Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

A Curious Peril is an exemplary scholarly work: exceptionally well researched, consistently smart, accessible. Drawing her title from an H. D. verse ("Loss"), Vetter (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) focuses on H. D.'s less-known, post-WW II writing. Vetter makes a persuasive case for the impact on H. D. of living through both world wars in London and experiencing the Nazi blitz. Starting as an imagist, H. D. (1886-1961) transitioned to an emphasis on war, nation, time, and the intersection of imperialism and patriarchy in her later work. A Curious Peril is grounded in previous criticism of H. D. and in theories of autobiography, genre, and intertextuality. Of particular interest is the description of H. D.'s library holdings and reading habits--an invaluable appendix lists books H. D. owned and/or read--and how those books interacted with her own works. Vetter provides close readings of By Avon River, The Sword Went Out to Sea, and White Rose and the Red, all written in the 1940s, and of work published in the 1950s. Sword, Vetter argues, is a postmodern pastiche of autobiography, ghost story, mysticism, science fiction, fairy tale, and historical fiction. By interrogating the very nature of narrative, H. D. gestured toward the trauma of war and the Holocaust.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

A book of enormous breadth and ambition, Attention Equals Life is at once astonishing and reaffirming, challenging and clarifying. It engages more broadly than its scholarly focus would suggest. Epstein (Florida State Univ.) explores contemporary poetry's obsession with the quotidian, setting that obsession in literary context (both historical and current) and identifying it as contemporaneous with cultural interest in the ordinary, the commonplace, the "real." His argument is persuasive, the information is abundant and compelling, the endnotes and bibliography are extensive if not exhaustive, and the style is accessible. This book has something for everyone--poets, critics, teachers of literature and contemporary culture, fans of contemporary poetry, and even those who think that no poetry of value has emerged in the US since Robert Frost. The book is demanding in that the author consults and embraces theorists and practitioners from many fields. Though it is not for everyone, Attention Equals Life will richly reward those willing to take up the challenge.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

