Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

Comprising essays by 27 scholars knowledgeable on this subject, this is an important topical history of WW I and its presence in American literature and culture. Dayton and Van Wienen's introduction provides a comprehensive overview and concludes with a useful subsection titled "How to Read This Book." Notes throughout link the essays. The collection begins with considerations of literary genres from poetry to memoir. The essays include discussions of titles often outside of general awareness, and war-related works by stalwarts Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Pound, e. e. cummings, Eugene O'Neill, et al. receive considerable attention. Context is provided in chapters on film, music, and art, which examine works by Irving Berlin, Cecil B. DeMille, and Childe Hassam. Of special note are essays on African American involvement and the situations of conscientious objectors and German Americans. David A. Davis examines the South, with its then-recent Civil War history, and David A. Rennie the Midwest, where the war replaced the ethos of the frontier. The chapter on monuments should inspire contemporary interest given recent issues regarding Civil War monuments.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

Paul Auster, author of novels, poetry, memoirs, and film scripts, has now produced a magisterial literary biography of 19th-century poet and fiction writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900). Crane had a short life but produced the classic The Red Badge of Courage and many admired works of short fiction and poetry. Auster makes the convincing case that Crane's poetry prefigures modernism. Crane knew the giants of his time, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Roosevelt. Auster shows how incidents in Crane's life and the social/political environment connect to his literary compositions, with superb quotes from published letters and contemporary memoirs. Auster has absorbed the previous scholarship on Crane and acknowledges the work done in the past. Unlike many literary biographies, Auster's book--his approach and his prose style--is totally engaging. Though Auster is not known as a literary scholar, this book is an important addition to a long list of books on Crane, starting with Thomas Beer's Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) and most recently Paul Sorrentino's Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire (CH, Dec'14, 52-1848). In places Auster seems to be selling his subject--arguing that Crane has been undervalued until now. With this book, Crane's status and value will be incontrovertible. Readers will be convinced.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Harris (Univ. of Alabama) has made a long, distinguished career of taking on topics within African American literature that seem simple enough until she unpacks the messy complexities and reveals them to be much more difficult and engaging. This latest work examines the notion of home in African American literature, and Harris quickly demonstrates that home is often not where the heart is but a dysfunctional space, riven with violence and pain. It is also filled with memory and belief systems that sustain one and it is portable in ways that go beyond the traditional definitions of "homespaces" one often relies on. Here home also becomes a space of imagination and migration. Harris reveals the fraught, complicated rendering that creates these spaces in works by such writers as Margaret Walker, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, A. J. Verdelle, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, and Yaa Gyasi, crossing time periods and genres to catalog distinct variations while revealing the racial and religious structures that shape people's views. Harris provides an important corrective to views of home, and her work will particularly interest scholars of American literature and Black studies.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this well-researched work Miller (Univ. of California, Davis) demonstrates the perspicacity of certain British authors who witnessed first-hand the reception of industry mining based on fossil fuels. Examining British novels written from the 1830s to the 1930s, Miller illustrates a gradually rising concern over the downsides of forceful extraction of fuel, minerals, and ore from nonrenewable natural resources, including the detrimental effects of the removal on local communities. She does smart work on Charles Dickens's Hard Times, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and later works such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. In the introduction, Miller states that "it is a premise of this study that the extraction of underground mineral resources--not only coal, but gold, iron, tin, copper, silver, and more--can be conceived of as a singular activity, and that this activity of extraction was bound up with a new cluster of socio-environmental conditions: extractivism." Miller's groundbreaking study of "extractive fictions" sets the stage for more research on how literature reflects the perils and short-sightedness of an age.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers/faculty.

