Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2016 -

Hutchison (Univ. of Texas, Austin) has put together a landmark work in American studies--what the preface aptly calls "the first omnibus history of the literature of the American Civil War." The collection comprises 22 essays distributed across three categories: contexts, genres, and figures. Essays explore current scholarly concerns, such as the nuances of cultural memory, and review significant subfields, e.g., southern studies. Among the many important contributions are Judie Newman's examination of the transnational significance of Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin, T. Austin Graham's analysis of Civil War historiography over time, Shirley Samuels's look at Abraham Lincoln's complexity, and Robert Levine's meditation on Frederick Douglass's changing views of Lincoln. Coleman made the crucial decision to stress the Civil War's enduring legacy by including work on contemporary writers for whom the war loomed--or still looms--large. Daniel Cross Turner's essay on Natasha Trethewey'sNative Guard(2006), for example, illustrates well how this bloodiest of US conflicts resonates powerfully in the present-day US. Both probing and accessible, Hutchison's collection is indispensable to any serious study of the literature of the American Civil War.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this sophisticated, impeccably researched volume, Lockwood (English, George Mason Univ.) demonstrates how in the period 1865-1915, both well-known and obscure New England women represented and performed "history" in literary and historiographic texts and in creating heritage tourist sites. In particular, she counters Richard Brodhead and other new historicists' dismissal of the New England urban elite for appropriating the region for touristic, imperial ends. Though Lockwood acknowledges the racist and nativist character of regionalist cultural work, she provides a nuanced, expansive argument that articulates how women fiction writers, historians, and colonial revivalists used the example of republican dissent and imperial cosmopolitan New England to create "intimate" and "queer" histories in which they, as mobile white women, are citizens and producers of history and create "alternate affiliations" with other women instead of being defined as the mothers of citizens. Although Lockwood's treatment of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman is insightful, her unexpected exploration of the gender-bending phenomenon of china collecting is especially innovative. Lockwood asserts that Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Hopkins, who are not usually identified as regionalists, used colonial referents to carry out even more-radical dissent.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Published in the bicentennial year of Charlotte Bronte's birth, this approachable and empathetic biography reads like an adventure tale. Harman assembles her historical framework around a classic question surrounding the author: was she a tragic figure? The answer, according to Harman, is both yes and no; Bronte's life was restricted and painful, but her responses to events were transformational, even heroic. For this thoroughly grounded, richly resourced narrative Harman draws on abundant precedents and relies heavily on recently published letters--especially Margaret Smith's three-volumeThe Letters of Charlotte Bronte (CH, Jul'96, 33-6130),(CH, Jan'01, 38-2587),(CH, Jan'05, 42-2642)--plunging the reader into the Haworth, Yorkshire, of Patrick Bronte and his children. The family drama is psychologically compelling, and the author makes Charlotte come alive. The picture that emerges is of a thwarted woman who turns adversity into arresting prose. Bronte'sJane Eyre captures her haunting ability to draw on personal facts and mesmerize readers with their implications. This wonderful biography joins (and updates) earlier masterworks, e.g., Winifred Gerin'sCharlotte Bronte: The Evolution of a Genius (CH, Jan'68). In addition to a selected bibliography, Harman includes invaluable page notes and photographs of key figures.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Scholarship on literature produced by Korean American and Vietnamese American authors has been notoriously hard to come by until quite recently. Examining the social, (geo)political, and literary dimensions of a complex topic, Park (Univ. of Pennsylvania) has produced a study that provides an invaluable, potentially foundational, three-pronged genealogy of Asian American identity during the Cold War. In her introduction, "Making Friendlies," Park frames the book's central argument: Asian American identity during the Cold War was overdetermined by the wartime concept of a "friendly"--rather than a "friend"--epitomized by the Korean character of Ho-Jon in Richard Hooker's 1968 novelMASH (and the subsequent film and television series). The author divides the book into two sections, in each examining a small, though representative, set of literary works, including memoirs, novels, and feature films from the 1960s to the present. The first section, "Securing the Korean War," focuses on the construction of Korean American identity in the wake of the Korean War, a subject that has languished, falling victim to the general lack of scholarly attention paid to that conflict. The second section, "Reviving the War in Vietnam," looks at how these identity-making strategies were both adopted and altered in regard to the Vietnam War and Vietnamese Americans.