quill.jpg"><img tooltip="linkalert-tip" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SmS2mn7j81I/AAAAAAAAAcU/V0mOCh3b3A8/s320/Blackwell-Quill.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5360610231147819858" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">The Quill and the Scalpel</h1> <h2>Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science</h2> <h3>Stephen H. Blackwell</h3><br /><p>Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, <i>The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science,</i> by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov’s scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions.</p> <p>Nabokov’s attention to holistic study and inductive empirical work gradually reinforced his underlying suspicion of mechanistic explanations of nature. He perceived chilling parallels between the overconfidence of scientific progress and the dogmatic certainty of the Soviet regime. His scientific work and his artistic transfigurations of science underscore the limitations of human knowledge as a defining element of life. In provocative novels like <i>Lolita, Pale Fire, The Gift, Ada,</i> and others, Nabokov advances a surprisingly modest epistemology, urging skepticism toward all portrayals of nature, artistic and scientific. Simultaneously, he challenges his readers to recognize in the arts a vital branch of human discovery, one that both complements and informs traditional scientific research.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-1927079958249867533?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-25644431417090980482009-06-23T12:47:00.002-04:002009-10-27T13:29:03.442-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SkEIDkVGvSI/AAAAAAAAAcM/JQlu8hIQjYM/s1600-h/Raskolnikov-Body.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SkEIDkVGvSI/AAAAAAAAAcM/JQlu8hIQjYM/s320/Raskolnikov-Body.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350566689677688098" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Body Against Soul</h1> <h2>Gender and <i>Sowlehele</i> in Middle English Allegory</h2> <h3>Masha Raskolnikov</h3><br /><p>In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In <i>Body Against Soul: Gender and </i>Sowlehele<i> in Middle English Allegory,</i> Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of <i>sowlehele</i> (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, <i>Body Against Soul</i> examines <i>Piers Plowman,</i> the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul.</p> <p>The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving <i>sowlehele</i> is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self’s inner powers.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-2564443141709098048?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-48119375769857590162009-06-23T12:34:00.003-04:002009-06-23T12:47:36.158-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SkEHDn7-0TI/AAAAAAAAAcE/GzLU2CU1sjc/s1600-h/Hogan-Understanding.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SkEHDn7-0TI/AAAAAAAAAcE/GzLU2CU1sjc/s320/Hogan-Understanding.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350565591134425394" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Understanding Nationalism</h1> <h2>On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity</h2> <h3>Patrick Colm Hogan</h3><br /><p>From the rise of Nazism to the conflict in Kashmir in 2008, nationalism has been one of the most potent forces in modern history. Yet the motivational power of nationalism is still not well understood. In <i>Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity,</i> Patrick Colm Hogan begins with empirical research on the cognitive psychology of group relations to isolate varieties of identification, arguing that other treatments of nationalism confuse distinct types of identity formation. Synthesizing different strands of this research, Hogan articulates a motivational groundwork for nationalist thought and action.</p> <p><i>Understanding Nationalism</i> goes on to elaborate a cognitive poetics of national imagination, most importantly, narrative structure. Hogan focuses particularly on three complex narrative prototypes that are prominent in human thought and action cross-culturally and trans-historically. He argues that our ideas and feelings about what nations are and what they should be are fundamentally organized and oriented by these prototypes. He develops this hypothesis through detailed analyses of national writings from Whitman to George W. Bush, from Hitler to Gandhi.</p> <p>Hogan’s book alters and expands our comprehension of nationalism generally—its cognitive structures, its emotional operations. It deepens our understanding of the particular, important works he analyzes. Finally, it extends our conception of the cognitive scope and political consequence of narrative.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-4811937576985759016?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-88975768036382437732009-06-15T15:27:00.004-04:002009-06-15T15:32:28.906-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sjahs_yPUVI/AAAAAAAAAb8/dVYPUHiTR00/s1600-h/Seniors-Beyond.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sjahs_yPUVI/AAAAAAAAAb8/dVYPUHiTR00/s320/Seniors-Beyond.