Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2021 -

Why did so many families in early modern France produce multiple writers, editors, and translators, thereby exercising inordinate influence over what was published at the time? Was this phenomenon particularly French? How did these literary families affect the scholarship and learning of future generations? Focusing on late-15th- to mid-17th-century France, Kenny (Univ. of Oxford, UK) deals in hard numbers and nuanced analysis. He identifies 200 families with more than one "literary producer," showing how sons, daughters, siblings, cousins, and grandchildren made a name for themselves in areas as diverse as fiction, philosophy, poetry, history, and engineering. He explores prevailing social expectations, inheritance customs, and private ambitions, explaining how some writers collaborated with relatives on original creations, whereas others finished admired but incomplete treatises, parodied despised works, or corrected error-filled manuscripts that damaged family reputations. After highlighting the complex links between hierarchy, heredity, and authorship, Kenny delves into two case studies: the family of the period's most important poet, Clement Marot, and the extraordinarily prolific but largely forgotten Brouart-Vatable-Beroald-Verville family. Based on meticulous research, this informative book is the first extensive study of how family, social hierarchy, and literary production intersected in the early modern era.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Celebrated as a popular 19th-century author and master of the modern short story, Maupassant (1850-93) has endured more than a century of prudish critics, condescending biographers, unscrupulous editors, and inaccurate translators. Lloyd's goal in this succinct volume, one of the best in Reaktion's "Critical Lives" series, is to set the record straight. In some 200 pages, Lloyd (emer., Durham Univ., UK) highlights Maupassant's cynicism, debauchery, and lust for life, and explains the sociopolitical context that allowed him to thrive as a journalist and author before succumbing to madness and early death. Favoring material evidence over speculation and close analysis over generalization, Lloyd delves into selected letters, newspaper articles, and novels and short stories to highlight the impressive range of a writer too often reduced to a handful of safe classics, e.g., "Boule de Suif" (1880), Bel-Ami (1865), and Pierre et Jean (1888). Lloyd skillfully bridges the gap between the 19th and 21st centuries, offering fresh interpretations of incidents in Maupassant's life and lamenting that his work has been "relentlessly pillaged" by the film and television industries. This is an engrossing biography, all the more important since it is, shockingly, the only biography of Maupassant currently available in English.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Writing in the precise, evocative language of a masterful chronicler, Stieber (Catholic Univ. of America) examines Haiti's volatile post-independence struggles in governing. It is a revolutionary tale of the battle between autocratic or republican rule waged in the press and literary circles of the period. Covering the entire 19th century and the first half of the 20th, Stieber provides an in-depth analysis of the personalities of those seeking power and the historical external and internal events that shaped the fate of a nation. She provides insightful details about the fluctuating, and constantly changing, military and public attitudes toward self-governing. Haiti--as empire and as republic, including its rise from an enslaved colonial state through the ruptures of post-colonial civil wars--has been examined in depth by scholars. What makes this study particularly significant, and singular, is Stieber's exhaustive examination of primary source material--newspapers, pamphlets, official government documents, personal correspondence, and literary texts. Through her critical analyses of writing as a tool to shape a nation, Stieber unveils the multilayered meanings of liberte that defined Haiti from its declaration of independence in 1804 to the mid-20th century. This compelling and accessible study would provide fertile ground for a similar examination of Haiti from where Stieber ends in 1954 to the present day.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.