Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Gayk (Indiana Univ.) focuses on 15th-century English vernacular biblical literature and the way it encourages attention to what she terms "apocalyptic ecologies" (p. 4), by which she means its consideration of how "contemplating the ephemerality of the more-than-human world can spur reflection on human transience, kinship, and responsibility" (p. 3). After an introduction entitled "Learning to Die," which traces this important thesis, Gayk turns to "A Brief History of Medieval Climate Change," which establishes the parameters of the Little Ice Age of the 14th century and its consequences. Over the next five chapters, separated into three parts under the headings "Edenic Ecologies," "Everyday Apocalypse," and "Apocalyptic Ecologies," Gayk reads the York Plays, Chaucer's Boece, the Anglo-Norman Play of Adam, Cleanness, Piers Plowman, and the Legenda Aurea, among other texts, while interspersing personal reflections and considerations of contemporary climate change to produce a study that is both deeply personal and also a master class in the close reading of a wide swath of late medieval English literature. As such, this volume occupies that rare place where few scholarly studies ever reach: a valuable contribution to the field that can also be read with profit and enjoyment by a general audience.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas is one of the most provocative and troubling characters in American literature, and critics from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to contemporary scholars have grappled with how to understand him and his actions. Harris (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) offers a sustained reading of this character's literary life, from his creation in 1940 to the Black Lives Matter movement today. Harris's approach highlights Bigger Thomas's unique influence on American literature as he shatters the stereotypes of politeness and decorum that dictated African American responses to white America and exposes the racist underpinnings of US economic, political, and cultural life. Harris traces Wright's development of Bigger as a character reflecting distinct elements of Black culture, catalogues Bigger's reception on the debut of Native Son, and explores how readings of Bigger have shifted and coalesced in the 80 years since his debut. Harris is one of the most influential and prolific literary critics at work today, and her latest text is yet another example of illuminating scholarly exploration combined with sustained historical and cultural research. Every scholar of African American literature should read this work.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

In Black Apocalypse, Nyong'o(Yale Univ.) provides a succinct, comprehensive exploration of connections between afrofuturism and afropessimism, introducing the term "Black counter-speculation" to describe persistent, alternative worldmaking in the face of ongoing Black erasure (pp. 5, 76, 67). Part of the "American Studies Now" series, which brings exigent cultural debates into "teachable moments," this text demonstrates the insidiousness of anti-Blackness as a central, ongoing component of American identity and world reality (p. ii). Situated among intersections in Black feminist, queer, and trans theories, Nyong'o connects the rise of white supremacy and fascism in today's world with a history of racial capitalism. He makes insightful connections among Black speculative fiction writers and theorists, from DuBois's Darkwater (1920) to adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy (2017). This text will enhance a variety of graduate classes in Black cultural studies that explore queer and trans cultures, power dynamics, white supremacy, and Black resilience. Afropessimists' concept of "the changing same" demonstrates racism's constantly mutating form as a central component of world culture that goes well beyond typical portrayals as originating in chattel enslavement (p. 46, 66). Despite anti-Blackness's shifting forms, which perpetuate Black erasure, Black counterspeculation shows relentless hope for new worlds via radical Black imaginations.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