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Napier's study of Daniel Defoe is literary criticism at its best: attentive to text, informed (but not dominated) by theory, written in lucid--indeed lyrical--prose. Napier (Middlebury) begins with Defoe's complicated invocations of genre in the major fiction. Spiritual autobiography jockeys for interpretive dominance with picaresque fiction inRobinson Crusoe;criminal biography wars with conduct literature for narrative control ofMoll FlandersandRoxana. Such generic instability demonstrates the difficulty of telling a story of self, a point further emphasized by accounts that are changed in the retelling or that never get fully told in the first place. From the first chapter's introduction of the problem of the narrative (and narrating) self, Napier moves on to chapters centered on dominant versions of the self in Defoe: the performing self, the compulsive self, the divided self. Each chapter provides ample evidence that the problematic of accounting for the self in these various ways is evident in all of Defoe's major fiction, though, predictably,Robinson Crusoe,Moll Flanders, andRoxana receive the most detailed attention. Napier's elegant, comprehensive, judicious study fully convinces that accounting for the self is a central concern of Defoe's major fiction.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

Damrosch (Harvard) offers an extremely accessible and detailed summary of the life and work of William Blake. Thoroughly illustrated with nearly 100 images, 40 in full color, the volume combines biographical detail with an illuminating reading of Blake's work. Damrosch does not shy away from engaging with the complexities of Blake's composite art experiments, intricate symbolism, and esoteric mythology, but neither does he mythologize the poet. The author offers fresh, provocative interpretations of some of Blake's works and of his relationship to politics, religion, women, and science in a comprehensive, albeit in places exhausting, attempt to explore and explain Blake's difficulties. By the end of the volume, one has come to know Blake, his history, his time, his creative depth, and his endurance. The author's method is to involve readers with Blake's complexities but to do so with patience. Like a good film trailer, this book generates a desire to learn more.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This volume completes Moody's biography of Ezra Pound and his poetry. As was evident in the first two volumes--(CH, Oct'08, 46-0754), (CH, Jun'15, 52-5200)--Moody (emer., Univ. of York, UK) is exceptional at reading Pound's work. The third volume's title reflects the fact that during these years Pound, who broadcasted anti-US, anti-Jew propaganda from Italy during the war, was detained for treason by the US Army. He spent six months imprisoned in a cage in a facility in Pisa and was then transferred to the US and locked up in a mental hospital near Washington for 12 years. He gained his release in 1958 and immediately returned to Italy to live out his life. Moody covers all this. As an astute reader of Pound and US political culture, Moody separates Pound the poet from Pound the propagandist as best anyone could. The man who emerges from Moody's three volumes is as complex as the poetry he produced. Pound's comments on usury and defense of the US Constitution sound correct, and yet they cannot be disentangled from his anti-Semitism and his embrace of fascism. In the end, with the culmination of theCantos, Pound was a humbled man, one difficult to reconcile with the arrogant younger Pound.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Chronicling Frost's development as a poet, this volume is a blend of biography and literary criticism that reads like aKunstlerroman, a narrative of a young artist's struggles. After an introduction in which he describes the rise of realism against a backdrop of sentimental idealism, Barron (Univ. of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg) presents 14 chapters that analyze Frost's early life and poetry. As a youth, Frost read the "schoolroom poets" (William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) and so learned early that poetry could both instruct and delight. By combining realism with a high moral purpose, Frost created a new poetry that employed straightforward diction, the sound of everyday speech, and exacting details to convey contemporary themes of loss. After moving to England and meeting Ezra Pound, Frost further embraced the realist approach, using colloquial language and blank verse in narrative poems such as "The Death of the Hired Man." Never abandoning his poetic principles, Frost depicted ordinary people using traditional meter, a technique that elevated the ordinary to the universal in poems that have become part of the English language. In narrating the artistic development of Frost, Barron creates a volume that does what Frost did so well, instructs and delights.