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5347639401957511506" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing</h1> <h2>The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater</h2> <h3>Paula Marie Seniors</h3>Paula Marie Seniors’s <i>Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing</i> is an engaging and well-researched book that explores the realities of African American life and history as refracted through the musical theater productions of one of the most prolific black song-writing teams of the early twentieth century. James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, and Bob Cole combined conservative and progressive ideas in a complex and historically specific strategy for overcoming racism and its effects. In <i>Shoo Fly Regiment</i> (1906–1908) and <i>The Red Moon</i> (1908–1910), theater, uplift, and politics collided as the team tried to communicate a politics of uplift, racial pride, gender equality, and interethnic coalitions. The overarching question of this study is how roles and representations in black musical theater both reflected and challenged the dominant social order. While some scholars dismiss the team as conformists, Seniors’s contention is that they used the very tools of hegemony to make progressive political statements and to create a distinctly black theater informed by black politics, history, and culture. These men were writers, musicians, actors, and vaudevillians who strove to change the perception of African Americans on stage from one of minstrelsy buffoonery to one of dignity and professionalism.<br /><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/"><br />http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-8897576803638243773?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-81496721365868606972009-05-05T15:05:00.002-04:002009-05-05T15:08:29.556-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SgCOj-ur96I/AAAAAAAAAb0/FC3LlclyBDw/s1600-h/Eggers-Departure.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SgCOj-ur96I/AAAAAAAAAb0/FC3LlclyBDw/s320/Eggers-Departure.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5332418707592050594" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">The Departure Lounge</h1> <h3>Paul Eggers</h3><br /><p>What happens when people land on unfamiliar moral and cultural turf? The five stories in Paul Eggers’ <i>The Departure Lounge</i> examine that question, focusing on characters in either voluntary or involuntary exile—men and women forced to confront their deepest emotions and beliefs, removed from familiar, comforting surroundings.</p> <p>In one story an academic flees his family, arriving in Africa only to find that his African host is dealing with a similar crisis. In another, an American chess hustler in Africa is forced to come to terms with his own sense of right and wrong. In yet another, an old Vietnamese man now living in California finds that his relationship with his now-dead daughter was not what he had assumed. In the story “Hey,” a young chess star confronts the death of his brother in the Vietnam War. And in the final story, an aging American couple—former UN relief workers—return to their refugee-camp worksite in Malaysia, discovering what they had forgotten about themselves.</p> <p>In lyrical, tough-minded prose, Eggers’ stories illuminate in unexpected ways the profundity of cross-cultural experiences, as well as deliver fresh insights into the complexity of identity.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-8149672136586860697?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-72116928415603017322009-05-05T14:53:00.003-04:002009-05-05T15:03:31.111-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SgCNQel60_I/AAAAAAAAAbs/uLtsTGgYeIw/s1600-h/Savelson-Where.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SgCNQel60_I/AAAAAAAAAbs/uLtsTGgYeIw/s320/Savelson-Where.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5332417273036198898" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Where the World Is Not</h1> <h2>Cultural Authority and Democratic Desire in Modern American Literature</h2> <h3>Kim Savelson</h3><br /><p>How do novels that literally discuss invention and inventors engage through such discussions an array of critically important conversations and issues beyond invention? And to where and how can we trace and follow such discourses? In <i>Where the World Is Not: Cultural Authority and Democratic Desire in Modern American Literature,</i> Kim Savelson examines the ways in which resoundingly popular U.S. novels by Frank Norris, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison host the tug-of-war between thought and action, between the democratic agenda of the pragmatist movement and the aristocratic idea of aesthetics. Savelson argues for and reads these novels as a way of thinking through the implications for the meaning and making of “culture” brought about by the ongoing social revolution of democratic modernity. She thus expands the scope of the current work being done on pragmatism, as well as the work being done on literature and democracy, carving out an intersection of these two fields.</p> <p>Savelson demonstrates that the questions under her consideration appeared at different key moments over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, embodying and deepening the struggle between the abstract and the practical, the cultural and the commercial—a struggle that turned into a dilemma and a period of growth for modern democratic desire. In so doing, she offers a historical recontextualization of selected literary texts, analyzing them as a way of thinking about intellectual history with subtlety and particularity.