MacDuffie (Univ. of Texas, Austin), author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014), contends that Darwin's theories sent a ripple effect through the 19th century and beyond, as human beings struggled to accept, often unsuccessfully, that they are subject to the same natural processes as other living organisms. The response to climate change, the effects of which have been postulated since the 19th century, has proven similar because it is so difficult to accept the devastating effects on the planet and human culture. MacDuffie argues that the novel is particularly useful for analyzing the mixed feelings that climate change and its implications for the future provoke in human beings. He focuses on a range of writers from the long 19th century, using the works of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf as focal points. MacDuffie also uses works by Annie Dillard and Margaret Atwood to bookend his argument and establish its relevance for today. Climate of Denial offers a challenging and highly sophisticated argument, but it will likely attract a good many general readers and determined students. It represents a major contribution to literary and environmental studies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Clear and comprehensive, Comic Gothic builds on Horner and Zlosnik's Gothic and the Comic Turn (CH, Oct'05, 43-0793), which examined the Gothic's disruptions of fear and horror by situations rife with comic potential. Comic Gothic not only features a historical sweep from the 18th to 21st centuries but also expands its scope to include essays on American, Canadian, Indian, New Zealander, Thai, and Jewish Gothic modes. Many essays demonstrate the Gothic's embedded comic exaggerations, the role of parody, and recurring Gothic tropes in films and on TikTok. Readers looking for essays on vampires, witches, and ghosts will also appreciate Jerrold E. Hoggle's "The Satirical Gothic Vampire in England, 1740-1850" and Sara Whitehead's "The Comic Gothic of Edith Wharton's Witches," which show how quickly Gothic fear changes course. In other essays, camp or the carnivalesque become critical Gothic modes for highlighting oppressive social structures, such as gender conformity in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, or in the personas of Elvira and Lady Gaga. Overall, this collection offers readers many fascinating points of entry into the comedic affect of a genre typically presented through the affects of horror and fear.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

In an omnivorous, well-reasoned argument, Donnelly (Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that in antebellum American society, romantic male friendship was a central feature of representations of mainstream white masculinity and, postbellum, played a role in the nation's abandonment of Reconstruction. Images of romantic male friendship were more characteristic of antebellum Democratic Party rhetoric, Donnelly shows, than of Republican rhetoric. After the war, narratives of lost romantic white male friendships joined nostalgia for the mythical agrarian past of the "Lost Cause" to help bury white America's concern for freed Black Americans beneath the trope of white masculine friendship, a symbol of sectional reconciliation that shaped national politics. Donnelly offers a richly layered argument, expertly mining a capacious and eclectic mix of source material that situates major literary works by Whitman, Stowe, Melville, and James within cultural contexts of less well-known works, such as campaign rhetoric, dozens of pro-enslavement novels, and veterans' memoirs. Overall, the piece offers a rich, convincing argument about the cultural impact of images of white male romantic friendships during and after the Civil War.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

The term "ecofascism" has been adopted by white supremacists and their critics. Menrisky (Univ. of Connecticut) interrogates its meanings brilliantly in this learned book. Ecofascists are considered right-wing, but they have appropriated the environmental concerns that are usually identified with the Left. Menrisky explores how American white nationalists use ecofascist ideas to advocate for the elimination of minority groups that might use up scarce resources or even replace the white population (for instance, the "Great Replacement" theory). He organizes his explorations around five ecofascist concerns: land use, technology, the consumption of "natural foods," psychedelic drug use, and pandemics. The Nazi slogan "Blood and Soil" is a major influence on ecofascists. The Nazis were, in their own perverse way, ideological environmentalists. Menrisky's discussion of Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy is especially useful: these dystopian novels explore all five of Menrisky's topics. The style of this book is jargon filled, perhaps more than the subject requires. The excellent bibliography is 16 pages long. The footnotes are often insightful, and the index is detailed. A solid and timely contribution to knowledge.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to be a controversial book, previously for its social reflections on the Mississippi, now for the N-word and our understanding of its intention in relation to Jim, Huck's companion, an enslaved Black man. The title pairs Fishkin's exploratory scholarship with Percival Everett's James, an angrier book from a different perspective. Fishkin (Stanford Univ.) reveals Twain's intention to make Jim a strong, humane hero, leading Huck's "deformed conscience" to greater humanity. Accessibly written, Jim reveals Twain's embodiment of his background in Hannibal, Missouri. Chapter 4, "Jim's Version," retells the whole story in Jim's voice, convincingly preceded by explorations of the American culture it reveals and followed by a detailed examination of Jim's role as interpreted in numerous movies and as many stage plays, including the famed heavyweight Archie Moore as Jim, who expressed his admiration for the character. A survey of major Black scholars' and authors' appreciations and students' responses to Jim and the N-word demonstrates how the book can be well and sensitively taught to both white and Black students to appreciate Jim's honor, rectitude, and nobility. Jim is an important achievement, a highly readable book providing a practical application of extensive research with insights into today's classroom.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