As someone whose doctoral secondary specialty was American realism and naturalism, this reviewer approached Bitter Tastes with a confident complacency he now realizes was misplaced. Understanding of naturalism has often been governed more by assumption than by full comprehension. Now Campbell (Washington State Univ.) enlarges the tired definition of American naturalism beyond the label "pessimistic determinism," showing clearly how, by emphasizing "women's bodies and women's lives" and by examining the "less-than-clear-cut corners of naturalism," women writers recaptured the "vitality" submerged in the "clinical debates over heredity versus environment." Campbell's analysis of the interplay between women authors (including screenwriters) and the medium of cinema is nothing less than astounding. The author covers a broad scope, including neglected writers such as Evelyn Scott as well as famous novelists such as Edith Wharton. Yet despite the incredible range of Campbell's discussion, the book's treatment of each element is meticulous in detail and gripping in presentation. Bitter Tastes should be required reading for any serious student of naturalism, women's writing, or early film.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is the best single-volume Hemingway biography now available. Hutchisson (The Citadel) demonstrates complete mastery of past work on Hemingway done by so many others. To this, Hutchisson adds his own full knowledge of Hemingway's work in short and long fiction; newspapers, magazines, film reports, and chronicles; highly autobiographical books on bullfights in Spain and safaris in Africa; a memoir of Paris; and correspondence (both written and received). Hutchisson's absolute familiarity with the traditions, evolution, and current state of criticism of Hemingway's work is evident throughout. If this is not enough, what pushes this volume to must-read status is Hutchisson's gift for narrative. Writing with ease and grace, Hutchisson reveals a writer who was able to carry on a life-work synthesis despite the fact that he was more often in crisis than not. Probably no readers will come away from this biography with a better idea of Hemingway as a person. But readers will have a clearer picture of why Hemingway wanted to write and how his ability to turn his adventures, weaknesses, betrayals, and personal agonies into prose made him one of the great literary monuments of the 20th century.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Also author of The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (CH, Nov'82) and one of the editors of the eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2011), among numerous other works, Franklin (Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs) is a prolific and well-known scholar of American studies. With the present title, he completes his two-volume biography of Cooper (vol.1, subtitled The Early Years, CH, Jan'08, 45-2466). Volume 2 picks up in 1826, with Cooper's departure for Europe after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans and traces his life and career to his death in 1851. The biography is distinguished by Franklin's fresh insights into relationships between Cooper's life and works, the result of Franklin's full access to Cooper's family papers. Franklin details Cooper's career as a professional novelist and his legal defense of his public persona and suggests how these and other issues inform Cooper's fiction. A remarkable scholarly achievement, this is the most thorough, balanced, complete Cooper biography available.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this fascinating book, Soto (Trinity Univ.) takes a new and startling approach to understanding the racial divides and communities that informed the literature of the Harlem Renaissance: he peers at the subject through the lens of the US census. Going back to 1790, Soto presents data that show who was counted, how people were sorted, and who was doing the counting and sorting. The conclusions are revelatory. For example, data reveal that census enumerators--not residents themselves--assigned racial classifications through the 1960 census, a reality that upends some beliefs about "passing." Soto disputes claims about Jean Toomer's racial self-identity made by Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. in their edition of Cane (2011); analyzes W. E. B. Du Bois's understanding of who counted as black folk; and examines James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), and other works. This deft study demonstrates what can be learned about literature (assuming the use of accessible language) from nontraditional tools--including game theory, geostatistics, and urban planning data. This reviewer only wishes the historical maps and graphs were larger and in color.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In recent years, literary critics have (once again) debated how to read--whether one should focus on the gaps and silences of a text, remain fixed on its surface, or survey it from a distance. Mitchell (Princeton) offers his own theory of "mere reading"--a return to close analysis of literary language that nevertheless allows for ethical and social interpretations. Mitchell situates his approach within a larger history of literary reading practices, from the new critics to surface and distance reading, then applies that approach in close readings of six American novels, starting with Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925) and concluding with Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Each chapter provides a focused analysis that highlights how literature often refuses simple paraphrase or consolidation for irresolvable contradiction and paradox--a refusal that makes the work unique among cultural productions and commits one to reading the poetics of language in the novel as a means of understanding its unique vision. Offering an important meditation on the importance of seeing literature in all its messy wonder, Mitchell's book will resonate with literary scholars of all stripes.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

With this wonderful volume Davis (Northeastern Univ.) continues the masterful treatment of formalism in 19th-century American literature she began in Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century(CH, Jul'08, 45-6016). Her readings of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman evoke both the sense of wonder (to contemplate) and the sense of wonder (to produce awe). Though Davis initially grounds the work on Heidegger's sense of Dasein, of "being in the world," the study moves adeptly between classical studies of rhetoric and the politics of New Historicism. The three writers are covered in separate chapters. Davis's examinations are not exhaustive; rather, she establishes a theory of ornamentation in 19th-century American literature. Davis's readings of Thoreau's journals, Dickinson's fascicles, and the work Whitman did before the end of the war suggest a formalism present in American poetics. For Davis, poetic theory oscillates between classical theories of ornaments and the postmodern drive to undermine agency. The poet's world is neither representational nor purely phenomenological; rather, it resides in the interstices of poet/world and the world of reader/text.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Furey (religious studies, Indiana Univ.) has written an important book. She argues that early modern poetry was understood in a much more relational manner than is often allowed. In taking this position, she provides a corrective to works such as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (CH, May'81). Furey takes on a diverse group of poets, offering readings of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Mary Sidney/Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and Americans Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet. The use of a wide range of writers who are seldom discussed together helps to strengthen Furey's argument that the trend in early modern England and in the American colonies was not to use poetry merely as a means of introspection; rather the poems reflect attempts to build relationships and community with the audience, be that audience lover, patron, or God. Furey's historicized close readings of the poems are illuminating and compelling. This wonderful book deserves to be read and discussed, and it should prove influential in the years to come.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

