Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Language & Literature — Romance

Speculating on what inspires people to travel, Brigham (Roosevelt Univ.) focuses on how the concept of mobility, specifically the road trip, has shaped US national imagery.  The author offers a unique concept of mobility: based on Tim CresswellsOn the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006), Brigham's definition insists that mobility helps one engage with-rather than free oneself fromspace, society, and identity.  The book comprises five chronological chapters.  The first addresses the earliest US road narratives, which made their appearance in the 1910s with the advent of an automobile culture that promised to incorporate the outsider into US social identity.  Subsequent chapters consider post-WW II narratives, which focused on a questioning, alienated, male protagonist in search of truth; women as protagonists in the 1980s-90s, and their need to reject or accept traditional gender roles; late-20th-century Native American protagonists embarking on travel journeys requiring reevaluation of the personal, communal, and historical to create a new self-perspective; and post-9/11 representations of the road, in which mobility serves to reclaim an identity lost in that national tragedy.  In the end, Brigham is successful in revealing the need to question and redefine the idea of mobility and establish a new perspective on engagement and American identity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Argued here is that in the mid-19th-century USthanks to the influence of popular environmental writing, natural history essays, and increasingly visible proto-ecological sciences (notably botany, geology, and geography)people's attitudes toward nature began to shift from an emphasis on exploitation to a concern with conservation.  Gerhardt (American studies, Univ. of Bamberg, Germany) discusses Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in the context of these green developments, showing how the poets were affected by the culture's shifting views and analyzing their nature-related poems on four geographic scales or levels:  micro, local, regional, and global.  Gerhardt concludes that Dickinson and Whitman, in spite of their apparently disparate poetic subjects and styles, share a reverence for nature and express in many of their poems an "environmental humility," a perspective that avoids both anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.  A Place for Humility impressively extends and, in certain respects, supersedes the critical commentary of two comparable, earlier studies: Agnieszka Salska's Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: Poetry of the Central Consciousness (1985) and M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (2004).  Gerhardt's study is at once an exemplary contribution to the field of ecocriticism and a truly groundbreaking comparison of two of America's greatest poets.Summing Up: Essential

Zaretsky (French history, Univ. of Houston) has written an engrossing study of James Boswell, the renowned biographer of Samuel Johnson and the equally famous diarist.  In particular,Boswells Enlightenment is a study of the years 176365, when Boswell, a young man of 23 when he embarked, toured Western Europe.  During this tour, he managed to interview, and often to befriend, a number of Europes leading thinkers, writers, and political figures, including Voltaire, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Wilkes, and Paoli Pasquale.  Boswell kept a diary in which he recorded his conversations with his famous interlocutors, and Zaretsky makes good use of it in telling his tale.  There must have been something irresistible about Boswells personality for such a young man to have been able to secure the attentions of these men, not to mention the close friendship of literary titan Samuel Johnson.  A fascinating character study, Boswells Enlightenment helps readers understand what that something was.  It is also the story of Boswells struggle to reconcile his strict Calvinist upbringing with the ideas of the Enlightenment and with his tempestuous impulses and literary ambition.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Novelist, painter, filmmaker, actor, central member of the Beat generation, Burroughs (191497) has already been treated to numerous critical studies and biographies, including Miles's William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait (1993).  Now Miles has written the definitive biography of Burroughs.  Miles is the perfect writer for this task: he knew Burroughs well and has logged some 40 years of attention to the Beat scene and the British underground.  Burroughs was born in St. Louis to a wealthy family (his grandfather invented the adding machine), went to Harvard, traveled widely, and, notably, spent years exorcising the guilt following the accidental killing of his wife Joan in 1951.  This intense, lively narrative examines not only Burroughs's amazing life but also his considerable oeuvreeight novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, four collections of essays, and five books of published interviews and correspondence.  