Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

In this portrait, Marcus (independent writer) notes that Ralph Waldo Emerson "designed his essays to be disassembled" (p. 120). If Emerson challenges readers to "reverse-engineer" an essay like "Self-Reliance," Marcus has one-upped him by reverse-engineering Emerson's life itself. This is not a comprehensive, play-by-play biography but a lively consideration of watershed moments and motifs in Emerson's life. Tinkering with biographical conventions, Marcus reflects on Emerson's parents and his strangely bucolic Boston childhood not in the first chapter but in the last. Straying from a narrowly linear and largely familiar narrative allows for invigorating fixations and reassessments: Marcus shows Emerson striking up a friendship with Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, and he takes readers on the road with Emerson on a grueling winter lecture tour of the Midwest. He writes especially searchingly about the integral but imperfect symbiosis between Emerson and his second wife, Lidian (noting hysterically that their only wedding gift was a dual inkstand). Throughout the book, Marcus is on a first-name basis with his subject, so it is perhaps unsurprising to find him channeling the kind of arresting, informal, and thought-provoking formulations that Emerson deployed in his best essays.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty, but especially general readers.

In this compellingly argued and beautifully written monograph, Luciano (Rutgers Univ.) discusses 19th-century scientific and literary writings about the emerging field of geology as a rigorous field of inquiry. Interest in geology accorded respect, erudition, and class status, while its unknowable link to deep time, as exemplified by curious fossils, allowed for imaginative speculation. Luciano argues that "geology was seen to maintain a kind of political innocence by virtue of its concern with prehistoric lifeworlds and inanimate matter even as geological fantasy shored up the geographic and racial hierarchies associated with Man's overrepresentation as the human" (p. 139). Particularly strong is the chapter that engages with a vigorous reading of Harriet Prescott Spofford's short story "The Amber Gods" (1860), in which amber thematically encapsulates a primordial geologic past. Another chapter addresses the importance of geological thinking to such Black American intellectuals as Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith. Luciano discusses the appearance in mid-19th-century African American journals of articles about geology, particularly volcanoes. At a time of growing popular interest in what lies below the earth's surface, the volcano metaphorically expressed ideas about rumblings and the eruption of antislavery feelings.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Eminently readable and impossibly well researched, Larson's book is at once an efficiently written investigation into the history and current state of romance publishing and a perceptive and balanced assessment of the potentials and pitfalls of the gig economy and creative labor. The book takes on the formidable task of mapping "Romancelandia," which Larson (journalism, Univ. of Colorado) defines as the "sprawling network of authors, readers, traditional publishers, and editors, indie editors, formatters, proofreaders, reviewers, podcasters, bloggers, and others." While previous books about romance literature focused exclusively on either audience, author, or industry, Larson understands that one must consider the ecosystem to map the growth of online, independent publishing. Additionally, Larson makes a convincing argument about the need to view this ecosystem within the context of feminist ethics of care, which serves to both grow organizations such as the powerful Romance Writers of America and structure how conflicts about racism, sexuality, and exclusion are confronted. Refreshingly, Larson avoids tired, elitist concerns about the quality of the literature and instead focuses on what kinds of communities, opportunities, and voices this female-dominated, billion-dollar industry fosters, and how corrections can be made to promote broader inclusivity. A must read for anyone interested in contemporary publishing and gig labor.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; practitioners.