In this pathbreaking new book, Peters (Univ. of North Texas) goes beyond the narratological emphasis of Lothe's Conrad's Narrative Method (CH, Feb'90, 27-3194) and reads not just what is subtly said but what is subtly unsaid in Conrad's work. Concerning the short story "Amy Foster," Peters shows how Kennedy, the narrator, not only relates a tragic story of cultural misrecognition but conveys how the narrator is "profoundly affected" by their tale (p. 130). Refreshingly, Peters does not just see silence as epiphanic; he concludes by examining "the silence of the untrue," which "coerces" the epiphanic into something odious and destructive (p. 202, 195). Peters closely reads Lord Jim, demonstrating that the narrator holds back telling the reader how the ship Patna sunk until later in the action, and Nostromo, showing how the narrator tends to "defer knowledge to others" in ways that make its third-person, all-knowing objectivity more conjectural (p. 79). Peters most excels in his discussion of the "faux-frame" Conradian narrator who, via one-sided conversations, presents the filtering of a frame-narrative without full discursive authority (p. 169). Peters thus takes Conrad's narrative evasions beyond technique to a more capacious arena where the gaps of silence can speak volumes.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through professionals.

Armstrong (emer., Univ. of London) presents lively, localized case studies devoted to "a modernism of 'nobodies'" (p. 2)--that is, late modern writers on the aesthetic, social, and political margins of London from 1926 to 1950. His method is wonderfully varied: from the critical biographies of antipodean modernists Jack Lindsay, Len Lye, and Patrick White to the bibliographic histories of microsites of modernism, such as Charles Lahr's Progressive Bookshop, to close readings of forgotten poems (Eithne Wilkins's "Oranges and Lemons"), magazines (Soma), and anthologies (The New Apocalypse). Chapter 4's discussion of social credit literature is a highlight, connecting economic theory and literary style, especially "distributed points of view" in the novels of John Hargrave and Irene Rathbone (p. 104). Equally impressive is Armstrong's extended consideration of Laura Riding's turn in The World and Ourselves to letter-writing as a form of "possible, albeit fractured" (p. 88) community-building in a time of crisis. Overall, Armstrong's book is a timely riposte to big data approaches to modernism (i.e., network analysis and distant reading) and, in its commitment to the "transitory and relatively accidental" (p. 12), an inspired example of what Paul Saint-Amour calls "weak modernism."Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This is a book that could very easily have gotten out of hand, an initial observation that became sincere praise for what Kelly (Univ. College, Ireland) has produced. As the first book-length survey of "the new sincerity" in American literature, this study fills a significant gap between the peak of postmodernism and the later genre turn in the historicist consideration of early 21st-century American fiction. Kelly deftly embeds insightful and extended commentaries on works by an array of writers including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead, within a rich and sprawling critical discourse about literary sincerity that hearkens back to Lionel Trilling (among others) as well as the potential roles that literary art can play in an age dominated by cultural and political neoliberalism. Kelly's skillful management of this critical framework prevents the book from becoming primarily a diatribe against the admittedly plentiful faults of neoliberalism that only happens to use novels as its supporting evidence (an overly didactic tendency that, in this review's view, occasionally mars the otherwise excellent scholarship of the post45 collective).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This marvelous essay collection, including work from over 50 years, reveals Pritchard's lifelong engagement with two of the 20th century's most important poets. Though largely inaccessible until now due to the ephemeral or specialized nature of their original publication, these essays, organized into sections for each poet, showcase Pritchard's singular attentiveness to the aural qualities inherent in each poet's work. Referring to Frost, he writes that, for the poet, "Poetry had an obligation to be unboring and, above all, to be something heard, to be mainly ear--rather than eye--read" (p. 67). That sentiment, equally applicable to Pritchard's view of Eliot, joins with another thread common to his views of each poet: the importance of play to their craft and even to the substance of their work. Other features of this collection include "West of Boston: Robert Frost," which details Pritchard's own encounters with Frost. The essays are also notable for their incisive considerations of and attention to the lesser-known qualities of each poet's letters and prose, most of which have been unknown and unpublished until recently.