A rewarding and provocative study of contemporary theory and US fiction, Postmodernism in Pieces exemplifies the best of literary criticism. Mullins (English and history of ideas, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) stakes out a unique and well-thought-out position in current theoretical debates and then demonstrates how that position (which he terms neomaterialism) can be brought to bear on readings of literary texts. The results are intriguingly fresh. Of particular value is Mullins's substantial initial chapter, in which he provides a nuanced discussion of the concept of postmodernism. Mullins repurposes postmodernism in the context of actor-network theory, thing theory, and object-oriented philosophy in order to make it less of a literary-historical period than a means of examining the movement of things within a representational space. In doing so, he argues that "the social" is not a preexisting entity but, rather, fluidly and continually constructed by material means. Mullins pursues this perspective in readings of works by Leslie Silko, Toni Morrison, John Barth, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, and Julia Alvarez. Of note here is that Mullins carefully shapes these readings to address some of the large-scale issues that his initial chapter outlines. This makes Mullins's book a sustained critical reflection.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Evoking the 19th-century world of New York City and Boston intellectuals, details of daily life, European travel, and heady ambitions for reform, Showalter provides a wide perspective while focusing on an accomplished, ambitious woman. An aspiring writer, Julia Ward (1819-1910) was an heiress cultivated for a brilliant marriage. Only the dashing Samuel Gridley Howe, a romantic hero of the Greek War of Independence and an educator of blind children, could capture her eye and she married him in 1843. Howe did not approve of his wife's having a writing career and believed she should devote herself to her children. The "civil wars" of the title is a reference to Howe's troubled marriage. Showalter (emer., Princeton) deftly sketches the competing demands on Julia Ward Howe and her relentless, often secretive, determination to write. Unbeknown to her husband (from whom she separated in 1852), she wrote Passion-Flowers, a collection of poetry published in 1853, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862), among other works--all while pursuing a life of social action. Peopled with literary figures in Howes's circle, this deft biography describes the struggle of an aspiring writer and the rise of the women's movement.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

James's abundant writing on art exhibitions and artists, theatrical performances, and published plays appeared in American and British magazines and newspapers throughout his long career. Selections have been republished, but these two volumes finally bring together all of these essays and reviews, offering an indispensable resource for understanding of James's aesthetics. Collister, who judiciously edited James's autobiography, brings the same exemplary scholarship to this collection. Each volume includes an authoritative introduction that contextualizes the pieces and traces the evolution of James's vision. The drama volume begins with an unsigned theater review published in the Boston Daily Traveler in 1863, when James was a 20-year-old law student; that foray into criticism introduced him, he said, to "the profession of literature." The earliest art piece is an unsigned review of art critic Philip Hamerton's book Contemporary French Painters, published in 1868. Besides the introductions, each volume includes a chronology and every selection has a prefatory note and is followed by copious annotations. Illustrations, biographical notes on artists and actors, and a bibliography of primary and secondary works (including digital resources) round out these fine volumes.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; professionals; general readers.

The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture is brilliant scholarship. Einboden (English, Northern Illinois Univ.) probes the intellectual encounter of the American literary canon and the Islamic tradition in the Eastern world. To do this, he examines prominent American authors whose stalwart patriotism and extensive writings in the form of diaries, translations, correspondence, and fiction, among other forms, have been inscribed within a purely American tradition and have contributed to the formation of the American nation and its identity. His choices are perceptive: the unique intellectual Ezra Stiles; the erudite William Bentley; Washington Irving, statesman and forebear of American literature; human rights activist and scholar Lydia Maria Child; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, fierce advocate of individualism and towering poet. Einboden devotes a chapter to each, underscoring the impact that Islamic culture and Arabic and Persian literature had on these pillars of US culture. Provoking a discussion of foundational literature and its buried experience, this book is enormously relevant and timely, and it will serve as a formidable source not only for scholars of literature but also for those interested in linguistics, religion, cultural studies, and history.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