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-7211692841560301732?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-36892467314532862872009-04-29T16:42:00.003-04:002009-04-29T16:47:47.365-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sfi836kzBnI/AAAAAAAAAbk/EfKj432b0eA/s1600-h/Hedley-Made.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 212px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sfi836kzBnI/AAAAAAAAAbk/EfKj432b0eA/s320/Hedley-Made.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330217827795404402" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">I Made You to Find Me</h1> <h2>The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address</h2> <h3>Jane Hedley</h3><br /><p>When Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Gwendolyn Brooks began to write poetry during the 1940s and ’50s, each had to wonder whether she could be taken seriously as a poet while speaking in a woman’s voice. <i>I Made You to Find Me,</i> the last line of one of Sexton’s early poems, calls attention to how resourcefully the “I-you” relation had to be staged in order for this question to have an affirmative answer. Whereas Rich tried at first to speak to her own historical moment in the register of universality, Plath openly aspired to be “the Poetess of America.” For Brooks, womanhood and “blackness” were inextricable markers of poetic identity.</p> <p>Jane Hedley’s approach engages biographical, formal, and rhetorical analysis as means to explore each poet’s stated intentions, political stakes, and rhetorical strategies within their own historical context. Sexton’s aggressively social persona called attention to the power dynamics of intimate relationships; Plath’s poems lifted these relationships onto a different plane of reality, where their tragic potential could be more readily engaged. Rich’s poems bear witness to the enormous difficulty, notwithstanding the crucial importance, of reciprocity—of making “you” to find “we.” For Brooks, the crucial question has been whether she could presuppose an “American” audience without compromising her allegiance to “blackness.”</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-3689246731453286287?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-61311342643588922492009-04-29T15:21:00.000-04:002009-04-29T15:28:37.553-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SfiqNAXNFiI/AAAAAAAAAbc/IO5KQBQUN8I/s1600-h/Oxenhandler-Rimbaud.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SfiqNAXNFiI/AAAAAAAAAbc/IO5KQBQUN8I/s320/Oxenhandler-Rimbaud.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5330197299405329954" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Rimbaud</h1> <h2>The Cost of Genius</h2> <h3>Neal Oxenhandler</h3><br /><p>Living during the chaotic period between the end of the Second Empire and the early years of the Third Republic, Arthur Rimbaud would become the genius of French literary modernism, surpassing even Baudelaire. But at what cost? In his poems and letters he reveals the devastating rigors of his relationships with others as well as his power as creator and thinker. Neal Oxenhandler employs psychocritical strategies to penetrate the secrets of a man who was one of the greatest literary figures of his century. For each poem Rimbaud wrote he paid a price in suffering, in jealousy, and in misunderstanding. Eventually the price for his gift rose so high that he had no alternative except to abandon poetry while still in his mid-twenties.</p> <p><i>Rimbaud: The Cost of Genius</i> analyzes twenty-one major poems, showing the poet’s development during the ten years (1869–1879), when he was actively writing. It offers new solutions to the “joke” or “trick” poems, such as “H” and “Conte.” It also deals with the poet’s confinement in the Babylone barracks during the Commune, envisioned in the enigmatic poem, “Le Coeur du pitre.” In the last chapter, Oxenhandler studies how sublimation is achieved in “Une Saison en enfer” through the rhetorical trope of chiasmus.</p> <p>The book concludes with a personal “Appendix” that seeks to penetrate the mystery surrounding Rimbaud’s death in the Conception Hospital in Marseilles on November 10, 1891, at the age of thirty-seven.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-6131134264358892249?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-39428499477618792962009-04-08T13:56:00.003-04:002009-04-08T14:02:57.703-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SdzmXdH13cI/AAAAAAAAAbM/cbT_WZZgpU0/s1600-h/Huehls-Qualified.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SdzmXdH13cI/AAAAAAAAAbM/cbT_WZZgpU0/s320/Huehls-Qualified.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322382150273981890" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Qualified Hope</h1> <h2>A Postmodern Politics of Time</h2> <h3>Mitchum Huehls</h3><br /><p>What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo?</p> <p>In <i>Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time,</i> Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time’s relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that <i>Qualified Hope</i> identifies more complicated—and thus more productive—ways to think about the time-politics relationship.