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This book offers an accessible, clear biography of the highly acclaimed poet, essayist, memoirist, educator, and civil rights activist. Refreshingly unburdened by footnotes and theoretical digressions, the book applies a wide-angle lens to Angelou's life and provides a sweeping view of the woman and her works. The approach is nonetheless scholarly: Wagner-Martin (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) frames her discussion of Angelou's life with other critics' viewpoints and emphasizes Angelou's influence on the larger literary world. The book is as much a biography of Angelou's writings as it is a biography of the woman. Wagner-Martin smartly anchors her study in Angelou's six autobiographies, beginning withI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings--thus highlighting for readers her subject's growth as an author. Wagner-Martin even posits that Angelou's poetry gives insight into her love life. She also provides an analysis of some of Angelou's essays and her important work as a civil rights activist. The book includes a useful bibliography of primary sources--poems, autobiographies, essays, spoken-word albums, children's books, screenplays, and so on--as well as a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Finding the antebellum and postbellum categories too limiting, Marrs (Univ. of Georgia) seeks to redefine the traditional borders of US literary study. He argues for a "transbellum" approach to American literature, and makes his case by examining four writers who bridge and continually return to the Civil War period: Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Marrs looks at how Whitman's conception of US history and his attention to the labor problem--both influenced by Hegelian dialectics-- transform the poet's ongoingLeaves of Grass project. He asserts that Douglass developed a philosophy of history that points to the war as one moment in a longer battle between slavery and freedom. He argues that Melville's poetry--often dismissed by critics as inferior to his prose--clusters around unresolved issues prompted by the war, raising questions about history, art, and violence. Finally, Marrs claims that Dickinson addresses the war ahistorically and figuratively through erasure and blankness in her poems. This slim but invaluable volume displays a thorough knowledge of literary and cultural criticism and how it has changed over time. Marrs's laser-sharp focus on these important writers will earn the respect of a broad range of readers.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this grand tour of Keats's brief career,Wolfson (Princeton) provides luminous readings that foreground all the stitching and unstitching that makes the poet's lines seem to come as naturally as leaves to a tree. Yet this close focalization never leads to an elision of forest for trees. The author syncs the twists, turns, and local idiosyncrasies of Keats's poetic unfolding to the master themes and "favorite fancies" of his corpus: the belated fate of romance, the perils of gender, the allure of beauty, and the fact of mortality. Attuned to the pleasure of the text, Wolfson highlights and even harnesses the wordplay and aesthetic play that ever actuates the Keatsian imagination. One of the real delights here is Wolfson's generative wit: riffing on Keats'sGrecian Urn, she recasts lines as a "sphinxy bride of silence" that become, inThe Eve of St. Agnes,"a striptease out of thought." No mere introduction, this volume distills Keats's poetry, letters, life, and times--not to mention almost two centuries of scholarship--into a master scholar's fresh and lively attempt to untangle the Gordian complications of his poetic thinking.

In this groundbreaking book, Schaffer (Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) provides an alternative view of the marriage plots in 19th-century novels, building a case for the familiar marriage as a rival to the romantic marriage. Although the newer romance plot was dominant by the end of the century, the familiar marriage in its various forms--neighbor, cousin, disability, vocational--provided women with an attractive alternative. The familiar marriage afforded a woman benefits not usually available in romance plots. In the neighbor or cousin marriage, she is able to stay among her established community of family and friends. In the disability or vocational marriage, she gains some useful occupation in addition to being wife and mother. Schaffer also clarifies many choices the female characters make, e.g., why Marianne in Austen'sSense and Sensibility would ultimately be happy in her marriage to Col. Brandon. In addition, the author looks at why the romance plot took precedence by the end of the century. The subject matter of this impeccably researched, clearly written work is so compelling that the book will interest readers outside as well as inside the academy. The book will definitely influence how this reviewer teaches some of her favorite novels in the future.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

