Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2006

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Preface Acknowledgments The Colonial Wars, 1746--1763 The Revolutionary War, 1776--1783 The War of 1812 The Alamo and the Mexican-American War, 1836 and 1846--1848 The Civil War, 1861--1865 The Indian Wars, 1620--1911 The Spanish-American War, 1898 The War of the Philippines, 1899--1902 World War I, 1917--1918 The Spanish Civil War, 1936--1939 World War II, 1941--1945 The Korean War, 1950--1953 The Vietnam War, 1964--1975 El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf Biographies in Brief Index of Poems and Poem Titles Permissions

During the eighteenth century, novels by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Jane Austen offered their readers unforgettable, one-of-a-kind protagonists who appeared to overcome the limits of their social positions. This kind of individual did not reflect the authors and readers but endowed both with distinctively modern identities. In the decades following the revolutions in British North America and in France, novels began to question the fantasy of a self-made individual who could not rest until he or she arrived at a better social position. By the early nineteenth century, individualism had consequently become a problem in its own right. Instead of such plucky protagonists as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Richardson's Pamela Andrews, and Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, we find novels by Sir Walter Scott and Mary Shelley repackaging individualism in monstrous forms that threaten British society with collapse. Victorian novels by Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy assumed that every man harbors an inner savage, just as every woman harbors an inner whore. The trick in becoming an individual was to transform competitive instinct and seductive power into acceptable forms of masculinity and femininity. The high mortality rate of Victorian heroines testifies to the difficulty of negotiating the passage from savage to civilized. While a novel like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde gives up on the effort to contain these contradictory.phpects of individualism within one body, Dracula carries the process of disintegration one step further by pitting the modern individual against a species capable of taking over individual desire itself.

Each volume of this fully annotated scholarly of Jane Austen's complete works features an extensive introduction covering the context and publication history of the work, full explanatory notes to the text and an authoritative text. The Cambridge Austen is the definitive for the twenty-first century. This introductory set includes the first three out of the nine volumes in the and includes Mansfield Park, Emma and a volume of essays on Austen's time and contexts: Jane Austen in Context.

Winner of the Midwestern Studies Book Award, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland relates Midwestern pastoral writers to their local geographies and explains their approaches. William Barrillas treats five important Midwestern pastoralists---Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and Jim Harrison---in separate chapters. He also discusses Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres, current U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Paul Gruchow, author of Grass Roots, and others. The Midwestern pastoral is a literary tradition of place and rural experience that celebrates an attachment to land that is mystical as well as practical, based on historical and scientific knowledge as well as personal experience. It is exemplified in poetry, fiction, and essays that expresses an informed love of nature and regional landscapes of the Midwest. Drawing on recent studies in cultural geography, environmental history, and mythology, as well as literary criticism, this book will appeal to students and serious readers, as well as scholars in the growing field of literature and the environment. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: William Barillas is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He is the author of many essays on American literature and the editor of the forthcoming Interior Borderlands: Writings on Latino/a Literature of Chicago and the Midwest.

Covering Blake's early career, his major works (such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience) and his work as a visual artist, this new studynbsp;is a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

Ever since the hallowed statement, "All men are created equal," was penned in the Declaration of Independence, it has become a historical tenet that freedom and equality were brought to American shores by the so-called Founding Fathers. In this pathbreaking study, Michael Bennett departs from tradition to argue that the democratic ideal of equality and the actual ways in which it has been practiced are grounded less in the fledgling government documents written by a handful of white men than in the actions and writings of the radical abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Bringing together key texts of both African American and European American authors, Democratic Discourses shows the important ways that abolitionist writing shaped a powerful counterculture within a slave-holding society. Bennett offers fresh new analysis through unusual pairings of authors, including Frederick Douglass with Henry David Thoreau, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper with Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller with Sojourner Truth. These re-readings avoid the tendency to view antebellum writing as a product primarily of either European American or African American influences and, instead, illustrate the interconnections of white and black literature in the creation and practice of democracy. Drawing on discourses about the body, gender, economics, and aesthetics, this unique study encourages readers to reconsider the reality and roots of freedoms experienced in the United States today.

