Faculty Bookshelf
New and Forthcoming Releases, Listed by Publication Date
What Is Honor?
A Question of Moral Imperatives
Alexander Welsh
Yale University Press | July 2008
ISBN: 030012564X
What is honor? Has its meaning changed since ancient times? Is it an outmoded notion? Does it still have the power to direct our behavior? In this provocative book Alexander Welsh considers the history and meaning of honor and dismisses the idea that we live in a post-honor culture. He notes that we have words other than honor, such as respect, self-respect, and personal identity, that show we do indeed care deeply about honor. Honor, he argues, is a continuing process of respect that motivates or constrains members of a peer group. Honor’s dictates function as moral imperatives.
Surprisingly, little systematic study of the history of honor in Western culture has been attempted. Offering a welcome remedy, Welsh provides a genealogy of approaches to the subject, mining some of the most influential texts of the Western tradition. He rereads with fascinating results the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Shakespeare, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith, and others. With a sharp focus on the intersection of honor and ethics in both literature and philosophy, Welsh invites new and constructive debate on a topic of vital interest.
Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are
Paul Fry
Yale University Press | June 2008
ISBN: 0300126484
In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth’s motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or—more recently—political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.
Fry argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of nature in Wordsworth’s poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes “our widest commonality” in the simple fact that “we are” in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in the presence of being is what makes him original, Fry shows, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called “the hiding place of his power.”
Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England
Elliott Visconsi
Cornell University Press | April 2008
ISBN: 0801446724
In England, the late seventeenth century was a period of major crises in science, politics, and economics. Confronted by a public that seemed to be sunk in barbarism and violence, English writers including John Milton, John Dryden, and Aphra Behn imagined serious literature as an instrument for change. In Lines of Equity, Elliott Visconsi reveals how these writers fictionalized the original utterance of laws, the foundation of states, and the many vivid contemporary transitions from archaic savagery to civil modernity. In doing so, they considered the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, and the duties of sovereign and subject. They asked their audience to think like kings and judges: through the literary education of the individual conscience, the barbarous tendencies of the English people might be effectively banished. Visconsi calls this fictionalizing program “imaginative originalism,” and demonstrates the often unintended consequences of this literary enterprise. By inviting the English people to practice equity as a habit of thought, a work such as Milton's Paradise Lost helped bring into being a mode of individual conduct—the rights-bearing deliberative subject—at the heart of political liberalism. Visconsi offers an original view of this transitional moment that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of law and citizenship, the idea of legal origins in the early modern period, and the literary history of later Stuart England.
Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath (The Middle Ages Series)
Alastair Minnis
University of Pennsylvania Press | November 2007
ISBN: 0812240308
Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order.
This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.
Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England
Jessica Brantley
University Of Chicago Press | October 2007
ISBN: 0226071324
Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England.
Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Princeton University Press | November 2007
ISBN: 0691127263
In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values.
After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life.
Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.
Foreigners
Caryl Phillips
Knopf | October 2007
ISBN: 1400043972
A powerful and affecting new book from Caryl Phillips: a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society.
Francis Barber, “given” to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, more companion than servant, afforded an unusual depth of freedom that, after Johnson’s death, hastened his wretched demise . . . Randolph Turpin, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, becoming Britain’s first black world-champion boxer, a top-class fighter for twelve years whose life ended in debt and despair . . . David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice, and whose death at the hands of police in 1969 served as a wake-up call for the entire nation.
Each of these men’s stories is rendered in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the simple notions of haplessness that have been used to explain the tragedy of these lives. And each explores, in entirely new ways, the themes—at once timeless and urgent—that have been at the heart of all of Caryl Phillips’s remarkable work: belonging, identity, and race.
American Sonnets: An Anthology
(American Poets Project)
David Bromwich, Editor
Library of America | October 2007
ISBN: 1598530151
Like a Copland symphony or a de Kooning nude, an American sonnet marries European artistic tradition to New World innovation and imagination. Here, in this unique Library of America anthology, critic David Bromwich presents 161 sonnets and sonnet sequences by 56 of our most accomplished poets, revealing a surprisingly supple verse form that has proven an irresistible invitation to experiment and excellence for American poets. This volume, the 25th in the American Poets Project series, offers an unprecedented portrait of the American sonnet, including work by such poets as Longfellow, Jones Very, Poe, Millay, Berryman, and Robert Frost. Arranged chronologically from the colonial period to the present, this rich and beguiling collection serves as a sort of mini-survey of American poetry.