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Recent scholarship in comparative race studies often documents African American intellectuals' encounters and experiences with Japan and China since the 1930s, or investigates issues of racial violence and cultural nationalism as represented and articulated in both African American and Asian American literatures. In Other Lovings, Lee (Univ. of South Carolina) makes a provocative argument by suggesting that "Asian American consciousness" is "grounded in the open field of Blackness," and that anti-Asian violence during COVID-19 has been closely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement as a response to white supremacy. He then examines how love, as an ontological concept, may counter the impact of racial violence and offer an alternative to "Afropessimism" and "racial melancholy," once prevalent in the discourses and communities of these two racial minorities. Engaging both historiography and critical theories such as Black Marxism, queer feminism, psychoanalysis, and affect theory, Lee not only offers innovative readings of literary texts across diverse genres and authors such as Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, David Hwang, Gayl Jones, and Adrian Tomine, but also examines popular cultural figures such as Jeremy Lin and G. Yamazawa. Ultimately, Lee seeks to build bridges and foster conversations between theorists and cultural practitioners and between Asian Americans and African Americans.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This fascinating new study examines first-person narratives written and self-published by African American authors during the 19th century. Sinche (Univ. of Hartford) argues that "self-publication was a widespread practice that aspiring authors used to shape their individual circumstances as well as the physical and intellectual spaces they inhabited" (p. 3). Sinche argues that the act of self-publishing was "an idiosyncratic process" that produced a diverse range of publications in many formats and genres, most of which have usually been considered unliterary (p. 5). These publications, which Sinche categorizes and examines according to social functions, potentially complicates the canon of early African American print, which has long been dominated by the genre of first-person slave narratives. In that sense, Sinche's decision to focus the book on first-person narratives gives up some of that potential diversity and complication. Nevertheless, Published by the Author makes a welcome contribution to the fields of early African American literature and material textual studies. Scholars in these fields will find six chapters full of richly detailed information about a group of authors and genres not often considered to be part of African American or 19th-century American literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Peel's work adds important scholarship to the growing academic conversation on mistresses in Victorian literature. The notion of mistresses often creates a negative, sex-shaming stereotype; however, Peel (Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) expands the notion of "kept" women to include women who keep or help other women, men who assist or empower women to give them independence, and new family groups. Using classic 19th-century writers such as Dickens, Gaskell, Bronte, and Eliot, who create sympathetic kept mistresses, Peel demonstrates these authors' efforts to show these women as worthy of redemption, in part because middle-class readers could empathize with them. Peel's work gives "visibility and voice" to kept women. The author's efforts expand the understanding of terms such as "kept" and "mistress," and move beyond moral condemnation for women who found themselves kept for survival. Peel notes the continuing challenge of discovering kept women in the 19th century, in part because they are not in legal documents and because contemporary families kept them hidden. Readers and Mistresses is readable, accessible, and essential for Victorian studies and women's studies programs.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

For many years, scholars castigated Good Housekeeping and other women's magazines of the early 20th century for allegedly having propagated anti-feminist, traditional gender ideologies and decidedly middlebrow literary tastes among their mass-market audiences, in sharp contrast to the progressive messages conveyed by highbrow, modernist "Little Magazines." During the past few decades, however, a number of scholars have challenged this sharp dichotomy. In her meticulously researched and well-structured volume, Blair (Marquette Univ.)builds on her outstanding previous study of how popular periodical writers influenced early 20th-century readers--Reading Up (CH, Sep'12, 50-0136)--by examining in great detail a book advice column by Emily Newell Blair (no relation to the author), which appeared in Good Housekeeping between February 1926 and August 1934. Blair sets this column in the context not only of that magazine's readers and contents but also of contemporary critical debates about literary value, convincingly demonstrating the extensive overlap between "middlebrow" and "modernist" cultures and thereby making an invaluable contribution to the ongoing project of better understanding the actual evolution of literary publishing during the interwar period.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