A wide-ranging study of letter-writing in the eighteenth century, this book explores epistolatory forms and practices in relation to important areas of British culture. Organised around a series of characters, each chapter explores with depth and breadth the patterns of letter-writing and letter-reading in the period. Familiar ideas about epistolatory fiction and personal correspondence, and public and private, are re-examined in the light of alternative paradigms, showing how the letter is a genre at the centre of eighteenth-century life.

An affectionate, understanding, and informed study of Miller's life and works, supported by a wide selection of personal and public photographs. Arthur Miller was one of the most highly regarded and widely performed playwrights of our time. With his probing and perceptive dramas, he succeeded in charting the landscape of the American psyche to create classics of modern theater that have found enthusiastic audiences all over the world. Enoch Brater's concise literary biography gives the general reader a welcome introduction to this most political and moral of writers, whose keen social conscience and insights into human nature made him a cornerstone of contemporary culture. Professor Brater follows Miller's career from his prize-winning student days at the University of Michigan, through the phenomenal success of his 1949 drama, Death of a Salesman, to his doomed marriage to the actress Marilyn Monroe, and beyond. Examining seminal works, including All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, as well as commenting on Miller's journalism, fiction, screenplays, and acclaimed autobiography, Brater looks at how the writer, throughout his long career, achieved a fusion of family drama, political allegory, use of realism and expressionism, and themes of unrest and redemption, to stunning—and often devastating—effect. 122 illustrations.

This manifesto summarises the disparate critical practices that constitute `ecocriticism'. Lawrence Buell, one of the world's leading theorists in ecocriticism traces the ecocritical movement back to its roots in the 1970s, through its coalescence into a recognisable entity in the early 1990s, to its diversification and proliferation today. He shows how, from an initial focus on such genres as nature writing and nature poetry, ecocriticism has come to take all of literary history and discourse as its arena; and he addresses questions currently facing the discipline, such as: Why has the interest in environmental literary and cultural studies so quickly increased? Can the nature-preservation emphasis of first-wave ecocriticism be reconciled with second-wave concerns with issues of environmental justice? What is the meaning of `place' in a globalizing world? How do aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns interact and collide in ecocritical work? Finally, Buell looks to the future of ecocriticism, predicting that discourses of the environment will become a permanent part of literary and cultural studies.

This comprehensive history of Irish literature is written in both its major languages, Irish and English. The twenty-eight chapters in the two-volume history provide an authoritative chronological survey of the Irish literary tradition. Spanning fifteen centuries of literary achievement, the two volumes range from the earliest medieval Latin texts to the late twentieth century. The contributors, drawn from a range of Irish, British and North American universities, are internationally renowned experts in their fields. Featuring a detailed chronology and guides to further reading for each chapter, this major project will become the key reference to Irish Literature.

