Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

What did Arthur Miller witness regarding 20th-century life in the US? According to Lahr (distinguished author, biographer, and longtime drama editor at The New Yorker), Miller witnessed the advent of various disquieting phenomena: tribalism, cutthroat competition, political paranoia, a me-first attitude, and pervasive estrangement among people and within families. Lahr observes that Miller perceived firsthand the passing out of favor of a critically acclaimed playwright--himself--as new writers took center stage, and he perceived that he was becoming increasingly more invisible to American audiences. Nonetheless, Miller chose not to rest on his well-deserved laurels. He remained an engaged public intellectual and participated in various theatrical activities. For example, he served as the president of PEN International, vigorously protested the Vietnam War, campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, traveled to Sweden and China to direct productions of Death of a Salesman, and continued to create works for the stage until his death in 2005 at the age of 90. In this instructive, well-wrought interpretative biography, Lahr illuminates the enduring contributions Miller made to cultural affairs, at home and abroad. This insightful, accessible presentation will captivate Miller scholars and novices alike.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Armitage (Univ. of Leeds, UK) is poet laureate of the UK, and in this volume he has transmuted into print an engaging series of lectures he gave when he was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. The book makes poetry seem both accessible to modern readers--who likely imagine the words to be too dense to be understood for pleasure--and at the same time profound. The focus is on how poetry binds people together and how it is a form of art that anyone can indulge in. Interspersed with personal anecdotes that place real living poets in the world rather than just in school textbooks, the book shows an avid reader of poetry trying to get his listeners or readers to enjoy poetry with him through discussions of some of his personal favorites, which are broken down in ways that casual readers can enjoy. The language is lively and the humor droll, so the book reads more like an interesting conversation than a scholarly text.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

With his latest monograph, Smith (Lafayette College) captures the attention of his audience on the very first page with a close reading of the preface to the folio that is addressed "To the Great Variety of Readers," and he never lets that audience go. This book makes a seismic contribution--nay, offers a paradigm shift--to Shakespeare studies. Smith focuses on two interrelated arenas: first, he provides a close New Historicist reading of Shakespeare's texts; second, he looks at how Shakespeare has been received in the intervening centuries. The tie that binds these two together is the legacy of whiteness: the assumption that the reader/audience member is white has not only distorted how we receive Shakespeare but has denied us additional riches of the text. Smith takes a deep dive into the Venice plays, as expected, and also into Hamlet. Black Shakespeare is an extraordinarily clarifying work and should be taken up not just by scholars of Shakespeare but by theater practitioners as well. In The Souls of Black Folk W .E. B. Du Bois famously stated, "I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not." Smith demonstrates resoundingly why. An important resource for all who engage with Shakespeare.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

McGann (emer., Univ. of Virginia; visiting research professor, Univ. of California, Berkeley) applies a scrupulous philological eye to the troubled texts of the colonial US and restores, in compelling detail, the world views from which they emerged. Reconstructing the often-neglected specifics of composition and implementation of a range of canonical early works, what he calls "what they set out to do in saying what they say" (p. 4), McGann revives the immediacy and urgency of these works, making visible both their ambition and their precarity: the "unsettledness" within which they were produced and that they struggle to shape and to control. Key to McGann's approach is the recovery of Indigenous beliefs and treaty practices in relation to which the early settlers attempted, and often failed, to assert their realities. What is ultimately at stake for McGann is not merely the contested and fragmented history of early eras but also the very nature of the humanistic endeavor by which contemporary people struggle to comprehend them. Historically capacious yet precise, analytically fluid, and beautifully written, this book models and inspires humanistic scholarship committed to precision, detail, and to truth itself, however fleeting or futile the effort may seem.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this rich volume literary scholar Chakravarty (Univ. of Toronto) confronts the enduring myth that "there was officially no slavery in early modern England's service society" (p. 49). Using a wide range of literary and other sources, she demonstrates that knowledge of slavery could be found everywhere: in schoolrooms where the Roman plays of Terrance were staples of Latin instruction and scholars learned about Roman slavery from them to contemporaneous plays in which audiences saw depictions of captivity, slavery, and ransom. Some processions included returning English men and women who had been freed from captivity and slavery in North Africa, and the universal assumption that the master-servant relationship had reciprocal obligations ran through English society from the lowly to the monarchs. Chakravarty also includes revealing vignettes, such as the fact that the slaver John Hawkins, when ennobled, received a coat of arms prominently featuring a bound sub-Saharan African. All these experiences helped shape and reinforce the Atlantic slave trade and the slavery practiced in the transatlantic English colonies.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