Although critics disagree about the literary value of Burroughss fiction and the quality of his visual art, there can be no disagreement about his influence on contemporary literature and popular culture.  Miles also deals sensitively with two of the more sensational aspects of Burroughs's life: his drug addiction and his homosexuality.  Even those unfamiliar with Burroughs's work will appreciate this book, which is an amazing story, wonderfully told.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Like James Shapiros1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare(2005), this microbiography focuses on an important year in one writers life.  In this case, the year is 1386, and the writer is Geoffrey Chaucer.  During his lifetime, Chaucer was known as a mid-level bureaucrat, not as the father of English literature.  For the 12 years before 1386, he lived a comfortable life above Aldgate, where he could enjoy the excitement of medieval London.  However, 1386 was a crisis year for Chaucer.  Perhaps the first unlanded MP, he served an ill-fated term in Parliament as part of Richard IIs faction and ended up losing his job and his home.  Set adrift in Kent, Chaucer reexamined his life and his aversion to literary fame.  The result was the composition ofThe Canterbury Tales.  This excellent microbiography not only provides an insight into the books origins and Chaucers reluctance to seek literary fame but also presents Chaucers world with all its political intrigue.  Strohm (Columbia) provides a fascinating postscript about how, within a decade of his death, Chaucer went from being almost unknown as a writer to being famous beyond his wildest dreams.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Senier (Univ. of New Hampshire) initiated this milestone anthology, which makes visible the diversity and longevity of writing traditions within ten Native nations in New England: Abenaki, Maliseet, Mikmaq, Mohegan, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag.  Collaborative in production and format, the anthology includes a section for each tribal nation with works organized chronologically.  "Community editorsNative scholars, educators, writers, knowledge keepersprovide introductions to their respective nations and communities and to selected writings and bibliographies.  Ranging from poems to petitions, transcribed oral stories to tribal periodicals, representative works demonstrate the continuity and vitality of writing traditions for tribal communities while refuting the narratives of erasure and absence still prevalent about Native peoples in New England.  Senier addresses the notable absence of a Pequot section as part of the inevitable challenge of using a community editor model.  Extending the work the anthology started, a websiteWriting of Indigenous New England, https://indnewengland.omeka.net/serves as digital companion to the anthology and an online exhibit space.  A significant contribution to Native American and indigenous studies and to US literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Palgraves "Literary Lives" series offers concise treatments of writers lives rather than new interpretations of their work, but in the current entry, Christie (Univ. of Sydney, Australia) uses a sober, fact-based approach to cast a celebrated poet in a new light.  Like Andrew Lycett, author of Dylan Thomas: A New Life (2004), Christie believes that folklore about Thomass life has overshadowed the complexity of his body of work.  However, unlike previous biographers, Christie outlines this complexity by highlighting elements of the poets character that found expression in his poetry.  In lucid, readable prose, the author outlines Thomass resentment of academia, his longstanding insecurity about the gaps in his education, his wide reading in poetry, and his often-exaggerated relationship to his Welsh heritage.  While casually claiming that Thomas was the most important poet of the 20th century, Christie treats storied aspects of the poet's life, such as his arrogance and various indulgences, in a candid manner free of moralizing or sensationalism.  A portrait emerges of a troubled and insecure genius, a man who deliberately set out to become a poetic innovator by exploring the potential of language and reached his goal after many personal trials.  A fine study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

Kareem (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) took on the challenge of disproving a central critical commonplace: that Enlightenment skepticism tolled the death knell of wonder.  She succeeds, and her success should prompt a reassessment of 18th-century literature, all of which (whatever genre) bears some association with fiction (in terms of speculative assessment) and therefore some association with wonder.  Kareem demonstrates that central to the thought of the period is the joint enterprise of "wondering at" and "wondering about."  Her methodology is that of the philosophical skeptic in that she brings works and authors long considered antithetical to one another (Daniel Defoe and David Hume; Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole) into deep conversation, revealing, in the first case, that both the Puritan and the philosopher are "connoisseurs of uncertainty" and, in the second, that the writer of rational fiction and the author of marvelous fiction are both supreme manipulators of suspense and admiration.  Kareem also brings a little-studied text into the discussion: Rudolf Raspe's Baron Munchausen's Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785).  The attention is welcome and long overdue.  The concluding chapter features Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in conversation with Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein.  This erudite volume will challenge undergraduates, but the vista it opens makes the effort worthwhile.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