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: A Kind of History: Barbara Hodgdon (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) Part I: Overviews: Terms of Performance 1. Reconstructing Love: King Lear and Theatre Architecture: Peggy Phelan(Stanford University) 2. Shakespeare's Two Bodies: Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame) 3. Ragging Twelfth Night 1602, 1996, 2002-3: Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California) 4. On Location: Robert Shaughnessy (University of Kent) 5. Where is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation: Margaret Jane Kidnie (University of Western Ontario) 6. Shakespeare and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Performance: Ania Loomba (University of Pennsylvania) Part II: Materialities: Writing and Performance 7. The Imaginary Text, or, The Curse of the Folio: Anthony B. Dawson (University of British Columbia) 8. Shakespeare Screen/Play: Laurie E. Osborne (Colby College) 9. What does the Cued Part Cue? Parts and Cues in Romeo and Juliet: Simon Palfrey (University of Liverpool) and Tiffany Stern (author) 10. Editors in Love? Performing Desire in Romeo and Juliet: Wendy Wall (Northwestern University) 11. Prefixing the Author: Print, Plays, and Performance: W. B. Worthen (University of California, Berkeley) Part III: Histories 12. Shakespeare the Victorian: Richard Schoch (University of London) 13. Shakespeare Goes Slumming: Harlem '37 and Birmingham '97: Kathleen McLuskie (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon) 14. Stanislavski, Othello, and the Motives of Eloquence: John Gillies (University of Essex) 15. Shakespeare, Henry VI, and the Festival of Britain: Stuart Hampton-Reeves (University of Central Lancashire) 16. Encoding/Decoding Shakespeare: Richard III at the 2002 Stratford Festival: Ric Knowles (University of Guelph) 17. Performance as Deflection: Miriam Gilbert (University of Iowa) 18. Maverick Shakespeare: Carol Chillington Rutter (University of Warwick) 19. Inheriting the Globe: The Reception of Shakespearian Space and Audience in Contemporary Reviewing: Paul Prescott (actor and author) 20. Performing History: Henry IV, Money, and the Fashion of the Times: Diana E. Henderson (MIT) Part IV: Performance Technologies, Cultural Technologies 21. "Are We Being Theatrical Yet?": Actors, Editors, and the Possibilities of Dialogue: Michael Cordner (University of York) 22. Shakespeare on the Record: Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire) 23. Sshockspeare: (Nazi) Shakespeare Goes Heil-lywood: Richard Burt (University of Florida) 24. Game Space/Tragic Space: Julie Taymor's Titus: Peter S. Donaldson (MIT) 25. Shakespeare Stiles Style: Shakespeare, Julia Stiles, and American Girl Culture: Elizabeth A. Deitchman (University of California) 26. Shakespeare on Vacation: Susan Bennett (University of Calgary) Part V: Identities of Performance 27. Visions of Color: Spectacle, Spectators, and the Performance of Race: Margo Hendricks (University of California, Santa Cruz) 28. Shakespeare and the Fiction of

The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and the Virgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devoted to the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order.Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald.THOMAS G. DUNCAN is Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of St Andrews

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work. Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century.

Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism is an exploration of two fundamental yet greatly neglected.phpects of the author's life and writings: his deep-seated pessimism and his complex creed of heroism. The method of the book is both biographical and critical. Biographically, it traces the roots of Kipling's dark worldview and his search for something to believe in, a way of thinking and acting in defiance of life's hellishness. There matters were more basic to him than any of his social or political opinions, but this the first full-length study devoted to them. Critically, the book takes a fresh and close look at some of Kipling's most important works. The result challenges long established assumptions and amounts to a major reconsideration of novels like Kim and stories like "Mary Postgate" and "The Gardener." Central in these discussions of individual writings is Kipling's concern with the heroic life, but of equal importance is the analysis and evaluation of them as works of art. Avoiding the tangled and special language of some recent literary theory, this will appeal to a wide audience of those interested in Kipling's mind and art.

An invaluable and detailed critical analysis and record of a lively but undervalued literary community.

What role, if any, does narrative imagination play in the anticipation and actualization of America's political future? Rumors of War and Infernal Machines explores how narrative speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies may exert profound influence upon the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. This phenomenon is analyzed primarily within the domain of post-World War II American speculative fiction (e.g. science fiction, technothrillers, apocalypse narratives) and policy however, to show that this particular to one nation and one epoch, the book also conducts a detailed assessment of comparable Victorian and Edwardian British literature. Ultimately, these two investigatory thrusts reveal profound cultural similarities and a marked transatlantic continuum close analysis of primary texts and supporting historical documents indicates that, along with global dominance, a discursive preoccupation with military innovation was transferred from Britain to the US in the decades following World War I. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines reveals a similar historical relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technophilic ideologies. Throughout, new research and analyses are presented without recourse to jargon, inviting readers of varying backgrounds and interests to explore the intersections of future-looking fiction and contemporary political power.