Koenigs (Scripps College) disentangles practices of fictionality in the early US from the preoccupation with the novel that has dominated recent decades of scholarship. Both responding to and complementing such magisterial critical works as Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word (2nd ed., CH, May'05, 42-5103), Koenigs's book brings elegant clarity to his exploration of the range of dynamic, self-conscious experimentation in fictionality that preceded, contrasted, and complemented the aesthetic unity now recognized as the novel. Identifying fictionality not as a stable generic feature but instead as a set of experimental "structures of supposition" (p. 2) ranging from speculation to deception, Koenigs considers how early authors navigated that era's pervasively negative attitudes toward fiction and theorized the sociopolitical implications of fictionality with a nuance and variety often lost in contemporary distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. Koenigs's supple, insightful readings of works by authors ranging from Hugh Henry Brackenridge to Rebecca Rush to Harriet Jacobs bring to light a rich and fascinating history of fictionality, illuminating the complexity of early experimentation while tracing its contributions to the aesthetic and cultural dominance of what came to be known as the American novel.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In her introduction to this volume Vandenberg (rhetoric, Boston Univ.) notes that Didion's biographical details have "likely commanded as much attention as her prose, if not more." Earlier critical works offer themes and chronologies of her life, but Didion is a "writer with enormous reserve." In this book Vandenberg examines Didion's nonfiction prose of the past four decades through the lens of rhetoric, dissecting its power and charm. Whether looking at aging, delving into grief, or inspiring other women journalists and writers, Didion is a model and iconic essayist. Vandenberg shows the reader the ways in which Didion elegantly lifts the curtain on popular culture and political events while keenly aware of "the control that sentences exert over content" (p. 5). With her hallmark repetition, placement of commas, vivid metaphors, cadence, and parenthetical asides directed at the reader, she maintains precise control of form. Vanderberg offers a unique examination of how Didion's later nonfiction and essays are constructed. She offers close readings of Salvador (1983), "New York: Sentimental Journeys" (The New York Review, January, 1991), Political Fictions (2001), The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), and Blue Night (2011), providing an engaging look at how Didion's recent work mirrors an urbane style yet continues familiar patterns in her writing.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

The remarkable epitaph on Robert Frost's grave describes that poet's life as "a lover's quarrel with the world" (a line taken from Frost's poem "The Lesson for Today"). Nersessian (English, UCLA) offers not a lover's quarrel but a lover's discourse, a series of original, inviting, and ultimately personal meditations that track Keats's attempt to "record love's complementary processes of absorption and dissolution" (p. 8) across six infamous odes. This is not an introductory guide that promises to fix those odes in place. Rather, Nersessian's gift to Keats lies in her attempt to match the poet in his disarming openness and committed relatability. After all, why look only to scholarship when Keats's own ambit was the intimidating freedom of life itself? All the same, signs of an exquisite teacher and critic abound: Neressian explores Keats's most important allusions and mythological inspirations, but the testing ground for these insights is always radically contemporary. Her meditation on "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for example, starts with Ovid's Metamorphoses but looks to a moment attentive to trigger warnings and campus sexual assault. This generative book illuminates a Keats averse to hierarchies and attentive most of all to the durability of beauty in a world of harm.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In a welcome departure from traditional biography--with its often-forensic focus on questions of what, when, and where--Making Darkness Light instead reveals Milton's life and works as Moshenska (Univ. of Oxford, UK) experienced them. This is a book about Milton, but it is also about Moshenska's encounter with Milton, narrating Moshenska's peregrinations through England and Italy in search of various Miltonic sites and monuments. The result is a deeply learned book that offers fresh insights into Milton's life, works, and recurring intellectual and poetic preoccupations. More important, it is a warm and personal book: by bringing himself to these pages, Moshenska enlivens Milton, who comes to seem more real and vivid--yet also stranger and more elusive. Moshenska's Milton refuses easy categorization; he is a writer and a thinker who remains, in the book's evocative term, "molten."Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Significant authors need significant literary biographies. Roth was a heavyweight when the ranks were full of strong contenders and a controversial figure when controversy was, more often than not, the novelist's favored punch in a culture that was simultaneously shocked by the controversy and encouraging. Nadel's literary biography of Roth is sufficiently substantial to take on the challenges Roth presents: to carry the work, the life, and the controversies, to expose and examine the variously intertwined strands, and to weave them back together into a convincing and compelling whole. One may quibble with Nadel's decision to present the "counterlife" (Roth's term), but one cannot quibble with the research, the documentation, the close reasoning, or the persuasive reading of both texts and personal stories that fed his work. Nadel's research is so thorough that even Beth Roth's recipe for marble pound cake appears in full in the endnotes (chapter 8, note 101). There will be other biographies of Roth and his work, biographies that offer different understandings, but they will likely always find themselves competing with this volume, which for now at least is in the class of the heavyweights.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Fulton's Book of Books traces early modern biblical translations from Erasmus and Tyndale through the King James version, looking at both the texts and their accompanying glosses and annotations. Nelson (English, Rutgers) proceeds chronologically, with each chapter exploring specific cases showing how readers read and used these Bibles. The first four chapters look at the various translations, and Fulton's findings challenge many common assumptions. For example, biblical translations reflected politics as much as theology; readers did not always distinguish between the biblical text and the notes; and Protestant interpretation was less literal than claimed. In the remaining four chapters Fulton focuses on the ways in which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton read and understood the Bible, looking particularly at, respectively, the first book of The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, and a variety of places in Milton. The Book of Books is a most impressive achievement and a valuable resource for those studying early modern history, religion, or literature. Fulton provides extensive endnotes, a lengthy bibliography, a general index, and an index of the biblical passages referred to in the text.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through facutly.