The conversation surrounding Ralph Ellison (1914-94) has been going on for more than 70 years. Bland (Rutgers Univ., Newark) now gives the reader the voices of the Ellison scholars of the day--H. William Rice, Jerry Gafio, Arnold Rampersad, Barbara Foley, and Danielle Allen in addition to Frantz Fanon, James Smethurst, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Bland enters the conversation in the spaces left unfilled by others--the proverbial invisible space. Bland explores Ellison's movement away from a vision that neatly aligned race with class, showing Ellison's attraction to literary modernism, easily extended to thoughts about music. Bland purports that in the decades following the publication of The Invisible Man (1952) Ellison's focus on the form of the novel presupposes a direct and meaningful engagement with democracy over racial solidarity. Bland asserts that Ellison thought the true tension was among democracy, the nation, the novelist, and the legacy of 19th-century American literature. He was interested in articulating race in ways that identified its presence in the origin of the nation's psyche. Finally, Bland considers episodes central to Ellison's unpublished novel: the novel's form itself reflects and calls into question that narrative's unsettled, artificial form. To read Bland is to see Ellison in a new light 71 years later.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

In this excellent book, Greiman (Wake Forest Univ.) argues that Melville practiced democracy as a political concept and as an aesthetic ritual, positing democracy not as a stable, consistent entity but as a protean concept. The book's six chapters are organized in sections that identify democracy with three of Melville's own figurations of democracy. In section 1, Greiman examines the idea that democracy is green--in Typee this means hungering for the fruits of the green Earth, and in Pierre it entails color theory. In section 2, he looks at Omoo and Moby-Dick through the lens of circularity, as a round structure that is ideally communal but sometimes paradoxical in its theories, i.e., the people both supply and utilize power. In section 3, Greiman considers Clarel, The Piazza Tales, and Battle-Pieces as visions of a democracy without foundation, as groundless. Including a cogent, wide-ranging introduction and a useful overview of other approaches to Melville and democracy, this is a fascinating, valuable contribution to Melville studies.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Hines's collection of interrelated essays describes the emergence of a lively, creative, alternative model of class and race conscious education featuring Black literary figures and social critics who thrived in mid-20th-century community-based cooperatives. Hines (associate director, Aydelotte Foundation, Swarthmore College) begins by clearly identifying his betes noires: the Vanderbilt-based Nashville Agrarians. In his reading, Agrarians successfully introduced backward-looking and racially exclusionary ideology into American letters and saw their efforts rewarded as the New Criticism literary movement came to dominate American colleges in the postwar period. Endorsed by government education authorities during the Cold War, New Critics exercised considerable influence both inside and outside the academy and an alternative vision of class- and race-conscious literature espoused by Black intellectuals and writers was targeted as pro-Communist and driven underground as a serious threat to the official line. Hines's well-documented book reveals how often-bitter internal divisions emerged among factions of committed Black writers and intellectuals. Despite internal and external challenges, the movement flourished. Aimed primarily at scholars of education and those interested in literary movements, this book is clearly argued, despite occasional lapses into jargon, and will prove useful for those exploring the flowering of Black creativity in the mid-20th century.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Following on Emma Smith's The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio (CH, Jul'16, 53-4719), among other works, this fascinating study celebrates the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio and reflects contemporary interest in the history of the book (the First Folio in particular). Laoutris (Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK) opens with a listing of dramatis personae (key characters in the creation of the First Folio), and he divides the 20 chapters into five sections, which he renders as "acts." "Act One--1619" comprises chapters on the so-called false folio; "Act Two--1621," on negotiating the First Folio; "Act Three--1622," on printing the First Folio; "Act Four--1623," on finishing the First Folio; and "Act Five, William Shakespeare's Will in His Book." An epilogue, "1623 and Beyond," looks at the First Folio as the "world's book." The text is followed by tables on plays included in the First Folio and "the most recent known rights holders with dates of entry in the Stationers' Register." The notes are extensive and helpful, the bibliography is enumerative, and the index is detailed. This well-produced volume is replete with color images.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this groundbreaking study, Looser (Arizona State Univ.) provides a double biography of sisters Jane Porter (1776-1850) and Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832), important authors whose place in literary history has been neglected. Whereas Walter Scott has been traditionally credited with inventing historical fiction, Looser demonstrates how the innovative Porter sisters first developed the genre and how their careers helped pave the way for later female authors. Drawing on the sisters' unpublished letters, Looser constructs a compelling narrative of the Porters' personal and professional struggles and triumphs. She highlights the difficult material realities for female authors and describes how these sisters, famous in their day, wrote for economic survival and learned to navigate the literary marketplace. Providing well-selected details and pertinent historical and cultural context, this book often reads like a gripping novel itself. This resemblance is surely no coincidence. Looser contends (in the prologue) that the Porters' "letters proved a training ground ... for practicing the craft of novel-writing," and she convincingly argues for the importance of the sisters' correspondence in providing a detailed, realistic, and captivating depiction of Romantic-era Britain. This significant study will be of great interest to those interested not only in the Porter sisters but also in Romantic-era literary history.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty

The three Bronte sisters--Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48), Anne (1820-49)--between them wrote a total of seven novels. Whether the siblings discussed the effects of the industrial revolution one cannot know, but their fiction reveals a profound interest in the social changes it brought on. Their books ask how women can achieve agency. The answer is brought to the fore in complex novels that show protagonists who saw beyond love and marriage to the enriching possibilities of education and work. By 1855 the sisters were all dead, but their writings lived on and helped bring about social change. In 1904 Virginia Woolf visited the Bronte home on the moors: their knicknacks did not speak to her, but the novels still did. Over time scholarship has enriched understanding of the dark truths of Victorian change. This book is easy to read and well researched, and it includes useful chapter notes in addition to the customary scholarly apparatus.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Combining broad scope with intricate detailing, this last volume in Scharnhorst's three-volume biography of Mark Twain is special. The downward trajectory of Twain's later life--deaths, bankruptcy, physical decay, pessimism--would seem to be too depressing for enjoyable reading, but Scharnhorst never lets that mood prevail. He expands on the first two volumes (CH, Aug'18, 55-4376; CH, Jan'20, 57-1566) by highlighting the joy, pathos, tragedy, and ultimate success of Twain's literary career. Citations from Twain's papers give a unique stamp to a breadth of events: dinners, lectures, trips, financial deals, other authors, later writings, public responses to almost everything. Scharnhorst's account of Twain's irrepressible need to create stories expressing hope, ethical integrity, and the national spirit--even when he grapples with his own darkness--energizes the examination. Enriched with details from newspapers, public statements, and homage of others, the third volume is a page turner. Scharnhorst's illuminating responses to Twain's progress--often in the form of cascades of telling phrases from book reviews (positive and negative)--make the biography a window into national and international culture. Also notable is the inclusion of Twain's own words--Scharnhorst quotes epithets that previous biographers tiptoed around--which puts Twain's crassness, vulgarity, and humanity on display. This detailed scholarly study, with its extraordinary documentation, caps Scharnhorst's effort. This biography is unlikely to be superseded for decades.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

This volume makes a major contribution to Chicanx studies and therefore to American studies. Aranda (Rice Univ.) is on the board of the scholarly group Recovering the US Hispanic Heritage, and this book is a profound act of recovery. The author addresses the dynamics of an emerging literary tradition in the US-Mexico borderlands with theoretical sophistication and a close reading of key texts. He is especially perceptive about the great folklorist Jovita Gonzalez (1904-83). Gender, coloniality, nationalism and transnationalism, hybrid identity and barrio life, pochismo: these are major topics in understanding the culture that emerged after the traumatic Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). Aranda has much to say about all these matters. He gives abundant space to writing in California as well as in Texas. The scholarship is deep, although it is surprising that Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004), the great theorist of Mexican American hybridity, is missing from the text and from the ample bibliography. Some attention to Ernesto Galarza's classic Barrio Boy (1973) would have been useful. These omissions notwithstanding, this book will nurture further studies.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This book is divided into two parts, each comprising five chapters preceded by a prologue. The first part examines the "ordinary" women of Chaucer's time, women who served as models and sources for Alison, the Wife of Bath. In a masterful close reading of literary and historical sources, Turner (Univ. of Oxford, UK) shows that Chaucer based Alison on four key elements of women's lives--work, marriage, storytelling, and travel--and she discusses what each of these elements would have meant to Chaucer's late-medieval audience. The second half of the book is a true revelation: here Turner explores the afterlives of Alison (1400-2021), showing how authors have embraced the character as a source of inspiration for their own works. A good number of these later texts are grounded in misogynistic beliefs and actions, and Turner is deft in exploring why that is and what that means. Scholars interested in scribal commentary--John Gay, Shakespeare, Dryden, Voltaire, Joyce, Atwood, Pasolini, Bergvall, Agbabi, Breeze, Zadie Smith--will find much to consider in these chapters. This is an invaluable study not only for those who research and teach Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales but also for those who are engaged with women and gender studies from the Middle Ages to the present day.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This fascinating book explores the connection between two American writers, novelist Herman Melville (1819-91) and Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), the novelist's biographer. In brief, lively, and engaging chapters, Sachs (history and American studies, Cornell) alternates back and forth between the two men, detailing many correspondences in their lives and work despite the years that separated them. For example, both were troubled by events in their eras: Melville by the division leading up to and including the Civil War, Mumford by the cultural aftershocks in the years following WW I. The central idea that fuses their stories is the relationship between modernity and trauma, and a significant subtext is the historiography of canon formation. What were the conditions that led to the Melville revival? Why have scholars like Mumford (and like Sachs) been drawn to Melville? Sachs provides sensitive analysis of text and context, offers a wealth of resources in his bibliography, and models how historians and critics can pose questions that continue to matter. Any reader interested in either writer would profit from this book, but students in undergraduate programs in history and literature have the most to gain.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In the wake of his History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (CH, Oct'16, 54-0498) and Acrobatic Modernism from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory (CH, May'21, 58-2458), the present volume confirms Rasula's position as the US's most wide-ranging and culturally astute historian of modernism. Rather than offer yet another reading of Eliot's poem, Rasula situates The Waste Land in its cultural context, emphasizing Eliot's debt to Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk, and highlighting the cinematic and paratactic qualities that energized the poem's collage structure, rendering it so strange to its initial audience. Eliot's canny careerism is evident in his establishing an early reputation as a book reviewer and literary critic (Eliot's The Sacred Wood, a collection of essays, appeared two years before The Waste Land). Extensive discussions of Wagner, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Eliot's relationships with his wife Vivian and with Emily Hale, as well as generous selections of the poem's early reviews, both positive and negative, help one see the poem as it was before its canonization and the mass of critical commentary it has accreted since 1922, which Rasula describes as "unabashedly confrontational, renegade, noncompliant, and full of zest" (p. 243).Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers

