Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

A skillfully written exploration of the themes and aesthetics of African American fiction in what has become known as the "post era," Leader-Picone's book catalyzes past and present renderings of black literary expression. Focusing on novels by Colson Whitehead, Jesmyn Ward, Paul Beatty, Kiese Laymon, et al., Leader-Picone (Kansas State Univ.) thoroughly investigates the question of what it means to be black in the US given racial progress since the close of the Civil Rights era. As the author points out, black literature of the post era defies the notion that blackness maps a narrow terrain, and he calls on black writers to broaden definitions of blackness and black art. Situating the Obama presidency as a touchstone for cultural and academic inquiries into black social, political, and intellectual discourse in the 21st century, Leader-Picone points to socioeconomic stratifications within the African American community and cultural myths regarding the end of racism as influences on the works that have defined African American literature of the last 15 years. The result is a cogent, insightful examination of black essentialism versus individually defined black identity and self-expression.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Gabbin and Alleyne (both, James Madison Univ.) are executive director and assistant director, respectively, of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, established to honor the Black poetic voice. Gabbin's previous scholarly work includes Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1994); Alleyne has published two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019). The third in a series of anthologies--preceded by The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999) and Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004)--the present volume brings together poetry from more than 100 poets, presenting it in six thematic sections: "Collective Power," "Black Aesthetics," "Pan African Poetics," "Renovation," "Writing the Body," and "The Collective." Each of the first five sections is enhanced with a critical essay, contributed by a respected Black scholar or poet, pertaining to the section's theme; the final section intertwines creative essays with poetry, analysis, and personal stories. Rita Dove contributes a foreword. Looking to the future through artistic expression, this timely anthology is a formidable resource.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

This is a breathtaking collection of essays in terms of scope and content, and one not easy to review in so few words. Anyone who has read Chaucer knows that he lived, worked, and wrote within a variety of contexts, and this volume addresses virtually all of them. This is not a casebook, and so readers should not approach it with the expectation to be fully informed on all salient aspects of a context (such as love or Christianity) as they relate to Chaucer. Rather, what Johnson (Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland) and his contributors have provided are 52 focused, timely, and engaging essays that distill the significant components within each Chaucerian context. These are really mini- or micro-essays (some more comprehensive than others) written by literary scholars, historians, art historians, legal scholars, and philologists. Part 5, on Chaucer's political and social contexts, and part 6, on post-1400 reception of Chaucer, provide important information that is often lacking in introductions to or case studies of Chaucer. For anyone teaching Chaucer for the first time, at any level, this collection will be an indispensable resource. Even those who have taught Chaucer before have much to gain from it.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In the Mean Time explores time as a mode of colonial domination. Murrah-Mandril (Univ. of Texas, Arlington) examines the ways Mexican American authors have navigated and deployed multiple and differential forms of time to survive and contest US colonialization. The first two chapters take up the new economies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this period, Murrah-Mandril argues, Mexican American time was devalued by Anglo settlers. Writings by Maria Ruiz de Burton (1832-95) and Miguel Antonio Otero (1859-1944) not only make these dynamics visible but also challenge them. The remaining two chapters provide a theoretical framework for examining the ways Mexican American authors have responded to temporal colonization. In particular, Murrah-Mandril analyzes the preservation work of Texas historian Adina De Zavala (1861-1955) and the writings of Jovita Gonzalez (1904-83). The afterword engages with Chicanx literature from 1970 to 1990 and considers how these texts also reconstitute time. This is an intellectually rigorous and meticulously researched study of the Chicanx/Latinx/Mexican/American literary tradition.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This remarkable, timely, and readable scholarly book is unique in its content and breadth. Marrs (English, Univ. of Georgia) looks at how history and stories of the Civil War still resonate in contemporary culture and politics. Marrs's aim is to help readers better understand the "primal stories" of the war told in novels, poetry, songs, sculpture, speeches, essays, paintings, plays, fables, and films, including Ken Burns's nine-part documentary The Civil War (1990). As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun (1951), "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The US is still fighting these battles and taking sides. Marrs devotes chapters to the various ways the Civil War has been perceived and portrayed--e.g., as "family squabble," as "dark and cruel war," as "lost cause," and as "great emancipation." It is a story that the nation keeps telling and revising. Looking at evidence from the literary works of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson to the sociopolitical writings of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., Marrs underscores both the truths and misconceptions engendered by what has been called the "crucible" and birth of the not so "united states."Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In England, literary criticism became a distinct activity (and critics recognizable people) in the late 17th and early 18th centuries; parallel developments occurred in the US only a hundred years later. With many glances back to English forebears, this erudite yet approachable book focuses especially on the 1830s and 1840s. Gordon (Whitman College) does not write a conventional narrative: his book is not a history of critical doctrine, but instead (as its subtitle suggests) approaches its subject from the perspective of book history. Gordon considers the venues in which antebellum criticism appeared, from books to the prestigious quarterlies, the less prestigious but more popular monthly magazines, and finally the newspaper. Each form had its own kind of authority and its detractors, and each, the author argues, tended to shape the arguments it advanced. There is a superb informative chapter on the development of anthologies of American literature, but the bulk of the book examines a series of important figures--Emerson, Poe, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass--showing that each's famous and sometimes contradictory pronouncements were often responses to the mushrooming print culture of their time. This is a book all students of English literature will want to read, not just Americanists.Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Over the past few years, the scholarly community has--rightly--demonstrated renewed interest in the life and works of James Baldwin (1924-87). Gibson (Auburn Univ.) enters the conversation with an engrossing work that focuses on masculinity in the African American community. What is so refreshing about this study is that Baldwin is important to Gibson personally, as he clearly articulates. That does not detract from the richness of the scholarship but rather adds something quite profound to it. Gibson's central argument is too delicate and nuanced to explain in much detail, but, in brief, the author finds an edifying connection between the sanctuary the black church offered and the potential space of intimacy the body offered. Gibson engages in close readings of five seismic novels in the Baldwin canon, masterfully walking readers through the journey of John's forgotten birthday in Go Tell It on the Mountain and the streets of David's Paris in Giovanni's Room. This excellent study may interest those studying religion as well those in the disciplines of literature and cultural studies.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Well known as both a Miltonist and a Spenserian, Teskey (Harvard) has written an immensely valuable study that asserts The Faerie Queene's importance to Renaissance thought, literature, and philosophy and also addresses contemporary concerns. Teskey's title reflects his assertion that "Spenser is a remarkably intuitive, experimental, and nonteleological thinker" (p. 331) who "thinks in moments" (p. 17) and whose "ideas are continually changing as he writes" (p. 341). Teskey devotes four chapters (of 18) to Spenser from the time of The Shepheardes Calender to his life in Ireland and the writing of The Faerie Queene; six chapters to contemporary and Renaissance theories of allegory; four to the role and depiction of thinking in The Faerie Queene; and four to a discussion of change and constancy as presented in the Mutabilitie Cantos. As is true of Teskey's other writing--e.g., The Poetry of John Milton (CH, Nov'15, 53-1163)--his engaging and witty first-person narration contributes to the pleasures of this intelligent and informative book, which includes discursive endnotes with full bibliographic information and a detailed index.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Grounded in Lupic's impressive mastery of the literature of counsel from Homer to the present, Subjects of Advice offers fundamental insights into English Renaissance drama. In clear, satisfying prose, Lupic (Stanford) elucidates the shifting cultural contexts--from classical friendship to Renaissance statecraft--that determined how advice was to be given and received, how human subjects were constituted by such exchanges, and how drama and counsel came to be inseparable. Lupic's nuanced readings move smoothly from a particular scene to its function within a whole play, from individual plays to the larger dramatic traditions in which they participate. He encourages a rich understanding of those traditions by rejecting older categorizations and evolutionary schemes, aligning himself instead with contemporary critics who emphasize continuities and affinities among kinds of plays earlier criticism had tended to isolate (interludes and "moralities," academic drama, the London commercial stage, etc.). Hence most chapters examine a pair of plays, some obviously related (Latin dramas by George Buchanan, King Leir with King Lear), others seemingly disparate (Cambyses with Gorboduc, Damon and Pythias with Edward II). All in all, an outstanding achievement.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Scharnhorst (emer., Univ. of New Mexico) set a high bar in volume 1 of this three-volume set (CH, Aug'18, 55-4376), which covered Twain's early years (1835-71). That continues in this second volume, in which Scharnhorst reveals the ongoing cultural ambivalence about Twain as genteel and progressive critics contended over Twain's appropriateness, gentility, and humor while Twain moved to the center of post-Civil War US culture. Though challenged as vulgar, fresh, and irreverent, Twain became "the King of American humorists" (p. 318). Unhappily, the fortunes of the Clemens family reached a high point in the 1870s, and Twain's "middle" trajectory is one of frustration, family stress, misguided financial investments, and struggling to maintain an extravagant lifestyle. Scharnhorst offers copious examples of Twain's delightfully coarse words, including the description of baby Clara's drunken, profane wet nurse as offering the baby a "milk cocktail equivalent to infant forty-rod" (p. 122). Scharnhorst throws light on Twain's ambivalence about the Chinese, Wagnerian opera, his own business partners, and the (doubtful) evolution of human morality and free will. Weaving together mountains of facts, material not commonly quoted, and his own revisionist perspective, Scharnhorst provides a rich narrative that sets this biography apart from earlier biographies.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