Traister (Univ. of British Columbia) has assembled a collection that responds with creativity and ingenuity to the stunning transformations that have occurred in the study of early American literature over the past two decades. Embracing an expanded, dynamic range of materials, regions, and approaches, 15 mutually informative essays repudiate the narrowly (pre)nationalistic preoccupations of previous scholarly generations and expand what and how one reads to encompass Indigenous and nonwritten modes of communication and the environment itself. Some essays reject a historiography of triumph; Kathleen Donegal, for example, focuses on prevailing experiences of disaster among early expeditions to trace instead a literature of "catastrophe." New voices and actors come to the fore, as in Paul Downes's examination of the political and rhetorical complexities of the revolutionary era's anti-slavery petitions, especially the work of an enslaved Black Bostonian known as FELIX. Concluding essays situate the world of the early US within the simultaneous and co-circulating domains of Indigenous cultures, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific region. This volume will broaden the horizons of even experienced scholars while orienting others to a field recently and radically transformed.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Perkins (St. Hugh's College, Univ. of Oxford, UK) has written an engaging and well-informed study of the relationship between gift giving and reciprocity within Middle English romances. What sets this book apart from other scholarly endeavors on theories of the gift in medieval literature is its focus on genre and the ways in which the form of the text and the text's audience are inherently interconnected. Indeed, as the author illustrates, there is something to be said about the generative nature of Middle English romance that allows for the text, each narrative's form and function, and the objects and characters that populate various works to encourage theoretical, ethical, and religious discussions about the true or hidden nature of the gift. The gift's implicit or explicit meaning thus serves as central commentary to what is present within the text as well as what resides outside it in the Middle Ages and beyond. Perkins's readings of the works that constitute the Horn legend are exemplary and add much to that tradition. Scholars of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and The Franklin's Tale, Lydgate's Troy Book, and the Gawain-poet will find this volume to be indispensable.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is a masterpiece of scholarly literary biography. Homestead (Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln) points out that even as scholars have celebrated Willa Cather's lesbian identity, they have slighted the contribution of Cather's companion, Edith Lewis. Lewis was Cather's first reader but she was also, with "productive friction" (p. 142), her primary editor. Lewis made such major alterations as replacing a factory with a church bell in The Professor's House. Lewis's work in advertising--she was in charge of the Woodbury Soap Company account at J. Walter Thompson--contrasts with Cather's rigorous aestheticism but also brings it into the culture of "modern celebrity" (p. 206) and helps explain Cather's stance in Edward Steichen's photograph of her. Emphasizing Lewis, who unlike Cather went to college in the Northeast, pulls Cather into a more Northeastern world. Homestead's treatment sheds light on the two women's life in their beloved cottage in Grand Manan Island (in New Brunswick, Canada). Homestead concludes movingly with an account of Lewis's' gravesite, where she was effaced and made to seem a mere employee. Homestead restores Lewis to her proper place as Cather's "invisible hand," and makes a major contribution to queer American cultural history.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

