Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities

In this wonderful and engaging study, DiCuirci (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) examines the invention of Colonial literatures in the 19th-century US. Specifically, she shows how networks of antiquarian scholars, libraries, historical societies, and publishers recovered and reprinted--and in the process actively refashioned--most of what are today considered to be the foundational texts of 17th-century North American colonialism. "Collecting and reprinting Colonial books was both restorative and frequently disruptive," DiCuirci argues in the introduction, because "the process of historical reprinting did not reveal a shared origin story. Instead, historical reprints testified to the inveterate regional, racial, doctrinal, and political fault lines in the American historical landscape." Colonial Revivals is organized geographically, looking first at antiquarian projects involving archives and then, in subsequent chapters, at texts in New England, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Spain. DiCuirci's research was careful, and she details how scholarly reprinting projects served a host of competing political ends, which were buttressed by contradictory ideological ideals and fantasies. Book historians, librarians and archivists, and scholars of Colonial and 19th-century American literature and culture will find much to admire here.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

While ushering in a period of unfettered optimism, Utopian dreams, and joyous mirth, the Russian Revolution of 1917 also introduced the devastation of civil war, forced collectivization, famine, and, later, Stalinist repression. Reflecting these contradictions, Soviet visual artists of the 1920s and 1930s manipulated the destructive and constructive potential of humor to aid the regime in eradicating capitalistic opportunism, egotism, and greed in support of a new socialist future and, later, to combat Stalinist repression. Gerin (art history, Univ. du Quebec a Montreal) argues for the centrality of satire and humor to early Soviet policies and artistic aims. She analyzes state minister Anatoly Lunacharsky's theoretical work on humor and his role in directing Soviet propaganda, education, and the arts; explores Soviet print culture (including illustrated satirical journals) in the circus, theater, and cinema; identifies the strategies of Soviet satirists in the visual arts; and examines the Soviet debate about satire in relationship to the emerging doctrine of socialist realism in art. In addition to richly informative notes, a 15-page bibliography, and a thorough index, this book includes handsome illustrations and a translation of one of Lunacharsky's most important theoretical texts, "On Laughter" (1931).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

In Invisible Colors, Decamous (Kyushu Univ., Japan) offers an ambitious and perhaps exhaustive survey of the many ways the various arts have responded to the arrival of nuclear fission and fusion, beginning with the Curies and extending through Fukushima. The majority of examples Decamous provides are in literature and visual art, although she does devote one chapter to music. More important than the discussion of the various arts, however, is the book's revelation of the clear discomfort with nuclear technology that is expressed in the arts, regardless of medium. Invisible Colors shows that though humans may have to live with the reality of nukes, whether as a source of power or as weapons, dread is always present. Art is a powerful way of expressing this dread. A well-researched, scholarly contribution to the literature of the postatomic world, this book will become the go-to resource for scholars exploring political activism in the arts as they pertain to the nuclear question.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

This exemplary collection brings together philosophers, art historians, and literary scholars to shed light on the vast range of work by Michael Fried, and the relevance of Fried's work to philosophy. Fried's achievements as poet, critic, and art historian are brilliantly detailed as his work is placed in dialogue with philosophers from the German-language tradition (Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger), the French tradition (Descartes, Diderot, Ranciere, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes), and more recent figures such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and Morris Weitz. Fried himself offers an essay on Kierkegaard's connections to the anti-theatrical tradition. The 15 essays shed light on Fried's poetry and pathbreaking work on modernism, the ontology of art, and photography. Each essay is meticulously researched and helps one more deeply understand the role and meaning of responsiveness, absorption, and theatricality--prominent themes in Fried's work. As Abbott writes in an introductory essay, each of the contributions addresses "the nature of the relationship between modernist practice and modern philosophy, and the extent to which artistic discoveries (or failures) are also philosophical discoveries (or failures)." This exciting volume opens an authentic, valuable dialogue between art and philosophy.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

The ABC of It originated as a well-received 2013-14 exhibit at the New York Public Library. The staff of the University of Minnesota's Kerlan Collection of Children's Literature were so impressed with the exhibit that they sought and received permission to replicate it--supplementing it with materials from their collection--as a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Kerlan Collection. Marcus, curator of the NYPL exhibit and an expert on children's books and illustrations, curated the UMN exhibit and prepared this catalogue, working from the plans of his original exhibit and using materials from UMN. The catalogue is not a history of children's literature but rather a review of how children's books reflect the changing adult view of children. Set out in three thematic sections--"Visions of Childhood," "Off the Shelf: Giving and Getting Books," and "The Art of the Picture Book"--the exhibit and this catalogue touch on many wide-ranging topics. Lavishly illustrated in color, the catalogue preserves the content off an important exhibit and at the same time features an important collection.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Adaptation studies has officially entered a mature phase of thorough self-reflection. The present excellent resource and The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. by Thomas Leitch (2017), both offer smart, authoritative, and (most important) accessible essays on most aspects of adaptation, textual transformation, and/or remediation. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation does the great service of increasing the remit of adaptation-related scholarship while focusing on specific disciplinary questions and debates, in particular assumptions of medium specificity. Presented in five sections--"Mapping the Field," "Historiography," "Identity," "Reception," "Technology"--the 34 essays treat everything from early video game to film adaptations to radio drama to animated GIFs. Though the contributions inevitably skew to studies of film and literature, the book is not dominated by hyper specific case studies nor by the corpus of films that has traditionally dominated the field (the familiar Hollywood or BBC takes on Austen, Shakespeare, or American crime writers--though all are still in evidence). This reviewer found the essays on radio (Bradley Stephens, Suzanne Speidel, Richard Hand) particularly illuminating insofar as they make one rethink the textual reliance on visual analysis that typically attends to film and television adaptations of literature.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals, including students in technical programs.

North (English, UCLA) offers the results of his extensive research on the question that serves as the title of this book. Writing in an almost conversational style, the author reveals that there is much to be learned about how "present" time was regarded in ancient and medieval times--e.g., before and after tended to be calibrated to significant events)--and how it came to be regarded in the modern and contemporary period, i.e., after the calendrical method took over in the 17th century. For millennia humans muddled through social commerce without universal ways of keeping track of past, present, and future. Looking at thinkers such as William James and Augustine, Polybius and Immanuel Kant, and Henri Bergson and Paul Ricoeur, North mines an immense literature to get at the heart of his subject. Since the author draws from history, literature, philosophy, art, psychology, and more, the book is difficult to categorize. But North is adept at writing with clarity and keeping the many strands of the story organized, so the book is captivating. Weaving together many stories, this fascinating, well-argued book is a praiseworthy meditation on how previous generations have accounted for the familiar, and yet elusive, concept of present time.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.