Dowling (School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Univ. of Iowa) has written a delightful study of Emerson's acolytes in his transcendental Concord circle.  Individual chapters focus on Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Christopher Cranch, Samuel Gray Ward, Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Charles King Newcomb, and Ellen Sturgis Hooper.  Emerson, at one point or another, mentored these individuals.  However, as a mentor, Emerson was an anti-mentor, pushing his acolytes away as he accepted them.  He was influenced as much by them as they were by him.  In his essay Friendship, Emerson defined friends as beautiful enemies, and Dowling elaborates on Emerson's affection for and conflict with his protégés.  But the more one quarrels with Emerson, the more Emersonian one becomes.  Dowlings study is well researched, and he does a beautiful job of connecting Emersons universal statements in his essays to the particularity of his relationship with his protégés.  Dowlings focus on friendships sheds light on the transcendentalist influence on American literature and literary studies.  Though certainly useful for those studying Emerson, this book will be even more important to those interested in the protégés listed above.  It is also a fascinating read for those interested in American cultural history and the regional history of New England. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Dowling (Central Connecticut State Univ.) has written a fascinating biography of ONeill (18881953), the only American dramatist to ever win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  The biography portrays O'Neill's dysfunctional childhood, his life as a sailor, and his eventual discovery by the Provincetown Players.  His early works, from the "sea plays to such full-length masterpieces as Desire under the Elms and Anna Christie, mark the transformation of American drama.  The strength of the book is the meticulous weaving of the events that had happened, or were happening, in the playwright's life with the plays themselves.  This is particularly evident in Exorcism, written in 1919 but found only recently.  Dowling does not shy away from the more unsettling aspects of ONeills life, including his alcoholism, his outright negligence as a father, and his troubled marriages. He might once and forever have set the record straight on the strange events surrounding the publication and staging of the autobiographicalLong Days Journey into Night.  Making extensive use of letters, diaries, and newspaper reviews of O'Neill's works, Dowling paints a picture of a scared, emotionally troubled playwright using the theater as a means to escape the pastand in so doing forging a new American drama.Summing Up: Essential. All readers

This second volume of Moody's projected three-volume biography continues the excellent scholarship of the first volume (CH, Oct'08, 46-0754), which covered the years 18851920.  Here Moody (emer., University of York, UK) covers the the period when Pound was working up toCanto LXXI.  At this time, Pound was also developing his propaganda for Mussolinis fascist Italy.  Though not an apologist for Pounds politics, Moody does present Pound as being blinded by his own idealist attack against usury (bankers) and militarization (arms dealers).  He points out that Pound did not find Mussolinis Italy to be a model for the US; rather he found the model in the origins of the US, as evident in the John Adams cantos (LXII-LXXI).  Over the course of the period examined, Pound broke with his earlier associates (Yeats, Eliot, Joyce)  and formed new associations (e.g., with Bunting, Oppen, Zukofsky), but the latter group was unwilling to accede to Pounds politics.  The final chapter, Alien in America, emblematizes the end of modernism and the approach of WW II.  As the first volume revealed, Moody is an astute reader of Pounds poetic technique, locating the historical and musical structures in his poetry, and of the historical context it manifested.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