</p> <p><i>Qualified Hope</i> challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-3942849947761879296?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-61343626199725377472009-04-08T13:51:00.002-04:002009-04-08T13:56:43.559-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sdzkkc1ZgnI/AAAAAAAAAbE/KF2GrCvlNT0/s1600-h/Richards-Distancing.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sdzkkc1ZgnI/AAAAAAAAAbE/KF2GrCvlNT0/s320/Richards-Distancing.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5322380174511669874" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Distancing English</h1> <h2>A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible</h2> <h3>Page Richards</h3><br /><p>How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, essayist Walter Channing suggests that the country’s perceived deficiency in literature is due to a crucial overlap with England, that is, having “the same language with a nation, totally unlike it in almost every relation.” In <i>Distancing English,</i> Page Richards shows how these concerns of language are historically interwoven with the inexpressible.</p> <p>Often overlooked, the topos of the inexpressible redirects the ventriloquism of the English language. From its beginning, this topos combines the hyperbole of high expectations with the failure of inadequate words. In Charles Brockden Brown or George Tucker, it can register deficiency of “character” on and off the page, establishing important strategies of decenteredness also associated with modernism.</p> <p>In writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman, the inexpressible seizes advantage from disadvantage. It runs through literary framing strategies and flexible shaggy dog humor. The 1855 preface to Walt Whitman’s <i>Leaves of Grass</i> remaps the topos and emerges as a major movement in the history of the inexpressible.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-6134362619972537747?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-86515252874986548282009-03-13T13:11:00.001-04:002009-03-13T13:14:15.554-04:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SbqUTKFLuyI/AAAAAAAAAa8/na3JTYnxv44/s1600-h/Winkler-Roman.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SbqUTKFLuyI/AAAAAAAAAa8/na3JTYnxv44/s320/Winkler-Roman.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312721767281441570" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">The Roman Salute</h1> <h2>Cinema, History, Ideology</h2> <h3>Martin M. Winkler</h3><br /><p>The raised-arm salute was the most popular symbol of Fascism, Nazism, and related political ideologies in the twentieth century and is said to have derived from an ancient Roman custom. Although modern historians and others employ it as a matter of course, the term “Roman salute” is a misnomer. The true origins of this salute can be traced back to the popular culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that dealt with ancient Rome: historical plays and films. The visual culture of stage and screen from the 1890s to the 1920s was chiefly responsible for the wide familiarity of Europeans and Americans with forms of the raised-arm salute and made it readily available for political purposes.</p> <p><i>The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology</i> by Martin M. Winkler presents extensive evidence for the modern origin of the raised-arm salute from well before the birth of Fascism and traces its varieties and its dissemination. The continuing presence of certain aspects of Fascism makes an examination of all its facets desirable, especially when the true origins of a symbol as potent as the salute and the history of its dissemination are barely known to classicists and historians of ancient Rome on the one hand, and to scholars of modern European history, on the other. Thus this book will appeal to classicists and historians, including film historians, and will be of interest to readers beyond the academy.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-8651525287498654828?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-5260621058244931492009-03-03T12:05:00.003-05:002009-03-03T12:13:07.056-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sa1kx7GtYbI/AAAAAAAAAa0/faQrSZtFtKA/s1600-h/Laffrado-Uncommon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/Sa1kx7GtYbI/AAAAAAAAAa0/faQrSZtFtKA/s320/Laffrado-Uncommon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309010344581882290" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Uncommon Women</h1> <h2>Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing</h2> <h3>Laura Laffrado</h3><br /><p><i>Uncommon Women</i> discusses provocative, highly readable, nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency. This feminist study considers the generic forms, language, and illustrations of a group of complex and often daring texts, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s unconventional travel <i>Journal</i> (1825); Fanny Fern’s controversial newspaper essays (1851–72); Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott’s <i>Hospital Sketches</i> (1863); and cross-dressed soldier S. Emma E. Edmonds’s <i>Nurse and Spy in the Union Army</i> (1865), along with later women’s war reminiscences. The study concludes with a fresh reading of neglected aspects of Harriet Jacobs’s <i>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</i> (1861), the primary Black female autobiographical text of the century, which fundamentally displays what whiteness enabled.