The end result of great scholarship is often to make the subject studied seem strange, allowing the reader to see a familiar issue or text with fresh eyes. Pratt (Univ. of Oxford, UK) accomplishes this feat in his exploration of 19th-century African American writing as a space where writers redefined ideals of humanism by positing that being a stranger was both essential to the human condition and important as a foundational belief for defining an ethical democratic society. The author first identifies this ideal in the collective publications of antifacist texts, then reads Frederick Douglass and the poets who contributed toLes Cenelles (1845)--a collection of 85 French-language poems by African Creole poets of Louisiana--as producing compelling reworkings of the human through the stranger persona. He ends by linking Douglass's work to contemporary writer Edward Jones and formalist George Lukacs in order to demonstrate how African American historical narratives rely on the stranger motif as a central means of capturing the totality of black experience. Building on the work of Alexander Weheliye, Ellen Rooney, and Paul Gilroy among others, Pratt develops an important argument about the need for revised and expanded notions of the human in revising social contracts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This volume seems poised to become a new standard reference for Shakespeare scholars, although the price may place it beyond the reach of many schools. The first of the two volumes provides contexts for Shakespeare and his writing in his own era, and the second explores subsequent global reception, adaptation, translation, and performance. The list of contributors includes both well-established names in the field and emerging, less-known voices. Although the majority of the contributors hail from the US and the UK, scholars from several other countries are included. The first volume is particularly strong in its organization and coverage of the topic. Perhaps inevitably, because of the breadth of its topic, the second volume sometimes seems more scattered or haphazard in terms of subjects discussed, but the work is substantive and valuable. This set--with its broad scope--is an exceptional resource: nonspecialists and casual readers will find it accessible, and specialists will appreciate the consistently high-quality scholarship.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Studies of Shakespeare reception abound. Most draw on what great writers have had to say about him but only because great writers have left evidence; these works' goals are usually to capture a "typical" response. By contrast, Leinwand (Univ. of Maryland) focuses not on an imagined common reader but on seven major English and American authors from the 19th and 20th centuries: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes. Making no effort to tally Shakespearean sources and parallels in these writers' works, Leinwand tries instead to understand what Shakespeare meant for these exceptionally powerful literary minds. Some of their reactions are captured in famous publications (Keats's "On Sitting Down to ReadKing Lear Once Again," Woolf's imagined Shakespeare's sister inA Room of One's Own), but most of the evidence comes from marginalia, private letters, diaries, and so on. Leinwand's close readings are intense and insightful, and he takes the authors seriously even when they are at their most perverse. The result is a smart, readable book not about Shakespeare himself but about what he has meant to great writers.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

As Clifford Siskin makes explicit in his afterword, this heavyweight volume is presented as a lengthy argument to Ian Watt's classicThe Rise of the Novel (1957). Garside (Univ. of Edinburgh, UK) and O'Brien (King's College London, UK) focus on the period that Watt dismissed as aesthetically irrelevant, and the volume's three stars--Sterne, Scott, Austen--enjoy the centrality Watt afforded to Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson. But Sterne, Scott, and Austen are far from being the only stars in the firmament. Organized into six parts, the volume's 33 essays engage with aspects of the novel's transformation during this time frame, examining everything from statistics relating to authorship to the endlessly subdividing subgenres that developed (among them spy novels and scandal tales) to the appearance and vanishing of narrative modes (e.g., the epistolary novel). Although these multiplying categories imply division, in fact the collection emphasizes boundary crossings of all sorts--for example, novels crossing from England to Jamaica and William Beckford'sVathek appearing as both a Gothic and an Oriental tale. The resulting volume conveys the sheer energy of the form's experiments, both successful and dead-end. Jargon-free prose makes this important collection accessible to a wide range of readers.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates through faculty.