InNew Negro, Old Left (CH, Feb'00, 37-3236), Maxwell (Washington Univ., St. Louis) studied the deep interconnections between modern black literature and communism.  In the present volume, he brilliantly and chillingly examines how for 50 years Hoover and the FBI monitored the literary production of African American writers.  In five chapters he presents five audacious and compelling theses, arguing that the FBI was such a formidable reader and shaper of African American literature that the FBI file on black writers constitutes an important and hitherto overlooked literary genre. The volume reads like a detective thriller as it uncovers what Maxwell calls the "ghostreading" practices of the FBI.  The book delves deep into G-man personalities and into strategies that canonized modern black writers before literary critics did and that produced more pages of commentary than any literary scholar.  An invaluable companion website offers 51 declassified files on individual authors--material that will be useful in the classroom and for archival research.  Though the book's subtitle could suggest that in "framing" African American literature the FBI robbed the writers of agency, Maxwell smartly and insistently argues that black writers in turn wrote about the FBI spying on them, and their writing back constitutes resistance.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This reviewer has been waiting for 30 years for the publication of this material. Scharnhorst (emer., Univ. of New Mexico) arranges the 101 letters (18661910) in chronological order to show the true, rough-house Twain who is lost when read as a classic author.  As aggressive a moralist and critic as Twain seems in his more conventional fiction, here Twain is assertive, fantastically comic, lawlessly imaginativeunruly, strident, and irascible.  This raw newspaper journalism is central to understanding the writing style of Mark Twain as it had to be adjusted by editors like Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, and Livy Clemens for his work to rise to universal stature as art.  More important, the journalism is central to understanding the pragmatic, human-centered ideology that drives Twain's work.  Twain's 1867 burlesques of the female suffrage movement lead to burlesque defenses of his own moral character in the 1870s and a later defense of universal suffrage; attacks on local incompetence and political dishonesty lead to later protests of everything from street construction to con games to exploitation of China following the Boxer Rebellion.  Those who wish to understand the full spectrum of Twains genius need this unique collection, whichin style and substanceestablishes the lifelong continuity of a great comic moralist at work.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In volume 2 of his The Life of Langston Hughes (CH, Feb'89, 26-3155), Arnold Rampersad suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. was well aware of the poetry of Langston Hughes and sometimes recited Hughes's poems in his sermons and speeches.  Miller (English, North Carolina State Univ.) documents how extensively King utilized the poems and vocabulary of Hughes.  Certainly King was inspired by the "American dream."  However, King often recited Hughes's "Mother to Son" and commented that life for black people was no "crystal stair." He borrowed from and paraphrased "Let America Be America Again": "let it be the dream that the dreamers dreamed." He borrowed from "What Happens to a Dream Deferred" when he alluded to shattered dreams and deferred dreams. He also borrowed from "I Dream a World."  This brilliant, thoroughly researched book shows how King often had to hide direct mention of Hughes even as he borrowed from his dream motif, because J. Edgar Hoover maintained that Hughes was a communist.  Miller's book will help correct the historical amnesia that has for too long blotted out recognition of the cultural continuity between Hughes and King.  A masterpiece.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This is a fascinating, in places brilliant, investigation of the personal dimension of Victorian commerce as depicted in the period's literary fiction and in nonliterary forms of writing, such as handbooks for businessmen, business biographies, official correspondence, and bank records.  Hunt (Brown) connects the efforts of Victorian novelists to represent the role of individual moral character (in an increasingly impersonal economy) to Victorian businessmen's strategies for "reading" the characters of their employees and agents to determine their trustworthiness and reliability.  The book begins with a chapter titled "The Trusty Agent," in which the author discusses Dickens'sDombey and Son against the background of mid-Victorian criminal betrayals of trust by agents and managers, offering a sensitive analysis of the contrasting figures of Carker (the unscrupulous expert reader of character) and Captain Cuttle (the hopeless businessman whose simplicity and flatness of character are signs of his honest nature).  The other three chapters feature illuminating, extended readings of Margaret Oliphant's Hester, Anthony Trollope'sThe Way We Live Now, and George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss.  Hunt's prose is polished and precise, and her research is thorough and pathbreaking.  Though the conclusion is unsatisfying and too brief, this is a thought-provoking and valuable work of original scholarship.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.