The controlling metaphor of Park's stunningly original argument is the camera obscura, the dark room within which one stands and views external reality as it is transfigured by the space in which it is projected and by the imagination of the individual who perceives it in this space. By this means, external reality becomes a part of what Park (Penn State Univ.) terms the "possessive individuality" that defines not only the 18th-century novel but also 18th-century material culture as a whole. The literary texts examined include Marvell's "Upon Appleton House," Cavendish's Sociable Letters, Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard," Richardson's Pamela, and Walpole's Castle of Otranto, linked respectively to the English country house, the closet, the grotto, the detachable pocket of women's dress, and the folly--all of which serve to illustrate that the individual's response to external stimuli transforms both the perceiving subject and the object of perception. Park references paintings, letters, furniture, gardens, collectibles, and other aspects of 18th-century material life to bolster her claim that the dark rooms of the period were the spaces in which the individual's imagination claimed authority over self and experience. Lavishly illustrated, eminently readable, brilliantly argued, utterly convincing.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Reading Jimenez Heffernan's extraordinary evidence of the scope of James's ironically allusive reinvention of the novel in English, one might readily embrace T. S. Eliot's judgment that Henry James was "the most intelligent man of his generation." Jimenez Heffernan unfolds a Jamesian world beyond the antinomies of realism/idealism, materiality and the thing-in-itself, a world in which uncanniness of memory transforms Hamlet into an early modern novel that unlocks the mystery of the demise/suicide of a would-be poet-revolutionary (The Princess Casamassima) and the plight of a sexually troubled Victorian governess rehearses elements of plot, character, and settings derived from Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Amelia (The Turn of the Screw). Jimenez Heffernan reveals the significance of Jamesian memory as it transforms the action and language of The Wings of the Dove into an allegory of lurid sacrifice in ancient Rome as described in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In The Ambassadors James performs a seriocomic return of Thackeray's wistful unfinished Denis Duval, and in The Ivory Tower James invokes the satiric voices of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Reanimating the best James criticism from Edmund Wilson to Tony Tanner, Jimenez Heffernan reconfigures the relation of the English novel to the emergence of literary and philosophical modernity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This important work has enough material for three books. Watchman (McMaster Univ., Canada) has mixed Cherokee and Navajo (Dine) ancestry and her kinship ties become part of the story. She does not detach herself from the narrative but exists as a constant presence. Her initial focus is on the stories associated with the Navajo sacred mountain in New Mexico, Tse Bit'a'i (known in English as Shiprock Peak). Her guiding principle for understanding Indigenous stories is their restorative power for Indigenous culture. The second focus is on is two Navajo films, Sydney Freeland's Drunktown's Finest and Larry Blackhorse Lowe's 5th World. A final and less integral chapter explores a third subject: storytelling among the Dene of northern Canada. The Dene, like the Navajo, speak an Athapascan language, and Watchman wishes to encourage intercultural relations. The book provokes thought in the best way--by exploring Indigenous knowledge. Watchman is uncompromising in using Indigenous vocabulary; a glossary would have been helpful. The book is illustrated with helpful maps and photos. The annotations are full and substantive, and the bibliography is lengthy. Watchman has made a major contribution to American studies, Indigenous studies, and folklore studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

In Selected Letters of Wilfred Owen, Potter (Oxford Brookes Univ., UK) treats readers to a profound journey into the life and mind of one of the most iconic war poets of the 20th century. Drawing from Owen's correspondence with his mother and others, this compendium traces Owen's path to becoming a fully developed artist living through one of the world's worst conflicts. Potter's expertise in First World War literature and her meticulous curation of Owen's letters bring forth a deeply intimate and insightful portrait. Potter's edition deserves a place among the finest works of Owen scholarship. This is a stunning achievement--and a surprising one, too, given the massive number of works that have explored Owen's life and work previously. Potter's introduction and notes, filled with astute observations, enrich the reading experience, making it accessible to scholars and general readers alike.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

In his excellent Sensationalism and the Jew, Anthony (Southern Illinois Univ.) traces antebellum anxiety about rapidly morphing socioeconomic conditions during roughly the 1830s and 1840s. In particular, Euro-Christians who were reluctant to face crimes including African slavery (and, this reviewer would add, genocide against Indigenes) or to cope with the mercantile capitalism making while breaking their economy off-loaded responsibility for their messy culture onto American Jews. Anthony summons an impressive array of antebellum sensationalist literature and illustrations, all hammering home hook-nosed and increasingly racialized Jews and "Jewesses" villainously pulling the protean strings. Itself protean, American anti-Semitism buds, flowers, and permutates from its simplistic robbery of "innocent Americans" (a favorite self-depiction) into sexual, racial, and class panic. Adding a quick rundown on the continuation of the Jew-as-usurer theme in the Civil War, North and South, Anthony wraps up with a quick analysis of sensationalism's descendant: the deadly Charlottesville demonstration of 2017, with its ritualized chants, tiki torches, and "replacement theory" ("Jews will not replace us!"). Throughout, Anthony displays a remarkable grasp of antebellum sensationalism, both the low- and high-brow versions, that marked class by mimicking the standing racial fantasies of telling who people were by using pseudoscience, especially physiognomy.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

As a devotee of Jane Austen, Dooley's She Played and Sang was a delight to read. This text is extensively researched and shows the author's considerable knowledge of traditional and contemporary Jane Austen scholarship. The text really flourishes in the comprehensive use of both Jane Austen primary sources and the primary source material of Regency-era music and lyrics. Dooley (Flinders Univ., Australia) shows the wide-ranging uses of music in the Regency era and how Austen's work shows the depth of her knowledge of the culture, politics, and social norms of her lifetime. Music provided social opportunities, was a medium through which people of the Regency era could display status and skill, and served as a mechanism for people to convey emotion and opinions in a socially approved setting during this time frame. Through Austen's letters, Dooley shows how readers can better understand the writer through her knowledge of music and how she and others interacted through it. She Played and Sang is a quick and absorbing read for any Jane Austen fan.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals.