In this new biography of H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Hollenberg (emer., Univ. of Connecticut) deftly weaves together historical fact and the poet's literary output to tell the story of a woman who is now a major figure of modernism. This was not always the case. Interest in H. D.'s work waned in the post-WW II era until a new generation of scholars, informed by feminist theory, sought to revivify the study of figures such as H. D. and restore them to their proper place. Consequently, her work has increasingly been viewed as a cornerstone of the influential imagist movement in early-20th-century poetry. Along the way, Hollenberg touches on H. D.'s fascination with other topics, including psychoanalysis, spiritualism, and the then-new medium of film. For contemporary readers, H. D.'s lived experience and literary explorations of such topics as bisexuality and gender fluidity resonate particularly well. Hollenberg's biography is clearly the product of a lifetime's study of the poet. It will appeal to both new readers of H. D. and longtime students of her work. The writing throughout is lucid and engaging.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Eisler's purpose in writing this book is to demonstrate how the evolving relationship between American society and the armed forces has shaped war literature since WW I. A scholar of culture and literary studies and formerly on active duty with the US Army, Eisler braids print culture, political science, military history, and psychology into his exploration of recent war fiction in a way that is broad yet simultaneously intimate. He asks an overarching question: Who is entitled to describe the experiences of the active-duty service member and the veteran? In telling the story of war, do civilians have the same moral authority as soldiers? How do war stories told from different authorial positions differ? These questions are of paramount importance in the burgeoning field of veteran studies, and this text will undoubtedly cast a long shadow there and in the field of cultural history and memory. This brilliant, deeply interdisciplinary study is Eisler's first book, but with it he joins the ranks of Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell. A stunning achievement.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

In this long-awaited collection of Hurston's essays, editors Genevieve West (Texas Women's Univ.) and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard) do not shy away from the more controversial aspects of Hurston's career. These include her celebration of segregationist Senator Spessard Holland ("devoted to the best in literature," p. 229), her endorsement of Robert Taft's "sincerity and truthfulness" (p. 295) in the 1952 presidential election, and, cogently, her sense that Russia was not "the sworn champion" (p. 272) of dark-skinned peoples. These are counterbalanced by Hurston's advocacy of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman accused of murdering a white doctor who had abused her, whom Hurston saw as more a "victim" than a "cold, ruthless killer" (p. 383). Notable is Hurston's adamant self-defense against the caustic review by Harlem Renaissance intellectual Alain Locke of Hurston's pivotal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston castigated Locke for patronizing her book on "folk lore." Another triumph is a humorous essay on noses, which are "necessary" and to which one should "be kind" (p. 185). West and Gates give readers a full sense of Hurston's rhetorical range and moral conviction. This book should be a staple of American literature courses.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.