In this captivating study, Martin (a freelance writer) transports the reader to the 1850s inside smoky Pfaffs saloonthe meeting place of the USs first Bohemianslocated in the basement of 674 Broadway in New York City.  Run by Charles Pfaff, a cheerful German immigrant, the subterranean vault became the stomping grounds of Henry Clapp Jr., editor of theSaturday Press, who wished to re-create in New York the Bohemian scene he had experienced while living in Paris.  Pfaffs offered the ideal venue.  In its heydaythe years leading up to the Civil Warthe saloon was frequented by artists, writers, actors, and comics, including a handful of women, who became known as Pfaffs Bohemians.  Among those who patronized the saloon most nights was Walt Whitman, whose time at Pfaffs, Martin argues, was critical in the evolution of the poets verse.  Whitman's immersion in the Bohemian scene provided him with the freedom to experiment with his poetry and his sexuality.  Thanks to meticulous research, Martin was able to re-create the Bohemian scene, and Whitmans place in it, in vivid detail.  This book is a lively and entertaining read for students of American literature, history, and culture.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

The second of a two-volume set (it joins Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century, 2011, also edited by Craven and Dow), this collection grew out of a conference marking the centenary of Richard Wrights birth.  Central to the collection, which includes 15 contributions, is a reassessment of Wright's work, particularly in light of an increasingly transcultural and transglobal landscape.  There are unique pairings, for example, a reading by Shoshana Milgram Knapp of Richard WrightsThe Outsider alongside DostoevskysCrime and Punishment, Victor HugosLes Misérables, and Ayn RandsAtlas Shrugged.  James Smethurst establishes the tone of the collection with the observation that Wright drew on a wide spectrum of genres--Gothic literature, proletarian and naturalist literature--and on such movements as existentialism and Marxism in order to render more palpable the lived realities of blacks in a segregated urban environment during the 1930s.  Barbara Foley contends that availability of the Wright papers, housed at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, could lead to a reassessment of Wrights oeuvre,particularly the unfinished novelBlack Hope,which, according to Foley, depicts women as central to the liberatory project of the proletariat.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Smallwood (emer., Univ. of Birmingham, UK) and Wild (Plymouth Univ., UK) provide a fascinating hybrid collection/anthology on the role of ridicule in criticism produced during the long 18th century.  They focus on ridiculeof critics/criticism rather thanby critics (though sometimes the boundary blurs).  In both the critical commentary it offers and the primary texts by the period's "ridiculous critics" it includes, the volume stands as a history of a body of criticism that has been largely ignored, and which has implications for today's critical practices.  In part 1, the editors consider the balance of serious and unserious in English criticism and "suggest that acorpus of comic and satirical writings with its own genealogy" reveals "what criticism was, and should be."  In part 2, they provide examples of such writings (and some satirical prints), beginning with Buckingham'sRehearsal and proceeding to satirical jabs by Rochester, Swift, Wycherley, Pope, Parnell, Fielding, Smart, Johnson, Goldsmith, Mackenzie, Sterne, Gibbon, et al.  In part 3, the editors suggest that bringing together the "laughter of critics [and] their own laughable vices ... offers a way of being serious about things that serious expression renders trivial, obscure, or ineffective."  All who profess themselves literary critics should take a serious look at this book.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This new biography of playwright Tennessee Williams was conceived as a sequel to the late Lyle LeverichsTom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (CH, Mar'96, 33-3772), which concludes with the staging ofThe Glass Menagerie (1944).  However, longtimeNew Yorker theater critic John Lahr decided that to reinterpret the plays and the life, [he] needed to revisit Williamss childhood and to take a different tack from Lyles encyclopedic chronological approach.  The result is indeed a stand-alone biography, a masterful treatment of the often-tempestuous professional and personal relationships that shaped Williamss characteristically autobiographical dramas, fromBattle of Angels through his last major play,A House Not Meant to Stand.  Although Lahr makes limited reference to the extensive secondary scholarship on Williamss work, he cites interviews, memoirs, and manuscript collections in libraries from California to Massachusetts.  Lahrs deep knowledge of the theater is evident in his attention to the impact of producers, directors, agents, actors, and reviewers onA Streetcar Named Desire,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other gripping dramas of Williams's mad pilgrimage of the flesh.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

