Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2016 -

This is a story of profound disillusionment and remarkable adaptability. It is an original and compelling analysis of Baudelaire's disenchantment with the sociopolitical upheavals of the mid-19th century and his coming to terms with the traumatic consequences of the modernization of Paris in the Haussmann era. According to Ross (emer., comparative literature, Univ. of Michigan), Baudelaire's inevitable and persistent confrontation with city noise--distracting, alienating, and ubiquitous--led to a change in his ethics and aesthetics. Through close analysis of individual poems inTableaux parisiens (1857) andLe Spleen de Paris(1869, posthumously published), Ross shows how Baudelaire moved away from poetry that beautified the ordinary by denying the reality of time and noise to poetry as allegory that presents noise and disorder as proof of transcendent evil and ultimate destruction. Ross encourages readers to approach Baudelaire's poetry as an urban diary--achantier, or work in progress--that bears witness to a period of alarming transformations and gives birth to a new form of beauty, the poetics of poetry's alien other, its enemy: noise. Out of the inescapable din and rubble of the old city destroyed during the Second Empire came a new vision of a world governed by sinister supernatural forces and a modern aesthetics of permanent incompletion and instability.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Chica lit is a wonderful addition to the literature on Latina/o popular culture. Taking an expansive theoretical approach that includes a critique of neoliberalism and the difficult questions of stereotyping and authenticity, Hedrick (Univ. of Florida) explores the production, content, and reception of this subgenre within chicklit called chica lit. Given that chica lit seeks a space in mainstream chicklit, the author explores the opportunities and challenges of participating in the marketing of difference. Looking at such subjects as denial of structural inequality and the tension that authors experience in their efforts to write something original against the publishing industry's expectations of an authentic Latina/o that often borders on offensively prejudiced, Hedrick takes the reader through the construction and evolution of the contemporary romance genre, industrial expectations of ethnic female authors, and the possibilities of subverting structural barriers once one's foot is in the door of this publishing industry. The author includes interviews with many authors, and she also deconstructs plots. The resulting book is a brilliant example of scholarship that explores the difficult yet absolutely necessary effort of being present within the mainstream while maintaining cultural integrity.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

This efficient, readable translation by Dixon offers English-speaking readers access to Santagata's compelling and lyrical biography of Dante,Il romanzo della sua vita, originally published in Italian in 2013. The biography is exactly what one would expect from a sensitive professor of literature writing the life of a major literary figure: it is mindful of chronology, social contexts, and cultural influences and narrated in overt and subtle ways to highlight Dante's literary achievement. Indeed, in places the book reads as much like a novel as a biography, which makes it a valuable resource for students and nonspecialists. Besides the actual biography, which occasionally grinds but more often gallops over complicated historical interactions, there are delightfully informative and helpful notes that offer a second layer of context and scholarship for experts and advanced students looking for additional nuance and resources. Along the way, some interesting--if ultimately unverifiable--theses are proposed, including the clever argument that Dante may have come to grips with a disease (other scholars have postulated epilepsy), transmuting the experience in theVita Nova.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Hernandez-Salvan (Univ. of California, Riverside) delves into the complex and shifting relationship between literature and power in post-1959 Cuba. Basing her discussion on a solid theoretical foundation, the author elucidates how artistic and literary representations of the revolution were transformed from utopian and allegorical in early years to dystopian and anti-representational in recent decades. In the introduction Hernandez-Salvan provides background, emphasizing intellectual movements in post-1959 Cuba and the ways in which these have imagined and represented the revolution. In the first chapter she explores 1960s revolutionary ideology, in particular Che Guevara's ideas on the "new man." In the next chapter she analyzes works from the 1980s and 1990s to show both the influence and subsequent rejection of Guevara's ideas on the subject's role within the state; in chapter 3 she looks at the revival in the 1990s of Jose Lezama Lima, positing that the push to recover this once-ostracized author was, in fact, a new and effective government campaign aimed at controlling cultural production. Hernandez-Salvan concludes by examining the post-1989 Diaspora(s) and Paideia projects, movements that rejected aesthetic representations of politics, albeit in different ways. An invaluable contribution to Cuban studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Spain's most famous novel,Don Quijote, is in many ways about the shaping of history and the search for truth. The challenges of historiography are fundamental to the narrative design. Although the time period, tone, and goals of the works Hazbun (St. Anne's College, Univ. of Oxford, UK) scrutinizes are different from those of Cervantes, the study is likewise about the underlying sources, perceptions, rhetoric, and, one might add, philosophy of history. Hazbun focuses on the representation of the Islamic conquest of Spain and the centuries-long reconquest. The book's four chapters look at King Alfonso X's vast project,Estoria de Espana (1252-84); theCronica de veinte reyes(c. 1360);mester de clerecia poetry (including works by Gonzalo de Berceo); and Pedro de Corral'sCronicasarracina (c. 1430). Hazbun demonstrates that Islam is inscribed in the history and fiction of Catholic Spain. Both story and discourse here are inflected by change, flux, adaptation, loss, and, perhaps paradoxically, an interweaving that is more prominent than separation. This is a fascinating and remarkably nuanced analysis.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This is an exceptional book about the unexceptional, the botched, the flawed, and the imperfect. Original and illuminating, the volume considers French modernism and its fascination with the thoroughly unremarkable: everyday incidents and encounters, modest means of enjoyment, and commonplace objects like coffee-table statuettes, glasses of tap water, spots, and soap. Devoting half of her study to Proust and the other half to three writers she presents as his literary heirs--Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Yasmina Reza--Freed-Thall (comparative literature, Brown) focuses on a significant but critically overlooked, surprisingly modern side ofIn Search of Lost Time: the power of the prosaic. She argues for reading Proust's masterpiece as a guide to seeing beauty and intrinsic worth in ordinary, unsophisticated aspects of daily life. Beautifully written, Freed-Thall's analysis of modernist variations of everyday aesthetics invites the reader to revisit Ponge's poetry while keeping in mind the word "profanation," and to reexamine Sarraute's fiction while considering her deliberate cultivation of an aesthetics of bad taste. And the author analyzes how Reza's playArtencourages the reader to experience the phenomenology of blankness. This is an important study of the theory of aesthetics, the sociology of culture, and the art of thequelconque (the "whatever").Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.