Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

In Counterpoints of Modernity, eminent Irish literature scholar David Lloyd (Univ. of California, Riverside) examines eight poets for the ways in which they examine and problematize various modernist moments in Irish history and poetry. These writers, Lloyd contends, challenge formal linguistic practices and conventional modes such as the traditional Irish lyric. They are continually aware of the conditions of loss and discontinuity, the results of a history of colonialism. Although Lloyd is tracing a line of development among these poets, it is a "broken line," where influence is not part of individual development but a retrospective consideration for the critic. The earliest poets discussed are James Clarence Mangan and William Butler Yeats, each of whom sought alternative creative paths in relation to modernity. Susan Howe's work offers a response to modernity by considering possibilities of the past. The works of Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Catherine Walsh challenge notions of the "well-made poem." And the works of Maurice Scully and Trevor Joyce push the boundaries of poetic innovation and experimentation to the limit. Lloyd's treatment of often overlooked poets and their influence is profound. Counterpoints of Modernity is a major contribution to scholarship of Irish poetry.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division through faculty.

Machan (Univ. of Notre Dame) provides a historiography of English. In the first chapter (of six), "Writing the History of English," Machan explains the project he has in mind: identifying and critiquing the paradigms that linguistic historians use. Chapters 2 through 5 explicate the paradigms themselves. In chapter 2, "Theocratic Linguistics," he takes biblical Babel as his starting point and examines various departures from supposed perfect communication. In the next three chapters he considers, respectively, narratives grounded in the types of language used as historical evidence, how languages are organized into families and periods, and the nature of data and the way in which reconstructed structural accounts "become their own proof" (p. 161). In the final chapter, "When Speakers Make the Difference," Machan elaborates the frameworks he sees running through his historiography: emergent grammar, narratology, and social semiotics. Here he identifies the titular Jamestown as a moment that could be the outset of a new periodization. Machan's exposition is erudite and clear, with an impressive depth of sources and several in-depth case studies and thought experiments. English Begins at Jamestown will be an excellent supplement to histories of English, and it is a must-read for historians of English.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Contemporary genre fiction--particularly crime, romance, and fantasy--is popular and pervasive, "a source of enjoyment" (to quote the publisher's website) all the more compelling because of its relationships to transmedia and culture and its influence on the production and distribution of texts. In this book, the authors (all based in Australia) explore the production and circulation of genre fiction. They introduce the concept of "genre worlds" to describe genre fiction's interdependence on "industrial, social, and textual practices," such as its relationship to self-publishing, its connection to fan culture, and its particular craft techniques, including the use of high-concept genre tropes and the technique of world building. Genre Worlds investigates many facets of genre worlds, including the impact of transnational and transmedia cultural properties, which allow readers to engage with a story world without interacting with a published text; the impact of fan culture, conventions, and genre conferences on the production and promotion of texts; and hierarchies within genre worlds. In the process, the authors highlight ways of reading, writing, and critiquing genre texts. Genre Worlds is a fast-paced, engaging, and insightful examination of genre fiction and its wide-ranging influences.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and practitioners.