In this innovative content analysis of historical novels and films for Black children, Chandler (Univ. of Louisville) asks and answers a specific question: How have Black writers since 1980 constructed a history of personal and social survival under conditions of slavery and in the post-emancipation period? Setting aside a tradition of reaching children through novels about heroic fugitives and autobiographies of enslaved persons, she seeks texts that present lives lived fully despite enslavement and the systemic racism and economic precarities that followed, texts she calls "freedom narratives." She focuses on writers whose novels illuminate Black social and individual creative adaptations, agency, community support, and resistance. She gives special attention to the way freedom narratives convey Black agency and autonomy as well as Black cultural continuity, despite enslavement; the value of memory and folk tradition; the importance of literacy, language, and children's play; and livelihood and financial agency. Her discussions of specific writers, novels, and films are perceptive and revealing. Her attention to the works of Julius Lester, Mildred Taylor, and Joyce Hansen is especially full. Every children's librarian should acquire a copy of this book for their collections, as should all academic libraries.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through graduate students.

This is a stunning work of literary analysis, critical theory, philosophy, and a clear introduction to the burgeoning field of political theology. Andrews (Whitworth Univ.) marshals an impressive list of theologians, theorists, and philosophers to engage in a dialogue with his chosen texts of modernist fiction by four exemplary figures: Virginia Woolf, D.H. Laurence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Most interesting is how even the most secularist of thinkers reflects the larger public themes of Christian nationalism, with its tendencies toward civil injustice and war. This is anything but a survey of British modernist literature; the author has presented ways of imagining a political theology that can be useful when examining a vast range of texts. At the heart of this study is Andrews's desire "to claim for literary fiction an active role in critiquing the false and destructive ways that sacralized nationalism operates--its capacity to stir emotions toward ends that are violent, coercive, oppressive, and malignant" (p. 15). This is an erudite academic study (replete with copious footnotes and an extensive bibliography), but one with a moral argument at its center. It is informed by a personal warmth and a sense of humanity.Summing Up: Highly recommended

Hunt (political science, Univ. of Notre Dame) is unusual, almost unique, in practicing serious literary criticism outside of a literature department. She brings political theory to bear on Mary Shelley in this last installment of a critical trilogy that started with Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child (CH, Jul'18, 55-3919) and was followed by Artificial Life after Frankenstein (2020). The First Last Man is a book about Mary Shelley, COVID-19, and global politics all at once. Though Shelley's apocalyptic and dystopian novel The Last Man (1826), set in the aftermath of a deadly pandemic, is at the center, the real subject is Shelley's "plague writing" in general, both public and private, fiction and nonfiction (p. 26). Hunt views The Last Man as a departure from an earlier tradition of plague literature going back to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (which Shelley translated) by depicting a global pandemic, which allowed her to reflect on how cultures respond to traumas partly of their own creation--an echo of Frankenstein. As the daughter of two political philosophers, Shelley was well positioned to muse on these questions. This thoroughly researched and compellingly written book deserves a wide readership.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

In a brilliant reconsideration of the literary criticism of Samuel Johnson, Smallwood (Birmingham City Univ., UK) argues that affective response, not rational analysis, drove Johnson's literary pronouncements. As Smallwood thoroughly demonstrates, lived experience--emotional, relational, philosophical, temporal, editorial--is at the heart of Johnson's critical enterprise. Johnson's work on Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets are particularly important texts in Smallwood's account, but one of the most interesting aspects of the study is Smallwood's exploration of conversations (some real, some imagined) between Johnson and a host of other writers, from poet David Ferry to Thomas Warton to Montaigne to F. R. Leavis. Johnson's literary criticism, Smallwood demonstrates, everywhere evidences his experience of compassion and emotion, time and duration, immersion in the vicissitudes of life and awareness of the inevitability of death. Smallwood's book does full justice to Johnson's critical acumen; it (perhaps more importantly) exemplifies literary criticism as a creative, deeply human enterprise. Both erudite and accessible, this book is required reading for Johnsonians in particular; and its close attention to text and deep investment in literary contextualization model a methodology that literary critics in general should also find compelling.Summing Up: Essential. Lower division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In the late-20th century books on Shakespeare's Sonnets were few but epochal. Among them are works by Murray Krieger, Stephen Booth, Joseph Pequigney, and Helen Vendler. Garrison (Grinnell College) has produced a book that can stand with works by these earlier scholars. Garrison mixes memory studies with psychology in an unprecedented way to focus on "pleasure and bliss" (p. 18) enacted in Shakespeare's language. Shakespeare's erotic, linguistic ecstasy is both performative and "encourage[s] the reader to imbricate the poems within their own personal memories" (p. 40). Yet just as language can be a way to express sexual feeling, so can the body be a tool for memory keeping and "memory making" (p. 108). Using examples from across the swath of the Sonnets, Garrison shows how the poems are more about the speaker's experience than the beloved as such. The experience may be real, but the purpose of the poems is literary and they are addressed to the reader. Garrison leavens any potential utopianism with his final chapter, on memory, disease, and love. Using examples from the eras of AIDS and COVID, he explores how the memory of loss can be a tool to shape the future" (p. 277).Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty

This learned and lucid book is a valuable contribution to the literature on genre and Victorian poems, literature that includes Stefanie Markovits's The Victorian Verse Novel (2017), Jonathan Culler's Theory of the Lyric (CH, Nov'15, 53-1129), Monique Morgan's Narrative Means, Lyric Ends (CH, May'10, 47-4889), Marion Thain's The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism (2016), and The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. by Virginia Walker Jackson and Yopie Prins's (2014). Huber (Univ. of Konstanz, Germany) offers elegant interpretations of Victorian poems, including the most frequently taught works and others chosen wisely. Huber's interpretations are cogent, and so are her graceful dissents with other theorists. She situates her arguments about lyric poetry in the context of the transformations of the society to which the poetry responds--socialism, class struggles, urbanization, mechanization, commercializing of time, theories of evolution, secularization, erosion of certainties, the acceleration of time, and relativities everywhere. Huber suggests that Victorian poems often respond to the era's transformations by concentrating attention on a "shift from an aesthetic of eternal essence to an aesthetics of self-sufficient form" (p. 219).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers

Morrison's passing has led to a spate of scholarly works assessing her profound legacy in American letters. Balfour (Univ. of Virginia) has produced one of the best examinations of Morrison's oeuvre to date. Focusing intently on the concept of freedom, Balfour connects multiple works (fiction and nonfiction) to explore Morrison's vision of freedom as inherently complicated by the racial and gendered oppressions prevalent throughout US history. She explores these difficult political concepts in Morrison by grounding the discussion within the texts' own specificities, teasing out the tensions that Morrison constantly evokes surrounding responsibility and rights, mobility and situatedness, home and displacement, all with an eye toward understanding Morrison's constant questioning of abstract notions of freedom in a concretely unequal world. Though not a literary critic per se, Balfour combines her acute political knowledge with keen readings of Morrison's prose, capturing the multiple layers of connotation that drive Morrison's fiction. This accessible volume is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the ways in which Toni Morrison's fiction offers political practices and ideals necessary for the current moment. Balfour's work is not one to pass on.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Smith (Oklahoma State Univ.) opens her introduction with this arresting sentence: "The words Oklahoma and cosmopolitan do not show up often in the same sentence." In Urban Homelands she addresses and rectifies this situation, drawing concepts from urban studies, American Indian studies, postcolonial studies, and other fields. Kwame Appiah, Arjun Appadurai, Donald Fixico, Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Dean Rader are just some of the theorists whose work she braids together to tell the stories of Oklahoma Natives in Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans by using fiction, poetry, song, and film. "This creative and critical positioning, to bring Oklahoma into conversation about Indigenous modernity and the arts is the ultimate aim of this book," Smith declares in the introduction's final sentence. The artists Smith discusses include Joy Harjo, former US poet laureate; LeAnne Howe, novelist, whose notion "tribalography" is groundbreaking; Sterlin Harjo, the creator and director of the popular television series Reservation Dogs; and Lynn Riggs, an early-20th-century playwright whose play Green Grow the Lilacs was adapted into Oklahoma. Smith's reading of these texts is insightful and persuasive; she deploys just enough summary to familiarize readers with the texts, and skillfully integrates her own analysis with those of other critics. Overall, a dazzling study.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Saunders (Durham Univ., UK) and Watt (Univ. of Surrey, UK) have compiled an impressive collection of essays that provide new and substantive evidence that women actively read and wrote both religious and secular literature during the medieval period (c. 11th-15th centuries) more extensively than traditionally assumed by historians and literary scholars. This is a particularly important addition to the field of medieval women's literary culture because it includes not only ubiquitous women like Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, Marie de France, and Eleanor of Aquitaine but also an array of less-known women writers and literary patrons. Although focused mostly on writers in England, the essays show the women engaged with Latin, French, German, Welsh, Gaelic, and even Arabic literary traditions, thereby creating a robust international literary culture among women across varying backgrounds in an evolving English nation. Contributors are leading scholars in medieval literature and medieval women's studies, and the book boasts extensive reference notes, illustrations, manuscript examples, an almost exhaustive bibliography, and suggestions for further reading--making this book a treasure trove for medieval scholars, especially those focused on medieval women's literary studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.