An important and long-overdue consideration of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the long 18th century, The Novel Stage treats major Restoration and 18th-century dramatic forms--tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama--as they abandon the stage to take up residence in prose fiction. Frank (Concordia Univ.) convincingly presents the "reformed rake" plot of the early-18th-century stage as precursor to the fiction of Samuel Richardson. She demonstrates, just as convincingly, that Henry Fielding's skeptical response to Richardson employs a theatricality of its own. Letters serve as props in Fielding's fiction in order to call into question the authority of narration itself. Novels by women are the true beneficiaries of Frank's approach. Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Jane Austen emerge as exemplars of the integration of drama and fiction. For Burney, the theater was an "ally" (p. 117) in construction of her characters' subjectivity. Inchbald and Austen employ theatricality in pursuit of a challenge to the "compulsory nature of marriage and its consequences for women" (p. 126). A coda on melodrama extends the insights of this study to the novels of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Callahan and Conner's collection of Ellison's letters spans six decades, starting in the 1930s with the writer's college days. Arranged by decade, the letters provide not only fresh insights into Ellison's life, friends, and community but also a bird's-eye view into the history of modern African American literature and culture. Ellison's brilliance shines through on every page. Callahan (emer., Lewis and Clark College), Ellison's biographer and literary executor, provides the opening introduction, and he introduces each chapter. In these lengthy chapter introductions Callahan culls passages from Ellison's epistolary prose that reveal much about the spectacular career of this much-loved and sometimes-reviled American icon. The letters themselves provide answers to questions about Ellison's personal life--his relationships, choices, and identity; his public persona; and his social, political, and literary commitments. Ellison was an exquisitely complex human being, but in his writing he made complex issues of the modern American sociopolitical divide seem perfectly clear. Opening the window on the vast landscape of Ellison's personal and public successes and trials, the letters read like a biography that tells truths about US history that in some ways the second novel, Juneteenth (1999, published posthumously and edited by Callahan) never could.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this brashly titled book, Kilcup (Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro) rewrites US literary history. Kilcup focuses on "an influential group of nineteenth-century reviewers," arguing that they "contributed markedly to the twentieth-century demise of emotional and accessible American poetry" (p. 1). Kilcup describes what she terms the murder of "affective, popular, and women-authored" works (p. 264), even though (and often because) such works were among the most widely read, regularly reprinted, and best-selling books of the 19th century. Rather than single out the reviewers of the 1890s as the culprits, as is conventional, the author--thanks to her innovative research methods--is able to chart reviewers as early as the 1820s who "disparaged emotive excess," which they "habitually gendered as feminine" (p. 34). She further argues that by the 1840s a clear aesthetic standard existed that, though detrimental to popular poetry, did allow such poets as Lucy Larcom and Sarah Piatt to achieve best-selling status. In the 1870s, however, when they realized they could not prevent such success, "reviewers redoubled their efforts to maintain the hierarchical gender divide" (p. 235). In its historical sweep, Kilcup's original and important book reveals just how catastrophic "gender-based standards" can be when they "demean emotional responses to literature" (p. 265).Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Wordsworthians will devour this book. Bevis (Univ. of Oxford, UK) begins with William Hazlitt, who thought of Don Quixote on meeting Wordsworth and later observed, "To one class of reader he appears sublime, to another (and we fear the larger) ridiculous" (p. 9). In this book, Bevis addresses the former class of readers, but he might well convert the latter. Fascinated by both sublimity and humor, Wordsworth was a lifelong admirer of such comic writers as Ariosto, Cervantes, and Sterne. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" foregrounds the traditional associations of daffodils with daftness because, Bevis writes, "To be open to ridicule is to be open to possibility" (p. 29). Offering a combination of social history and critical detection that eventually turns to the poet's biography, Bevis argues (in the section titled "Fooling") that Wordsworth's frequently mocked poem "The Idiot Boy" discloses "one of Wordsworth's secrets: he has lived like that too, and will continue to do so whenever he gets the opportunity." In the final section ("Humoring"), Bevis reads The Prelude as "the comic-epic story of the child who is father of the man, the man who cannot help but play Sancho to his own past Quixote."Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Freedgood (NYU) makes the strikingly innovative double argument that critics have at once patronized the Victorian novel as stolidly realist and imposed a Victorian-realist model on world fiction in ways that suture its wayward movements and are tacitly racist. In a concise but sweeping and erudite series of arguments, the author posits that some Victorian critics wished for the shorter, more elegant French novel, a tendency amplified by what Freedgood calls a "Marshall New Critical Plan" (p. 9) of the 1950s. Yet when closely examining the "ballast" (p. 37) of the motley real objects found on a ship, paratexts such as epigraphs, and the ontological reality of ghosts in both the England of Shakespeare and the Nigeria of Amos Tutuola, Freedman shows that the Victorian novel reveals there is never a "seamless" (p. 124) novel depicting a real world. The realist novel instead produces "metaleptic effects" (p. xvi) that burst the seams to produce "ragged and broken" (p. 16) tableaux that yet are worlds enough. Spiced with citations of critics past and present, this cogent, necessary book is ideal for students in Victorian surveys because it both covers the field and stretches it out to the global and the decolonizing.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.