The very existence of The Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf bespeaks Woolf's centrality in the modernist canon and demonstrates her preeminent, radiating influence on the modern literary landscape. Comprising 39 essays organized into six parts ("Life," "Texts," "Experiment in Form and Style," "Professions of Writing," "Contexts," and "Afterlives"), the collection will be a necessary resource for any discussion of modernism, modern book reviewing practices, or the etiology of many current theories grounded in social justice, including feminism, queer studies, trans studies, and disability/ability studies. Fernald's careful, cohesive editing choices provide a text rich in brief expository essays (for those new to Woolf) and longer critical pieces positing provocative readings of Woolf's corpus. The contributors include giants in Woolf studies, such as Madelyn Detloff, Anna Snaith, Vera Neverow, Kathryn Simpson, Helen Southworth, and Alice Staveley, so the text becomes a master class in Woolf scholarship. Newer voices provide fresh insights, among them gems by Eleanor McNees and Chris Coffman. This collection proves that Woolf helped define modern critique and creative writing as it is currently known.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Everyone should read this book, both those who are big fans of Vonnegut (1922-2007) and those who find him flippant and confusing. The Writer's Crusade makes a lot of sense. An over-simplified explanation of Roston's thesis is that Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's famous antiwar novel, is haunted by Vonnegut's struggles to address his war experiences as a POW during the Allied bombing of Dresden in February, March, and April 1945. Those efforts and the resulting novel are similarly haunted by what is now known as PTSD. Roston makes his own conclusions clear but leaves room for readers to differ. The book is remarkably readable for literary criticism, well researched but not stuffy, personable but still vigorous. Roston spoke with family, friends, psychiatrists, and Vonnegut scholars; read all of Vonnegut's public statements and writings on the subject as well as unpublished materials; examined the realistic characters and storylines in the novel and also the "speculative" or fantastic elements that break up the grim narrative of the Dresden experiences; and consulted with other combat-veteran writers with their own PTSD struggles. The result is a remarkable, solid, compelling achievement.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

To Make Negro Literature inspired this reviewer to urge colleagues to pick up a copy. The book is that provocative. Taking an approach that brings to mind Toni Morrison's call for the resurrection of "discredited knowledge," McHenry asserts that "certain kinds of productions and been "dismissed as unworthy of attention" (p. 14). Some have been disregarded, others discarded. Her goal is to "turn ... away from the usual markers of literary achievement" to expand and supplement "knowledge of the complex literary landscape" of African Americans (p. 6). McHenry is interested in who the early, poorly educated Black readers were as well as in those whose efforts were thwarted by an unfriendly white publishing world. In an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, McHenry explores racial schoolbooks, bibliographies of Negro literature, "author others," and literary failures. This reviewer found especially engaging the author's assessment of Mary Church Terrell's efforts to publish short stories and the records she kept (for posterity) of publishers' rejections. Other chapters are equally engaging, revealing surprising information about the interstices of the African American literary tradition. In sum, this is a riveting, much needed account of the spaces between recognized African American literary success and the scaffolding that enables it.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

Also author of Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature (2003) and Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective (CH, May'12, 49-4936), Wardi (Chatham Univ.) here advances her acclaimed critical studies in African American literature and ecocriticism. By linking the ecology of colors in the natural environment with the work of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's fiction, Wardi traces a direct line between racism and ecocide. The introduction, "All of Them Colors Was in Me," links embodiment with material ecocriticism and Morrison's vision of sustainability and color theory with bodies of color. The chapters that follow focus on a particular color and the corresponding fiction. For example, brown, the color of skin, dirt, and compost, is used to explain meaning in Paradise and The Bluest Eye. Green, the color of life and healing, applies to Beloved, Home, and Song of Solomon. "Blue, the color associated with islands, swamps, water, and other ecotones" applies to Tar Baby and Love. This fascinating, insightful study concludes with the "colors" black and white, the epitome of no color and all color and the historical foundation of racial prejudice signified in A Mercy and Jazz.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is a fascinating exploration of musical repertoire salon culture of the southern US during the 19th century. The South's demographic encompassed people from social strata defined by wealth, race, ethnicity, and lineage. Although literary traditions appealed across population groups at this time, Bailey's exploration of musical repertoire confirms the ubiquitous home music parlor as the physical site of a distinctly feminine sphere of cultural influence. Appointed with piano and fashionable decor, the parlor both affirmed and promised the rewards of high social status through the genteel manners of musical performance. Bailey (North Carolina Central Univ.) brings a keen analytical eye to the repertoire performed, focusing on sheet music and other manuscripts bound into a volume for prominent display on pianos. These binders were prized artifacts of intellectual and artistic accomplishment, reflections of their female host's membership (or aspirations to membership) in the cultural elite. That Bailey's extensive research included Black women and women of lower social classes in these salon practices is commendable. Parsing the spectrum from amateur to professional musician, the author threads the practice of sacralizing concert music tradition through southern homes of all kinds.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.