An enduringly popular novel, Wuthering Heights (1847) has variously been cited as erotic, evil, mythical, realistic, and/or moral.  This wonderfully printed annotated edition provides fascinating illustrations and a useful introduction.  Gezari (Connecticut College) retains Brontë's original two-volume, 20-chapter structure, and her annotations fill in countless gaps that few could have known existed.  Included are genealogy, maps, photographs, and textual notes galore. For ease of reading, Brontë's text is printed on the left side of each page with supporting editorial materials appearing on the right.  Annotations are factual, providing many contextssuch as history, economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and linguisticsand elucidating literary allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, folklore, and so on.  In the introduction, Gezari explains her plan and indebtedness to earlier work on Brontë, including Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Terry Eagleton'sMyths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (CH, Oct'75), and Winifred Gerin'sEmily Brontë: A Biography (CH, Oct'72).  The volume's "Further Reading" lists primary sources, biographical and critical books, and essays.  Wuthering Heights has never been so usefully packaged for readers.  An important edition of a work by an important Victorian novelist.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Our stories have died with us long enough. We mean to leave behind some map, some key, for the gay and lesbian people who follow."  This quote from gay memoirist Paul Monette (Becoming a Man, 1992) introduces Writing Queer Lives: Autobiography and Memoir, one of 14 essays in this excellent, far-ranging collection.  Same-sex literary criticism continues to evolve and grow as diverse academic writers and researchers reflect on texts, novels, films, poetry, theater, memoir, and history from the 18th century to the present.  Deftly edited by Scott Herry (English, Indiana Univ.), the companion is organized into three sections: Genres, Historical Contexts, and Critical Approaches.  Topics include the many contested meanings of the closet, AIDS, queer literary theory, privacy and protection, queer of color, the Cold War, post gay, coming out, race and sexuality, identity politics, psychoanalysis and literature, and more.  Also included is a helpful chronology of significant LGBTQ-themed works, events, and watershed moments, starting with Charles Brockden Browns novelOrmond, or, The Secret Witness (1799) and culminating with the reidentification, in the 2013 DSM, of gender identity disorder as gender dysphoria.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above

A welcome addition to the excellent "Cambridge Companions" series, this collection of clearly written essays is both interesting and informative, and fills a scholarly void.  Although canonical authors such as Austen, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley are mentioned, the bulk of the discussion focuses on female authors who were well known in their own timewomen such as Mary Haysbut have now been mostly forgotten.  Written by an impressive group of scholars, including Anne Mellor, the essays concentrate on genres and themes such as aging, sexuality, and publishing.  The collection also looks at misconceptions about women writers in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.  For example, because Austen did not write about war, one might assume that women had no interest in the Napoleonic Wars.  However, one essay points out that female writers were outspoken about the war, both for and against.  The Romantic period marked a turning point for women writers, a time when writing became a viable profession.  As noted several times in this collection, this period laid the foundation for the feminist movement of the Victorian period.  This is an outstanding collection.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.

The publication of The Dating ofBeowulf, ed. by Colin Chase (1981), instigated three decades of often-impassioned scholarly debate. Prior to 1981, mostBeowulf scholars assumed that the poem was composed early in the Anglo-Saxon period, most likely in the seventh or eighth century.  The 1981 collection presented a range of arguments for both early and late dates, but the late-date arguments changed the field.  The present volume provides a thorough overview of recent scholarship that argues, contrary to late-date assertions made in the 1981 collection, thatBeowulf was indeed composed in the seventh or eighth century.  The contributors are prominent, well-established Anglo-Saxonists, most of whom have already published more detailed studies on the dating question.  Essays summarize this previous work, presenting a wide range of linguistic, metrical, onomastic, paleographic, and historical evidence.  The contributors various methodologies are more technical and more objective than those of pre-1981 early-dating arguments, and collectively offer a cohesive and compelling case forBeowulfs early composition.  Not only is this volume a necessary companion for the 1981 collection, it stands on its own as an introduction to key issues in the dating of Old English poetry.