A game changer for Delany studies, this tome provides the raw material of Delany's intellectual and artistic progress, from the time he was a promising but conflicted student at the Bronx High School of Science to his attainment of fame as a writer of science fiction. A gay black dyslexic genius, Delany also got involved in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. From early on Delany (b. 1942) led a life of contradictions: he loved poetry but wrote science fiction; he was gay but married to the poet Marilyn Hacker; he was brilliant but unable to function in college due to a severe learning disability; he was black in a community of white sci-fi writers and fans; he was torn between pop music and popular fiction. Meticulously edited by James, these journals reveal how one of the most brilliant American science fiction writers of the time (and later a noted literary theorist) came of age. Like Jacques Derrida, Delany captures the elusiveness of language. In its construction of a multilayered self, Delany's diary is comparable to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962). James includes illustrations, Hacker's annotations to the journals, a 26-page introduction, and 37 pages of notes. Other volumes will follow, each covering ten years of Delany's life.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Chapman's The Legal Epic persuasively shows that Paradise Lost reflects Milton's deep interest in and understanding of early modern law, and that his legal perspective is central to his effort to "justify the ways of God to men" (PL: I.26). Milton's use of law, Chapman (Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham) suggests, would have been clear to his contemporaries but has been missed by modern readers because modern assumptions about the law differ greatly from early modern perceptions. This being the case, the author devotes the first two chapters to explicating the early modern understanding of law; the remaining seven chapters systematically focus on Milton's use of legal language in Paradise Lost. The results are impressive. Chapman's careful attention to the nuances of Milton's precise legal terminology sheds new light on every part of Paradise Lost, including such much-studied subjects such Satan's fall and damnation, the nature of God, and the relationship of Adam and Eve before and after the Fall. The book is exceptional in its clarity of organization, writing, and accessibility. Chapman provides footnotes.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This fourth and final volume of the letters of Samuel Beckett covers the last 24 years of his life, a period when he produced some of his most memorable work--including especially his short dramas and dramas made for television. The informative letters comment on these works, on Beckett's translations of them, and on the numerous productions of them for the stage. In the letters Beckett encourages writers less successful than himself; explains to publishers his intentions regarding contracts and rights; and indicates his artistic principles as he gives practical advice to directors, translators, and collaborators. This last volume also reveals Beckett's intention regarding his legacy, including his wishes for his letters. Useful chronologies, detailed annotations, and photographs are included throughout the volume. The appendix includes letters from collections accessed after the publication of earlier volumes (CH, Aug'09, 46-6645), (CH, Nov'12, 50-1320), (CH, Jun'15, 52-5178). The collection of Beckett's letters has been an extraordinary undertaking and achievement. This final volume, like those before it, sheds contemporary light on the life and work of this major literary figure. The entire set is an invaluable resource for directors, set designers, and actors as well as for scholars.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Poet, critic, and scholar Stephen Burt (Harvard) offers here a unique book that is both an anthology of contemporary US poetry and a work of elegant criticism. He selected 60 poems (all written since 1980) by 60 poets (some recognizable to general, informed readers and many not) and for each provides a brief sensitive, close reading along with helpful background context. One learns how each poem fits into a body of work that is itself situated within the larger culture of contemporary poetry. Some readers might wonder about the omission of any number of poets, including some luminaries and poets laureate. In his rich, informative introduction, Burt explains that his selection does not imagine any hierarchy of US contemporary poetry--quite the contrary. He is most interested in trends and tendencies, and the book is most valuable in demonstrating the variety, diversity, and vibrancy of contemporary American poetry. Each essay is a tribute to the poem being discussed and to the art of poetry itself.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