"There was no good reason for the sonnet to be reborn in America," observes Bromwich in his introduction, "except that the thoughts and feelings of poets turned out to be renewable under this aspect, close as the form is to aria and aphorism and syllogism, closer still to prayer." American Sonnets reveals some of our greatest poets experimenting with - and changing forever - a grand poetic tradition.
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
Anne Fadiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux | June 2007
ISBN: 0374106622
In At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman breathes new life into the familiar essay—a beloved literary genre recognized for both its intellectual breadth (“at large”) and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences (“at small”). With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions, from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb. The book has been described by Booklist as “blithely brilliant,” by Publishers Weekly as “a perfectly faceted little gem,” and by NPR as “utterly delightful, witty, and curious.”
Endless Things: A Part of Ægypt
John Crowley
Small Beer Press | May 2007
ISBN: 1931520224
This is the fourth novel—and much-anticipated conclusion—of John Crowley’s astonishing and lauded Ægypt sequence: a dense, lyrical meditation on history, alchemy, and memory. Spanning three centuries, and weaving together the stories of Renaissance magician John Dee, philosopher Giordano Bruno, and present-day itinerant historian and writer Pierce Moffett, the Ægypt sequence is as richly significant as Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Crowley, a master prose stylist, explores transformations physical, magical, alchemical, and personal in this epic, distinctly American novel where the past, present, and future reflect each other.
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism
Pericles Lewis
Cambridge University Press | May 2007
ISBN: 0521535271
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, forthcoming in 2007 from Cambridge University Press, is intended for an audience of undergraduates and general readers. I intend the book to fill the need for a general introduction to English-language modernism in a comparative and interdisciplinary context. Over the last generation, literary historians have challenged the postmodernist conception of modernism as the product of an arrogant elite. "Modernist studies" has embraced a broader historical and cultural conception of the movement. Scholars have traced the roots of modernism back to the mid-nineteenth century, found modernist currents outside the European mainstream, and explored the interaction among the various arts. They have also shown an increasing interest in the relationship between the arts and social history. My book updates previous standard reference works by offering a synthesis of these new trends in modernist scholarship.
It
Joseph Roach
University of Michigan Press | April 2007
ISBN: 0472069365
A witty and engaging exploration of the elusive quality of charm, animal magnetism, or charisma possessed by extraordinarily interesting people through the ages.
"Smart, provocative cultural history."--Times Literary Supplement. "Full of pageantry and insight, ideas that leap and shimmer like sequins on an unforgettable gown."--Los Angeles Times. "Essential."--Choice. "Thorough, accessible, and utterly off the wall."--New York Times.
Shades of the Planet:
American Literature as World Literature
Wai Chee Dimock & Lawrence Buell, Editors
Princeton University Press | April 2007
ISBN: 0691128529
In a globalizing age, studying American literature in isolation from the rest of the world seems less and less justified. But is the conceptual box of the nation dispensable? And what would American literature look like without it? Leading scholars take up this debate in Shades of the Planet, beginning not with the United States as center, but with the world as circumference. This reversed frame yields a surprising landscape, alive with traces of West Africa, Eastern Europe, Iran, Iraq, India, China, Mexico, and Australia. The Broadway musical Oklahoma! has aboriginal antecedents; Black English houses an African syntax; American slavery consorts with the Holocaust; Philip Roth keeps company with Milan Kundera; the crime novel moves south of the border; and R. P. Blackmur lectures in Japan. A national literature becomes haunted by the world when that literature is seen extending to the Pacific, opening up to Islam, and accompanying African-American authors as they travel. Highlighting American literature as a fold in a planet-wide fabric, this pioneering volume transforms the field, redrawing its institutional as well as geographical map.