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Following two previous volumes of Beckett's lettersvolume 1, 1929-40 (CH, Aug'09, 46-6645), and volume 2, 1941-56 (CH, Nov'12, 50-1320)this third volume of a projected four covers the years after the success of Waiting for Godot (1953), a period in which Beckett was especially prolific.  He is composing and staging plays, such asEndgame andHappy Days, and producing work for radio, television, and cinema.  Written from Paris and his country house in Ussy-Sur-Marne, the letters dispel any myth of Beckett as hermit and reveal that he inhabited an active social world.  Much is going on and Beckett is intensely involved with productions, foreign visits, foreign guests, and publication and translations of his work.  Becketts range of correspondents expanded during this period, and the volume includes useful indexes of first names and recipients and profiles of the chief correspondents.  Chronologies are included throughout the volume, as are detailed annotations, illustrations, photographs, and even sketches in which Beckett explained production details.  Extensive critical introductions provide contexts for the letters and explanations and translations of writings not in English.  The volume sheds light on the life and work of this major literary figure, and it will be an invaluable resource for scholars, directors, set-designers, and actors alike.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Rarely does this reviewer say that he cannot praise a book enough, but this is the case with The Myth of Emptiness.  Harding's grasp of the illusion and reality of emptiness in American culture is gripping and unique.  Every chapter offers remarkable insights. In chapter 2, for instance, Harding (Univ. of Toulouse, France) dissects American myth in the context of colonialism.  For Puritans, landscape was reduced to a "void" so early settlers could imagine the American terrain as a "desert" and establish European community in a threatening wilderness.  On the verge of the 20th century, "emptiness and fullness are no longer opposed as the contrasting zones of wilderness and civilization."  Cooper, Whitman, Thoreau, and other fashioners of the "hybrid figure" of the half-civilized pioneer merged the line between "native" and "settler."  Subsequently, discovering unspoiled wilderness became a summons in itself (this is case with Rick Bass'sWinter, 1991).  Harding does an admirable job of explicating the struggle by such authors as Charles Bowden, Ellen Meloy, Jonathan Raban, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Sullivan to restrain Americans from mentally "blanking out" empty spaces.  In her conclusion, the author eloquently revisits the need to revise one's view of the planet as a dichotomy of "fullness or emptiness."  A perceptive and challenging book.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

InThe Poetry of John Milton, Teskey (Harvard)whose numerous publications include the Norton Critical Edition ofParadise Lost(2005)traces Milton's poetic development from his early idealism through his mid-life period of political engagement to his masterpieces in his last years.  Teskey's ultimate aim is not only to elucidate what Milton's poems say and the art by which they say what they say but also to show what makes Milton's art "enduringly great," to quote from the preface.  Proceeding chronologically, Teskey devotes a chapter to each poem or grouping of shorter poems and a chapter to the English Romantics' engagement with Milton.  He treats Paradise Lostin six chapters, each addressing a major issue the poem raises.  His prose style, with its engaging first-person voice and the wide variety of literature and other topics Teskey draws on, is one of the pleasures of this informative, intelligent, and accessible book.  Teskey provides a lengthy set of discursive endnotes with full bibliographic details.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

This gem of a book is indispensable for any reader of Hughes or student of the 20th century.  In putting together this volume, Rampersad (Stanford), author of a well-received two-volume biography of Hughes, The Life of Langston Hughes (19861988), and Roessel (Stockton Univ.) selected from thousands of letters that, they assert, could easily fill almost 20 large volumes.  The result is a moving, often lyrical epistolary autobiography that covers the places (Harlem, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, Mexico, the Soviet Union) and the people (Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Blanche Knopf, Carl Van Vechten, Noel Sullivan) significant for Hughes over the course of his life.  These letters contain tales of artistic yearning and financial trouble, depict Hughess concerns about the color line and his commitment to leftist politics, and illustrate his deep involvement in all kinds of cultural artisanship.  This riveting book is an excellent companion to Hughess poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography.  Those less than familiar with Hughes will be inspired to return to the Hughes they love best or try yet unexplored corners of his oeuvre, and those who know Hughes well will likely read and reread these letters often.