At the tail end of the 20th century, poet and critic John Hollander (then at Yale) delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. His topic was massive in its range, sharp in its focus: the sinuous but ever-significant path of the word "shadow" through Western poetry. Expertly edited by Gross (Univ. of Rochester), The Substance of Shadow puts these lectures, which Hollander left unpublished at his death in 2013, in print for the first time. Hollander's searching meditations--"investigations into shadows and their growing figurative density in poetry in English," to quote from chapter 4--make an ambient, easily unnoticed feature of poetic description unexpectedly central and vital. For Hollander, shadows were at once optical phenomena and subjective emanations. Temporal as well as spatial, they cling to the threshold that separates reality from representation, the past and present from things to come. In this sense, shadows are central to the task of poetry and the slow modulation of that task over time. Balancing rapturous attention with a lightness of touch, this remarkable study tracks the evolving substance of shadow from Plato's cave to Hart Crane's bridge, along the way taking in a formidable range of British and American poetry.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

What do we value most in Emily Dickinson and does it matter? This is the question Dickinson scholar Loeffelholz (Northeastern Univ.) asks. Although recent scholarship seems centered on the manuscripts of Dickinson's poems--e.g., Emily Dickinson's Poems: As She Preserved Them, ed. by Cristanne Miller (CH, Sep'16, 54-0097)--Loeffelholz prioritizes the poems per se, various and dynamic, as transcending their artifacts--poems intertextual in their referentiality, effecting an artistry of internal dialogue and developing aesthetic. Loeffelholz explores Dickinson's love poems, antecedents (historical and cultural), religious ambivalence, and continuing resonance through digital media. Loeffelholz's study is unstinting in its soundness, intriguing for its discoveries, and invaluable for its close exegesis of many poems. Including supplemental notes, this book gives witness to the compelling vibrancy of an artist in perpetual motion.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This is not a book that has an ax to grind or thesis to drive home. Rather, it is a fine example of an always-welcome genre of criticism: an introduction that condenses an excellent scholar's lifetime of reading and thought on a major author. Leonard (Univ. of Western Ontario) devotes a chapter each to Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the minor poems and two chapters each to Milton's political prose (one on Areopagitica) and Paradise Lost. Leonard's theme is that Milton's work has a great deal to offer readers today, and he demonstrates as much with careful expositions that will prove at once accessible to novice readers and instructive to veteran Miltonists--and entertaining to both groups. Throughout he writes in an attractively teacherly fashion: particularly vivid are the pages, two-thirds of the way through, in which he draws on an obscure work nearly a century old, Edward Smith's Confessions of a Confidence Man: A Handbook for Suckers (1923), to elucidate Satan's moves in tempting Eve. The one chapter likely to raise some hackles is that on Samson Agonistes, a dramatic poem whose portrayal of terrorism has been vigorously debated in recent years.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Continuing an intensive study of Woolf's diaries she began in Becoming Virginia Woolf (CH, Dec'14, 52-1843), Lounsberry (emer., Univ. of Northern Iowa) here details Woolf as a voracious reader--and critic--of diaries and an apt pupil who used tropes and techniques gleaned from fellow diarists to create a writing style distinctly modernist, uniquely Woolf, and ultimately transformative of the literary landscape. Though not the first critical study of Woolf's "middle diaries" (i.e., those written from 1918 to 1929), this is the first that carefully examines the extratextual diaries that she read during this period and connects those influences to the modernist style Woolf developed in the period between the creation of To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). Examining the diaries chronologically, Lounsberry skillfully details Woolf's emotional state, her personal circumstances, and the influence on her of diarists Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, W. N. P. Barbellion, John Evelyn, Anton Chekhov, Alie Badenhorst, James Boswell, Anne Chalmers, Stendhal, Lady Anne Clifford, Jonathan Swift, Beatrice Webb, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, Benjamin Robert Haydon, and Katherine Mansfield. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this volume is a love letter for all scholars of Woolf and modernism, and for neophytes interested in the aegis of Woolf's distinctive style.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.