Ricks and McCue teamed their considerable expertise and literary acumen to produce this complete variorum edition of Eliot's poems, creating an authoritative, scholarly edition that is now the essential print resource. Volume 1 (Collected and Uncollected Poems) includes Eliot'sCollected Poems 1909-1962as edited and corrected by Eliot, with comprehensive annotations added by Ricks and McCue; previously uncollected poems;Poems Written in Early Youth;Inventions of the March Hare, ed. by Ricks; and a new reading draft of versions ofThe Waste Land. Of special interest is "Valerie's Book," which Eliot wrote out in hand for his second wife. Volume 2 (Practical Cats and Further Verses) comprisesOld Possum's Book of Practical Cats; Eliot's translation of Saint-John Perse'sAnabasis, a collection of poems; and copious annotations followed by scrupulous corrections of publication errors. Subject to the powerful forces in literary criticism, Eliot has proven to be among the most enduring poets in modern times. These volumes force a reevaluation of the highs and lows of Eliot's gifts, one that will supersede earlier, outmoded interpretations of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexual inhibition and avowals of elitist or conservative slants. The set reflects Valerie Eliot's promotion of a full view of the writer behind Andrew Lloyd Webber'sCatsand the pundits of New Criticism.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Setting aside judgments of aesthetic merit, Cohen (UCLA) considers literary texts in terms of the social dynamics they catalyze as well as embody. He traces the circulatory power of the 19th-century American popular ballad in the formation of an American ethos, for this purpose construing the ballad genre to include a variety works that are--with the exception of Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain"--pedestrian and more common in their popular character than in their formal features. His subjects range from the inklings of a simply more sociable community fostered by the balladmongering of Yankee peddler-poetasters at the turn of the 19th century to the emergent new composite African American poetic culture--and, arguably, African Americanness itself--produced by racially contested minstrelsy and jubilee choruses. Along the way the author devotes extensive attention to the mobilizing zeal of John Greenleaf Whittier's abolitionist verse and looks at "contraband" slave songs leading up to and running throughout the Civil War and the straining during reconstruction for a recovered national mythos mediated by ballad anthologizing. Cohen examines these texts as material sites for the negotiation of cultural ownership and belonging, social identity and agency, literary and racial authenticity, and other sociological turns. An ingenious, well-developed study utilizing impressively illuminating archival sources.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Anyone interested in realism in the Victorian novel should read Jaffe's book. As she addresses the idea of realism in the Victorian novel, Jaffe (Univ. of Toronto) makes the case that these novels portray desire of the real, rather than the real itself. Focusing on such classics as George Eliot'sAdam Bede, Thomas Hardy'sThe Mayor of Casterbridge, and Charles Dickens'sOliver Twist, Jaffe offers often-brilliant readings that are sophisticated in their attention to detail and in their awareness of critics' earlier claims about realism. As she discusses Anthony Trollope'sOrley Farm, for example, she picks up on a question that characters ask themselves -"Why should I not?"--and points out that the question allows characters to engage in fantasizing and pushing the boundaries of convention. As she writes, "Introspection takes the form of extended speculation." In the conclusion Jaffe discusses more recent attempts to read Victorian fiction. For instance, she challenges surface reading and argues that readers always engage in acts of interpretation or look beneath the surface. Jaffe reminds one that Victorian fiction works with the tension between fantasy and the real, and she points out that critics who try to sever the two miss that productive tension.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This excellent collection considers (as the editors write in their introduction) the "distinctive feminist culture of letters" of the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that second-wave women's writing was an activist intervention in US politics. Though it includes work on prestigious literary and postmodernist fiction (Margaret Atwood's Surfacing andThe Edible Woman, Bertha Harris'sLover), the collection pays special attention to other categories, including best sellers (Erica Jong'sFear of Flying, Anne Roiphe'sUp the Sandbox), genre fiction (Sara Paretsky'sIndemnity Only), lesbian drama (plays by Jane Chambers), and nonfiction publishing practices (newsletters, journalism, and publishing outside the mainstream). Especially admirable are an essay by Yung-Hsing Wu on the centrality of close reading to feminist critique and Phillip Gordon's audacious reading of Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple as "the first American AIDS narrative." The contributors offer a significant corrective to contemporary US feminist theory by looking closely at second-wave writers rather than basing their commentary on third-wave accounts of their feminist predecessors' shortcomings.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This study stands out as an excellent scholarly performance. Outside of Scotland King James the VI and I is rarely discussed as a serious writer; however, Rickard (Univ. of Leeds, UK) does a wonderful job of showing how the dismissive attitude toward James as an author has caused critics to overlook times when more canonical writers were responding to James's writings, and in so doing creating an important form of dialogue between the king and his subjects. After a well-researched introduction that traces James's identity as a writer from his days as the king of Scottish through his ascension to the English throne, the author provides historicized close readings of works by Ben Jonson, John Donne, and William Shakespeare that responded to their king and became part of a conversation. James's published texts offered a unique opportunity, as they invited an engaged readership and a responsive public. Jonson, Donne, and Shakespeare responded in ways that at times differed greatly from each other and enriched their own, and probably James's, writings. This is an important piece of scholarship.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.