This latest book by Drucker (bibliographical studies, UCLA) is not primarily a new history of the alphabet, although it provides this history, but a historiographical work that traces the ways beliefs in Western thought shaped the discourse around the alphabet's origins. The author asks who knew what when and how people conceptualized the evidence available to them, from the earliest classical and biblical accounts to contemporary archaeological, epigraphical, and paleographical syntheses. This is a scholarly work of intellectual history and does not present a direct path to ever-increasing knowledge. Seminal works and scholars are identified, but so too are works now largely forgotten as the dominant approaches of their centuries were superseded. The organization is roughly chronological. Illustrations reproduce the scripts or fragments available in each period. The final chapter, on the politicization of the alphabet, brings readers to the present. The author explores racial and cultural bias in alphabet studies and points out that new discoveries are still being made and frameworks will shift, extending the history of the alphabet. Complementing and updating Drucker's Alphabetic Labyrinth (CH, Jul'95, 32-6020), the volume includes an extensive bibliography of primary sources and key reference materials.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Zunshine (Univ. of Kentucky) tackles the topic of embedments in literature in an engaging and lighthearted way, taking an inception-esque complex topic, breaking it down into component parts, and then applying it to ample examples from across the broad spectrum of the written word. Embedment, as Zunshine explains, is a metaphorical term for what cognitive psychologists refer to as "mental states," or "capacity to see ... behavior as caused by mental states, such as thoughts, desires, feelings, and intentions" (p. 2). Zunshine demonstrates and explains this close-reading practice, which derives information about the perceived mental states of characters through levels of embedments. She practices this complex but rewarding exercise with a varied and multitudinous selection of sample passages from classical and popular literature. The third chapter in particular dives deep into the cognitive science behind embedments, and other chapters focus on specific contexts for reading embedments, including social status, cultural history, and children's literature. The prolific use of examples provides ample opportunities for readers to practice this method with support from the author, making this book particularly well suited to undergraduate students in literature classes focused on the close-reading of texts.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Medievalist Hana Videen (independent scholar) first began tweeting about Old English in 2013, https://twitter.com/oewordhord, which eventually led to blogging on her website https://oldenglishwordhord.com. Her passion for early English language and literature led to this book. It earned accolades from both Neil Gaiman and David Crystal, so readers will expect they are about to unlock a special treasure. Wordhord will not disappoint them. Written in a conversational style that playfully uncovers the meaning of words and their cultural contexts, Videen's book will appeal to all lovers of language and at the same time serve as an excellent companion to students of Old English literature or language. After a brief introduction to English's earliest contexts, Videen unlocks the treasure chest of ancient English to explore words grouped according to topics--e.g., "Eating and Drinking," "Learning and Working," "Caring for Body and Mind," to name a few--providing phonemic and nonphonemic pronunciation guides for each word in the process. The result is an accessible, erudite study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In the first essay in this collection, "Why Italian?," Lahiri (Princeton Univ.) contemplates her decision to speak and write in Italian in the midst of a successful career writing in English. "The Italian language did not simply change my life," she writes; "it gave me a second life" (p. 15). Translating Myself and Others documents distinct junctures in Lahiri's second life. The ten essays, several of them translated from the Italian (by Molly O'Brien, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, Domenico Starnone, and Lahiri herself) assay the multivalent processes of translation and self-translation. For instance, in "An Ode to the Mighty Optative," Lahiri compares translations of Aristotle's Poetics, revealing how this work "clarified and complicated" her understanding of Aristotle's ideas. She argues that this is always the case "when we step outside of any given language and venture into another" (p. 61). Though best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri extols the creative and sociocultural outcomes of translation, especially for writers: "The writer who translates will acquire fresh knowledge that springs from less-familiar sources.... For for to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself" (p. 59). Those interested in literary translation will value Lahiri's personal, erudite exploration of her life as a writer-translator.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Focusing on pleasure in the context of academic writing, Sword (Univ. of Auckland, NZ) sets out "to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion" (p. 3). Based on Sword's study of 590 handwritten narratives gathered from a diverse set of academics over a two-year period, the book identifies five characteristics of pleasurable writing--it should be socially balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively challenging, and emotionally uplifting--for which she uses the acronym SPACE. Sword divides the book into two parts, "The SPACE of Writing" and "The SPACE of Pleasure," each comprising five chapters devoted to the above characteristics. In addition to discussing the results of her research, Sword shows readers how to employ SPACE in their own writing through 18 "pleasure prompts," and in each section she includes multimodal callouts that represent the product of her own pleasurable collaboration with visual artist Selina Tusitala Marsh. This book will be valuable for any writers--not only academics--who wish to experience more pleasure in their writing. Sword's engaging and personable writing style makes the book a pleasure to read.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.