Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Classical Studies

This compact study offers an excellent and indispensable introduction to Marxist literary criticism. Foley (Rutgers Univ.) has organized the book in two sections: "Marxism" and "Literature." Part 1 comprises three chapters ("Historical Materialism," "Political Economy," and "Ideology"), in these Foley provides theoretical information about central Marxist concepts essential to literarys criticism. The second part, also three chapters ("Literature and Literary Criticism," "Marxist Literary Criticism," and "Marxist Pedagogy"), provides the means for putting Marxist theory into practice for the study of literature. The first part also includes a number of boxed sidebars that explore fundamental issues, such as the difference between chattel and free labor and the relationship of surplus value to profit. Throughout the book, Foley provides elegant and comprehensible descriptions of complicated concepts while highlighting the tensions at play between the sources. Readers without any experience with Marxist theory will appreciate the author's clear explanations; those more familiar with Marxism will likely glean something of value, given the author's ability to bypass the noise and focus on the vital elements of the topic.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Treating modernist writers such as Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Thomson, and Palestinian poet Yousif Qasmiyeh, Stonebridge (humanities and human rights, Univ. of Birmingham, UK) offers a nuanced and complex interdisciplinary treatment of the problems of citizenship, statelessness, and mass displacement--which she calls "the twentieth-century's continuing atrocity." Working from positions articulated by Hannah Arendt, Stonebridge observes that to be stateless is to be "rightless"; that is, human rights are guaranteed by sovereign nations, so to be outside the state is to be without enforceable rights. Modernist literature often validated exile and a withdrawal from the world into aesthetics, but, as Stonebridge writes in the introduction, "the exiled writer as a melancholy observer of modern life ... had, in reality, long gone." The writers Stonebridge treats all grapple with the philosophical and practical consequences of statelessness, particularly as they became apparent in WW II and after. Informed by religious, moral, and legal philosophy, the author's examinations of the situations of Europe's Jews and of the Palestinians point to the way governments have failed in the construction of international policy. Scrupulously researched and documented, this invaluable and informative volume is illustrated with relevant photographs and quotations.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that dedicated childhood reading leads to lifelong learning. But do beloved texts hold up when revisited in adulthood? In this fascinating study, Waller (Univ. of Roehampton, UK) examines memory, emotional attachment (both positive and negative) to books, and lifelong learning through the lens of rereading favorite childhood books in adulthood. How do the stories one clings to as a child affect one's identity as an adult? Does memory match the reality? Does the emotional attachment remain fixed? Waller tackles these questions in five chapters. The first two, "The Reading Scene" and "The Life Space," are devoted to, respectively, memory and where/how one reads in childhood. In chapter 3, "Affective Traces," the author considers the emotional nature of reading and the bonding (or disaffection) that may result; in the fourth chapter ("Rereading") she examines purpose (pleasure/didacticism/academic) and audience (oneself? children/students?). And in the final chapter, "Transforming, Misremembering, Forgetting," she analyzes not only what one forgets of these books, but why it is forgotten. A must-read for any bibliophile or educator, this is a delightful examination of the ramifications of rereading.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

In this fine book Martin adds to the story of American lexicography with a well-researched cultural history of 19th-century dictionaries centered around Noah Webster and his legacy. Webster is center stage for the first half of the book, fulminating against Samuel Johnson, proposing a national language and innovative spellings, and espousing Bible-based theories of the history of language along with fanciful etymologies. He was reined in somewhat by his son-in-law, Yale professor Chauncey Goodrich, and his scholarly excesses were grudgingly tempered through the efforts of Goodrich and Joseph Worcester, who edited abridgments of both Johnson's and Webster's dictionaries. The second half of the book introduces the Merriam brothers, George and Charles, who bought the rights to the dictionary. With the help of Goodrich and later Noah Porter, the Merriams eventually triumphed over Worcester, who had published his own Comprehensive Pronouncing and Explanatory English Dictionary in 1830 and became a bitter rival of Webster (and later of the Merriams). Martin's writing is brisk, and his narrative is detailed and insightful; the volume includes a series of appendixes and periodic illustrations, many of which are from the Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at Indiana State University.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Literary criticism and cognitive psychology--"two households, both alike in dignity," to borrow from Romeo and Juliet--converge in Holyoak's master class on how and why to study the construction and comprehension of poetry's metaphors, analogies, and emotional effects. In this tight inquiry, Holyoak (psychology, UCLA) presents a series of exquisitely clarifying demonstrations of how a person "educated by poetry" might interpret a poem. Experts in the two domains could object to the reduction and conflation that necessarily occurs in so brief a study, but nonspecialists will find the manageable length and relative lack of jargon refreshing. Descriptions of brain networks used in constructing and comprehending poetry are paired with reflections on individual poems drawn from British, American, Chinese, and French literature. Students in poetry and creative writing courses will find that Holyoak's questions, illuminations, and provisional explanations offer fruitful metaphors for the construction of reflective practices. Students in cognitive psychology courses will find, particularly in the notes and bibliography, ideas aplenty for directions in which to continue research in creative processes or language processing. Throughout one finds spots to stop and linger over a word, an insight, a diagram.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; general readers.