</p> <p><i>Uncommon Women</i> reveals attempts of white middle-class women to both violate and align themselves with gendered assumptions. In doing so, it makes visible the ways in which these texts disputed restrictive female constructions, tested boundaries of race and class, and anticipated reaction to their disruptive discourses. The resulting conflicted self-representations illuminate the vexed contours of women’s autobiography. This study’s findings make plain the impact of white/male discourses of gender on women’s self-narrative and illustrate how unconventional women were pressured to embrace domesticity, heterosexuality, marriage, motherhood, and political passivity.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-526062105824493149?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-42217610903249684722009-02-24T15:01:00.003-05:002009-02-24T15:05:10.082-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SaRSmg-NmnI/AAAAAAAAAas/H0p_eQLhRmM/s1600-h/White-Renaissance.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SaRSmg-NmnI/AAAAAAAAAas/H0p_eQLhRmM/s320/White-Renaissance.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306457082588666482" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Renaissance Postscripts</h1> <h2>Responding to Ovid’s <i>Heroides</i> in Sixteenth-Century France</h2> <h3>Paul White</h3><br /><p>Ovid’s <i>Heroides,</i> a collection consisting mainly of poetic love letters sent by mythological heroines to their absent lovers, held a particular fascination for Renaissance readers. To understand their responses to these letters, we must ask exactly how and in what contexts those readers first encountered them: were they read in Latin or in the vernacular; as source texts for the learning of grammar and history or as love poetry; as epistolary and rhetorical models or as moral examples?</p> <p><i>Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s</i> Heroides <i>in Sixteenth-Century France</i> by Paul White offers an account of the wide variety of responses to the <i>Heroides</i> within the realm of humanist education, in the works of both Latin commentators and French translators, and as an example of a particular mode of imitation. The author examines how humanists shaped the discourse of Ovid’s heroines and heroes to pedagogical ends and analyzes even the woodcuts that illustrated various editions. This study traces comparative readings of French translations through a period noted for important shifts in attitudes to the text and to poetic translation in general and offers an important history of the “reply epistle”—a mode of imitation attempted both in Latin and the vernacular. <i>Renaissance Postscripts</i> shows that while the <i>Heroides</i> was a versatile text that could serve a wide range of pedagogical and literary purposes, it was also a text that resisted the attempts of its interpreters to have the final word.</p><p><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-4221761090324968472?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-105821485040070341.post-1246558706399841392009-02-19T13:32:00.002-05:002009-02-19T13:35:51.908-05:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SZ2mV5NDRII/AAAAAAAAAak/FOPNWpSTbBM/s1600-h/Johnson-Latin.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eRNkdLtIZt8/SZ2mV5NDRII/AAAAAAAAAak/FOPNWpSTbBM/s320/Johnson-Latin.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304578831175337090" border="0" /></a><br /><h1 style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome</h1> <h2>Readings in Propertius and His Genre</h2> <h3>W. R. Johnson</h3>Over the centuries, Latin love elegy has inspired love poetry in the West from Petrarch to Pound. <i>A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and His Genre</i> offers a critical reevaluation of the Latin elegiac poet Propertius, situating him within the social and political milieu of first-century BCE Rome. W. R. Johnson’s study is centered on close readings of the poems in Propertius’ four books that emphasize both his celebration of erotic freedom as a manifestation of the sovereignty of the individual and his insistence on the value of this freedom, especially when it is threatened by autocratic ideology. Many recent titles on Propertius have tended to minimize or ignore this aspect of the poet’s work, concentrating instead on neo-formalism or Lacanian psychology. Johnson restores Propertius’ erotic creed and his politics to the core of his poetics and his career. He offers a vivid picture of the sociopolitical and erotic world of the late Roman Republic and the early years of the Empire which hatched Latin love elegy and allowed it to flourish. This study aims to redirect attention to the pleasures and energies Propertius provides that later generations of poets and readers discovered in and through him.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ohiostatepress.org/">http://www.ohiostatepress.org</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/105821485040070341-124655870639984139?l=osupress.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Ohio State University Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08262031779891771395noreply@blogger.com0