The Pickering & Chatto of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell is the first comprehensive critical of her work to be published. It brings together, for the first time, her journalism, some of which has never been republished, her extensive shorter fiction, which was published in various collections during her lifetime, her early personal writing, including a diary written between 1835 and 1838 when she was a young mother, the five full-length novels and The Life of Charlotte Bronte. These volumes will reveal a writer who excelled in many genres, and whose impact on the world of mid-Victorian publishing was far-reaching.

Bernard Shaw fashioned public images of himself that belied the nature and depth of his emotional experiences and the complexity of his intellectual outlook. In this absorbing biography, noted Shavian authority A. M. Gibbs debunks many of the elements that form the foundation of Shaw's self-created legend-from his childhood (which was not the loveless experience he claimed publicly), to his sexual relationships with several women, to his marriage, his politics, his Irish identity, and his controversial philosophy of Creative Evolution. Drawing on previously unpublished materials, including never-before-seen photographs and early sketches by Shaw, Gibbs offers a fresh perspective and brings us closer than ever before to the human being behind the masks.

In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder's well-crafted poetry and prose to track the early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various.phpects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America's cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder's writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco's Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love. Gray's introduction tracks the increased use of “Pacific Rim discourse” by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder's countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet's migratory or “creaturely” sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in the environmental issues. Throughout, Gray's citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder's communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder's life and work. This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.

Andrew Hadfield reveals for the first time exactly how Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary strands in political thought critical of the English crown. Although he was often seen as a conservative political thinker characterized by an over-riding fear of the 'mob', Hadfield argues that Shakespeare's writing actually emerged out of an intellectual milieu fascinated by republican ideas. From the 1590s onwards, he explored republican themes in his poetry and plays: political assassination, elected government, alternative constitutions, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the problem of power without responsibility.

Johnson himself wrote in 1782: "I know not that I have written any thing more generally commended than the Lives of the Poets." Always recognized as a major biographical and critical achievement, Samuel Johnson's last literary project is also one of his most readable and entertaining, written with characteristic eloquence and conviction, and at times with combative trenchancy.Johnson's fifty-two biographies constitute a detailed survey of English poetry from the early seventeenth century down to his own time, with extended discussions of Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, and Gray. The Lives also include Johnson's memorable biography of the enigmatic Richard Savage (1744), the friend of his own early years in London.Roger Lonsdale's Introduction describes the origins, composition, and textual history of the Lives, and assesses Johnson's assumptions and aims as biographer and critic. The commentary provides a detailed literary and historical context, investigating Johnson's sources, relating the Lives to his own earlier writings and conversation, and to the critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as illustrating their early reception. This is the first scholarly since George Birkbeck Hill's three-volume Oxford (1905).

In the middle of the nineteenth century, urban families began to inhabit apartment houses, boarding houses, tenements, and hotels. These multi-unit residences began to define American city landscapes, a shift that had enormous interpersonal and cultural repercussions. These new forms of housing altered the ways in which Americans inhabited and understood urban space. Helping to create among city dwellers a distinctively modern subjectivity were a host of writers (among them, Hawthorne, James, and Nella Larsen) who experimented in prose with the possibilities and dangers of urban space. Reformers, planners, and engineers simultaneously helped to shape urban sensibilities by experimenting with architectural form in the city's physical landscape, often hoping to shape a particular type of citizen with their designs. Imaginatively juxtaposing literary criticism with a history of the built environment, Klimasmith examines urban domestic fiction alongside architectural, sociological, and photographic texts of the period, pairing important American novels with developments in urban domestic architecture. Arguing that nineteenth and early-twentieth-century residential spaces were always more fluid and dynamic than traditional scholarship holds, her study allows us to witness the unfolding of modernity and to view the modernist subject at its very inception.

In lively, forceful, and at times witty language, Michael Lieb has written an illuminating study of the figure of God as a literary character in the writings of John Milton. Milton's God has always been a provocative and controversial figure, and Lieb offers a fresh way to look at the relationship between the language of theology and and the language of poetry in Milton's works. He draws into the discussion previous authors on the subject--Patrides, Hunter, Kelley, Empson, Danielson, Rumrich and others--resulting in a dynamic debate about Milton's multifarious God.