Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2014 -

Barnard (Penn State) casts exciting new light on a much-studied figure of the Spanish Renaissance.  Highlighting how Garcilaso incorporated material culture into his sophisticated Neapolitan poems, the author touts the poems as powerful exemplars of the new poetry at the beginning of European modernity.  The claim is bold but impeccably substantiated.  In a novel interpretation of Garcilasos worldview, Barnard points up the nexus between object, text, and memory in a fascinating exploration of the psychology of the self, engagement with a wide cultural heritage, and the interplay between orality and writing.  Eschewing the usual concerns of chronology and genre, Barnard begins withEclogue III and concludes withEclogue I; examines tapestries, urns, paintings, statues, musical instruments, and weapons; and indicates how history intersects with the ideology of empire.  Well-chosen photographs of specific artifacts in the poetry enhance further this amazing and engaging text.  A vibrant, truly scholarly study that deserves pride of place in any collection (library or personal), this is a book for those interested in Spanish and Renaissance art, literature, and history and those curious about the formation of culture.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This excellent literary biography of Machado, Brazils acclaimed 19th-century writer, regards him as both a realist and a modernist and places him alongside the major figures of world literature.  Jackson (Yale) organizes the volume into four main parts.  These take up, respectively, Machados formative years as a journalist and his intimate familiarity with Rios world of opera and theater; the guiding principles of Machados writing, particularly his creation of eternal viewpoints outside chronological time; Machados characteristic motifs, including delirium, satire, and metaphor;and Machados unity of theme and structure as understood through his famously unreliable character-narrators.  Machado was steeped in European literature, and in novels such as Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, Quincas Borba, and Dom Casmurro, he brilliantly reworked the European masters in myriad, hybrid ways.  He fashioned sophisticated narratives that featured disturbing psychological portraits of morally frail characters and illuminated the human condition in a highly stratified, slave-holding society.  Machadograndson of freed slaves, founder and president of the Brazilian Academy of Lettersobserved his social universe as an outsider, with impassive irony.  To him, life was an opera, a timeless dance in rented coats, in which human nature repeats itself in successive iterations.  Jacksons comprehensive, insightful study brings Machados world alive.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Williams (Univ. of California, Riverside) introduces this engrossing study in his preface, in which he states that his focus is to "question the critical lacunae and critical misrepresentations of Vargas Llosa's writing in the 21st century."  The main body of the work is organized into three parts"An Intellectual Biography," "A Novelist for the Twenty-First Century," and "Rereading Vargas Llosa."  They are followed by an epilogue and three appendixes (one of them Williams's 2011 interview with Vargas Llosa).  Vargas Llosa is the only member of "the boom" still actively immersed in creative work in the 21st century, and Williams's portrait of him is fascinating.  Over the decades, Williams has enjoyed a flourishing relationship with his subject, and that is reflected in details he offers about Vargas Llosa's private persona.  Williams's riveting portrait of a remarkable and prolific savant immersed in his intellectual interests and a citizen of the world is not to be missed.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This long-anticipated collection of Beauvoirs feminist writings joins the five other volumes in the highly acclaimed Beauvoir Series: Political Writings (CH, Feb'13, 50-3522),The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings(CH, Apr'12, 49-4338),Wartime Diary (CH, May'09, 46-4904),Diary of a Philosophy Student(CH, Jun'07, 44-5569), andPhilosophical Writings (CH, Sep'05, 43-0075).  Like its predecessors, it is the work of a team of internationally renowned scholars who, in brief introductions, provide essential historical-critical background for each text and new insights into the development of Beauvoirs thinking.  The writings featured here include recently discovered essays (some from as early as 1947) and revised translations of major texts whose original translations were marred by serious inaccuracies.  Although few would question the feminist credentials of the author ofThe Second Sex,some have struggled with apparent inconsistencies in her political and feminist positions.  How, for example, can her famous 1972 conversion to feminism be reconciled with her previous decades-long commitment to sexual freedom and equality?  Under the sure guidance of Simons and Timmermann, this collection answers many such questions while chronicling in detail Beauvoirs lifetime advocacy of womens liberation and human rights.  It is an impressive work of erudition.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

What does "reading as a feminist" mean in the 21st century, when the two-gender system, on which a binary symbolic order was constructed, is undergoing such fundamental scrutiny?  What are the ethical and political implications of feminist criticism?  These are but two of many important questions that inform Stantons ambitious, illuminating analysis of gender identity in early-modern French literature.  Decades in the making, this groundbreaking book is divided into two equal parts, the first featuring three chapters on male-authored texts (by Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre) and the second, three chapters on female-authored texts (La Guette, La Fayette, Sévigné).  In each of these chapters, Stanton (Graduate Center, CUNY) explores unstable and changing gender norms while highlighting tensions and contradictions, accommodations, negotiations, and resistances to these norms.  She questions traditional readings of well-known texts and explores texts usually ignored by critics.  Her erudition is impressive, her methodology exemplary.  Like Stanton's first book, The Aristocrat as Art (CH, Jul'80), and so many others sinceincludingEnchanted Eloquence (CH, Jul'11, 48-6169), which she coedited with Lewis Seifertthis study is destined to become a classic.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

At one time a Benedictine monk, Antoine-François Prévost (16971763) was a man of dubious morality fascinated by scandal and the struggle between virtue and desire.  As a novelist, he wrote about enigmatic historical and fictional characters, exploring their hypocrisy, madness, and disgrace.  HisHistoire dune Grecque moderne (1740), based on the actual experiences of a French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 18th century, may not be as well known as his sentimental novel Manon Lescaut(1731), but it is nevertheless a classic literary masterpiece that well deserves this outstanding new translation.  Although the work first became available in English just one year after the original title was published, and modern translations have since been attempted (for example,The Story of a Modern Greek Woman, a translation by Lydia Davis, was published inThe Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. by Michel Feher, 1997), this is the first accurate, single-volume translation and critical edition of the novel.  Singerman (emer., Davidson College) provides a fascinating introduction, extensive footnotes, and a highly reliable English rendering of Prévosts powerful narrative, which is clearly far more than just a roman à clef.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In the English-speaking world, Pasolini (19221975) is remembered today chiefly as filmmaker; somewhat as novelist, dramatist, literary critic, and political commentator; and scarcely at all as poet.  This is in stark contrast to the way he is remembered in his native Italy.  Pasolini's immense output of poetrythe writing of which was his earliest literary activity and a constant preoccupation throughout his liferemains almost unknown to his Anglophone admirers for the simple reason that relatively little of it has been translated.  This substantial bilingual edition of 76 poems, most drawn from seven major collections published in Italian between 1954 and 1971 and including some that appeared posthumously in 2003, is a welcome step toward redressing the damaging imbalance in the image of Pasolini conventionally offered to readers of English.  Sartarelli's intelligent, stylish translations are accompanied by copious and helpful notes, a bibliography and filmography, and a spirited and very useful introduction.  Wide-ranging, authoritative, and handsomely produced, Sartarelli's volume establishes itself immediately as by far the best selection of Pasolini's poetry available in English; its publication is a landmark in Pasolini studies.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.