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Hutchinson (Univ. of Aberdeen, Scotland) has written an outstanding overview of the literature that began within months of the start of WW I and flooded world reading markets. Hutchinson takes her title from Henry James, who said in a 1915 interview that "the war has used up words."  Certainly the Great War, the war to end all wars, produced a mountain of literatureshort stories, literary sketches, poems, and novels; publishers leapt at the chance to get the literary output of writers from both sides of the Atlantic into print.  Hutchinson's book comprises an introduction, an "aftermath, and five chronological chapters (each with extensive notes): "1914Civilization," "1915Volunteers," "1916Books," "1917Perspectives," and "1918Compromises."  The writers Hutchinson treats are a Whos Who of literary giants: Mary Borden, e. e. cummings, Henry James, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, John Dos Passos, and Edith Wharton.  As Hutchinson notes, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner figure prominently in the shaping of the literary output of the time.  Hutchinson spends a good deal of time outlining the history of the period, including the US's initial reluctance to enter the war and its eventual engagement in the conflict.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This is an excellent book.  Longtime scholars of 19th-century American women writers, Argersinger (independent scholar) and Cole (Penn State) have amassed essays that put into focus the rich association of transcendentalist women.  Only in recent decades has Margaret Fuller achieved canonical status among the major transcendentalists, and as the books 17 essays demonstrate, scholarship until now has still only scratched the surface of the remarkably diverse, far-reaching, and long-lived network in which Fuller participated and the women writers, intellectuals, and activists Fuller inspired.  The thematic center of the collection is Fullers rallying cry for Exaltadas, or female exemplars of the coming era, to quote from the editors' introduction.  As the editors elaborate, Fuller appeals urgently to readers to change themselves and the world.  In so doing, she promotes a claimfor women (editors' italics) as possessors of a high, quasi-divine consciousness and truth-telling power within.  This collection has broken new ground.  It will certainly encourage scholars to explore more fully the depth and breadth of the Exaltadas and their legacy.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Eighteenth-century literary studies have always been interdisciplinary: understanding Pope and Swift entails understanding garden history and developments in astronomy.  Distinguished historian of literary and art theory and of the novel, Lipking (emer., Northwestern) has done enough homework to write a book about the scientific revolution that passes muster with such discerning of historians of science as Peter Dear.  The book is not, as it first seems, a connected account of the role of visual imaging in science; rather, Lipking offers a series of meditations on individual figures from Galileo and Kepler to Hooke and Newton.  The result is uneven: most readers will already know what Lipking has to say about GalileosSiderius Nuncius and Newton, but his chapter on Descartes is a masterpiece of synthesis, perhaps the best brief account yet of Descartes's motivations in doing natural philosophy, and Lipking's account of Hooke is almost as good;  Robert Fludd and Thomas Browne round out the complex picture.  England and physics dominate (one wishes for more on chemistry, biology, and Leibniz, but that would have meant a different, and much longer, book).  Lipkings audience is not historians of science but students of literature and even, given his admirable clarity, general readers, for whom he has provided a thoroughly accessible intellectual feast.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Required reading for William Blake scholars and art historians, this volume provides a detailed account of the costs, materials, patrons, and sales of Blake's work, both literature and art.  Drawing on previous scholarship and his own careful research, Bentley (emer., English, Univ. of Toronto) has compiled a comprehensive database of facts and figures that makes a number of invaluable arguments: Blake was a prolific creator and tireless laborer, unfortunate in relation to overall acceptance and commercial success, and often a poor judge of opportunity and/or character in business situations.  His career was sustained by professional diversity and the generous patronage of friends.  Bentley surveys the pragmatics of pursuing art as a career, showing the income needed to sustain creativity at this period in history and demonstrating the intricate balance between production costs and sales profits.  The nine chapters are illuminated by 17 detailed tables of data and 33 color, high-resolution illustrations; also provided are an exhaustive 85-page list of Blake's patrons, 18 pages of notes, a strong bibliography, and a comprehensive index.  In an age of digitally diluted research practices, this exemplary volume testifies to traditional scholarly rigor and the continuing necessity of historicist methodologies.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.