The contributors are Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Homi Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Wai Chee Dimock, Susan Stanford Friedman, Paul Giles, David Palumbo-Liu, Ross Posnock, Joseph Roach, and Eric J. Sundquist.
The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature
Stefanie Markovits
Ohio State University Press | December 2006
ISBN: 0814210406
We think of the nineteenth century as an active age—the age of colonial expansion, revolutions, and railroads, of great exploration and the Great Exhibition. But in reading the works of Romantic and Victorian writers one notices a conflict, what Stefanie Markovits terms “a crisis of action.” In her book, The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Markovits maps out this conflict by focusing on four writers: William Wordsworth, Arthur Hugh Clough, George Eliot, and Henry James. Each chapter offers a “case-study” that demonstrates how specific historical contingencies—including reaction to the French Revolution, laissez-faire economic practices, changes in religious and scientific beliefs, and shifts in women’s roles—made people in the period hypersensitive to the status of action and its literary co-relative, plot.
By emphasizing the importance of inaction—both frustrated action and internalized action,—Markovits shows how the Victorian psychological novel develops out of Romantic poetry. But her concerns are ethical as well as generic. Aristotelian models of development see character as the product of actions. Yet in the writings considered, perceptions of characters come not from what they do, but from what they cannot do. This shift has moral consequences: must one do the right thing, or is it enough to will it? How does literary work relate to this question? Through an historically sensitive analysis, Markovits reinvests the idea of action with its Victorian weightiness.
Autobiography: Harriet Martineau
Linda H. Peterson, Editor
Broadview Press | December 2006
ISBN: 1551115557
Harriet Martineau lived an extraordinary literary life. She became a reviewer and journalist in the 1820's when her family's fortune collapsed; published a best-selling series, Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34), that made her fame and fortune by the age of thirty; overcame a hearing disability to become a "literary lion" in London society; toured the United States and wrote two founding texts of sociology based on her experiences; explored north Africa and the Middle East to observe non-European societies; wrote 'leaders' (editorials) on slavery for the London Daily News during the American Civil War; and commented publicly on matters of politics, history, and religion in an era when women supposedly maintained their place in the sphere of domesticity. This edition of her Autobiography reproduces the original 1877 text, which Martineau composed in 1855 and had printed in anticipation of her death. It includes illustrations of the author and her homes; excerpts from the "Memorials," added by her editor Maria Chapman; and reviews that praise and critique Martineau's method as an autobiographer and achievement as a Victorian woman of letters.
Through Other Continents:
American Literature across Deep Time
Wai Chee Dimock
Princeton University Press | November 2006
ISBN: 0691114498
"What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature.
Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Throughout, Dimock invokes the duration and extension of the planet as her coordinates, arguing that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole.
Temporal Circumstances
Lee Patterson
Palgrave Macmillan | November 2006
ISBN: 1403974810
Temporal Circumstances provides powerful and detailed interpretations of the most important and challenging of the Canterbury Tales. Well-informed and clearly written, this book will interest both those familiar with Chaucer’s masterpiece and readers new to it.
The Invention of Evening
Christopher R. Miller
Cambridge University Press | October 2006
ISBN: 0521863821
Lyric poetry has long been considered an art form of timelessness, but Romantic poets became fascinated by one time above all others: evening, the threshold between day and night. Christopher R. Miller investigates the cultural background of this development. The tradition of evening poetry runs from the idyllic settings of Virgil to the urban twilights of T. S. Eliot, and flourished in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. In fresh readings of familiar Romantic poems, Miller shows how evening settings enabled poets to represent the passage of time and to associate it with subtle movements of thought and perception. This leads to new ways of reading canonical works, and of thinking about the kinds of themes the lyric can express.
Dancing in the Dark
Caryl Phillips
Vintage | October 2006
ISBN: 1400079837
In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.
After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical decision to don blackface makeup and play the “coon.” Behind this mask he became a Broadway headliner–as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields, who called him “the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.” It is this dichotomy at Williams’ core that Phillips explores in this richly nuanced, brilliantly written novel, unblinking in its attention to the sinister compromises that make up an identity.
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters
Langdon Hammer, Editor
Library of America | September 2006
ISBN: 1931082995
No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day.
This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time.