Miller (Alleghany College) opens with a simple but provocative claim that his study "offers a new literary history of ecology." While Darwin's influence on the British realist novel is generally accepted, Miller traces the development of ecology by exploring a storytelling impulse shared by diverse thinkers such as Darwin, Harriet Martineau, and Thomas Robert Malthus, in an approach that traces elements common to science, economics, and literature in the 19th century. Miller then examines key realist novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, concluding that these writers, although influenced by Victorian science, often articulate growing divisions among newly established disciplines; such rifts ultimately prevent human beings from fully understanding their connections to the natural world. One of the book's major strengths is Miller's analysis of the ways in which 19th-century writers often anticipated ecological positions articulated by later thinkers such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. The Ecological Plot serves as a model for interdisciplinary writing. Miller's prose is clear and highly engaging. His use of critical materials is thorough, judicious, and consistently helpful. This book (Miller's first) represents a highly important contribution to the environmental humanities.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

Hill (independent scholar) offers a compelling, essay-style reconsideration of Wilder's work and legacy. Rather than sidestepping the criticisms leveled against Wilder in recent years, especially regarding her portrayals of Native Americans, Hill addresses them head-on, arguing that Wilder's intention was not to endorse prejudice but to reveal its consequences. Hill situates the Little House series firmly within the tradition of literary historical fiction, emphasizing its value in raising complex, age-appropriate questions for young readers and encouraging moral reflection across generations. She also convincingly argues that Wilder wrote with the understanding that her audience would grow with the Ingalls children, engaging more critically with the books over time. Especially poignant is Hill's defense of literary historical fiction as a genre capable of linking modern readers to the past in meaningful, personal ways--something increasingly urgent in an age dominated by digital immediacy. Too Good to Be Altogether Lost is a timely resource for fans of Wilder, teachers of children's and young adult literature, and scholars interested in reframing classic texts within contemporary conversations. Hill's work affirms Wilder's literary significance while inviting new conversations about how we read, teach, and remember the past.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Tippen's analysis of commercially published southern cookbooks from the 1990s on examines the tension between cookbook audience's desires for pleasure and joy from upbeat headnotes, mouth-watering recipes, and aesthetic food photography and the reality of the South's creativity generated within its legacy of suffering, poverty, segregation, enslavement, and violence. All geographic regions struggle with the general expectation of the cookbook genre to erase pain "through its orientation toward pleasure." Thus southern writers are not unique in this practice as they contextualize authenticity and identity (p. 8). Tippen (Chatham Univ.) argues that southern authenticity is achievable when writers "speak the truth of their painful experiences to powerful audiences," and when they amplify the contributions of Black southerners to regional culture, thus creating space for reconciliation, reparation, and apology for the past (p. 9). Tippen offers multiple strategies for finding new models of storytelling, a spectrum of suffering in southern cookbook writing that may be tools for truth and reconciliation. Each chapter examines southern cookbooks through a different lens: race, class, gender, ability, and grief (via funerary food practices). A delightful book for food scholars, folklorists, cultural historians, anthropologists, community organizers, and activists interested in food justice and memory.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.

Kucich (Bridgewater State Univ.) has written an extraordinary text on a difficult subject: the acknowledgement that Thoreau's writings are enmeshed in, echo, and advance the biases of settler colonial ideology, while salvaging the moments in which Thoreau's writings seriously challenge, or unsettle, those positions. Kucich's measured and thoughtful argument emphasizes Thoreau's multitudinous failures, for example, to speak out against genocidal federal government policies or even to fully recognize the presence of Native American people in Massachusetts. The argument embraces the entire scope of Thoreau's writing career, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) to posthumous works such as "The Dispersion of Seeds" and Wild Fruits (1999). It includes a relative rarity in Thoreau studies: a sustained examination of Thoreau's so-called Indian Notebooks (as yet unpublished), a provocative speculation about what Thoreau might have found had he visited Mashpee on Cape Cod, and a revelatory reassessment of Thoreau's relationships to his Penobscot guides in the Maine Woods. Overall, Kucich's volume is a nuanced, hopeful perspective, unearthing ways in which Thoreau's writings, especially on humans' relationship to the land, offer ideas that contemporary American society can build on.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.