University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Literature and Literary Criticism

University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Literature and Literary Criticism http://www.press.uchicago.edu/rss/newlit.xml The latest new books in Literature and Literary Criticism en-us erg@press.uchicago.edu Shakespeare Only http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5186399 Jeffrey Knapp <br><br><DIV><P></P><DIV>Three decades of controversy in Shakespeare studies can be summed up in a single question: Was Shakespeare one of a kind? On one side of the debate are the Shakespeare lovers, the bardolatrists, who insist on Shakespeare’s timeless preeminence as an author. On the other side are the theater historians who view modern claims of Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a distortion of his real professional life.  For these scholars, the bardolatrous emphasis on “Shakespeare only” blinds us to the inescapably social nature of Renaissance drama.  </DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV>Jeffrey Knapp shows how these seemingly antithetical perspectives on Shakespeare can and should be combined. In Shakespeare Only, Knapp draws on an extraordinary array of historical evidence to reconstruct Shakespeare’s authorial identity as Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood it.  He argues that Shakespeare tried to adapt his own singular talent and ambition to the collaborative enterprise of drama by imagining himself as uniquely embodying the diverse, fractious energies of the popular theater. Rewriting our current histories of authorship as well as Renaissance drama, Shakespeare Only recaptures a sense of the creative force that mass entertainment exerted on Shakespeare and that Shakespeare exerted on mass entertainment.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Is It Good for the Jews? http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5186426 Adam Biro <br><br><DIV><P>“Jewish stories,” writes Adam Biro, “resemble every people’s stories.” Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the <I>joys</I> of the Jewish people than through such tales—“There’s nothing,” writes Biro, “more revelatory of the Jewish being.”</P><P> </P><P>With <I>Is It Good for the Jews?</I> Biro offers a sequel to his acclaimed collection of stories <I>Two Jews on a Train</I>. Through twenty-nine tales—some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor—Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd—yet familiar—situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling.</P><P> </P><P>A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, <I>Is It Good for the Jews? </I>reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.</P><P> </P></DIV><br></div> Madwomen http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5630249 Gabriela Mistral <br><br><DIV><DIV>A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The <I>Locas mujeres</I> poems collected here are among Mistral’s most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self <I>in extremis</I>—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.<BR />            From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting “madwomen” who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral’s poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral’s final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. <I>Madwomen</I> promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated “madwoman” than most have ever known.</DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV> </DIV></DIV><br></div> Marriage of Heaven and Hell http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5666972 William Blake edited by Michael Phillips <br><br><DIV><DIV>No work has challenged its readers like Blake's<I> The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</I>. Blake's "Proverbs of Hell"--by turns iconoclastic, bizarre, and unprecedented--have been employed as the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Most extraordinary, though, is the revolutionary method Blake employed in making the physical book. The Bodleian Library holds one of the first copies that Blake printed using a technique he called "illuminated printing," and it is the only work in which he signifies its importance.<BR /><BR />This new facsimile edition of<I> </I><I>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</I> includes a plate-by-plate guide to the texts, interlinear figures, and larger designs in a commentary facing a transcript of each reproduced plate. Drawings from Blake's manuscript notebook, which were used as a basis for the designs, as well as working proof impressions, are also included, demonstrating the evolution of the work. This edition also reproduces a single plate from each of the other eight surviving copies, revealing how over a period of more than thirty years Blake altered the way he finished each copy. An introduction explores the book's literary and historical background, Blake's printing process, and the book's anonymous initial publication. <BR /><BR />An expertly edited volume for students, scholars, and collectors alike, this edition of<I> </I><I>The Marriage of Heaven and Hell</I> allows Blake's vision to reassert its breathtaking power.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Children's Literature http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5809646 Seth Lerer <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children’s literature. <I>Children’s Literature </I>charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop’s fables to Mother Goose, from <I>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</I> to Peter Pan, from <I>Where the Wild Things Are </I>to Harry Potter.</P><P> </P><P>The only single-volume work to capture the rich and diverse history of children’s literature in its full panorama, this extraordinary book reveals why J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Beatrix Potter, and many others, despite their divergent styles and subject matter, have all resonated with generations of readers. <I>Children’s Literature</I> is an exhilarating quest across centuries, continents, and genres to discover how, and why, we first fall in love with the written word. </P><P> </P><P>“Lerer has accomplished something magical. Unlike the many handbooks to children’s literature that synopsize, evaluate, or otherwise guide adults in the selection of materials for children, this work presents a true critical history of the genre. . . . Scholarly, erudite, and all but exhaustive, it is also entertaining and accessible. Lerer takes his subject seriously without making it dull.”—<I>Library Journal</I> (starred review)</P><P> </P><P>“Lerer’s history reminds us of the wealth of literature written during the past 2,600 years. . . . With his vast and multidimensional knowledge of literature, he underscores the vital role it plays in forming a child’s imagination. We are made, he suggests, by the books we read.”—<I>San Francisco Chronicle</I></P><P> </P><P>“There are dazzling chapters on John Locke and Empire, and nonsense, and Darwin, but Lerer’s most interesting chapter focuses on girls’ fiction. . . . A brilliant series of readings.”—Diane Purkiss, <I>Times Literary Supplement</I></P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Gardens http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5815522 Robert Pogue Harrison <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.</P><P>With <I>Gardens</I>, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history.  The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.</P><P> </P><P>Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, <I>Gardens</I> is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, <I>Forests</I> and <I>The Dominion of the Dead</I>. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.</P><P> </P><P>"I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled <I>Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition</I>, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."—Julia Keller, <I>Chicago</I><I> Tribune</I></P><P> </P><P>"This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."—Tom Turner, <I>Times Higher Education</I></P><P> </P><P>"When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight.  Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic.  But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study <I>Forests: The Shadow of Civilization</I>, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism—it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it.</P><P> </P><P>“Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ‘gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.’”—Jonathan Bate, <I>The Spectator</I></P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Collections of Nothing http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5820687 William Davies King <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don’t think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing—and a lot of it. With <I>Collections of Nothing</I>, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.</P><P> </P><P>Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, <I>Collections of Nothing</I> begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value. As he relates the story of his burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating meditation on the human urge to collect. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation and dissection of the collector’s art as seen through the life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive fever.</P><P> </P><P>"What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his collection, deftly demonstrating that the two stories are essentially one. . . . His hard-won self-awareness gives his disclosures an intensity that will likely resonate with all readers, even those whose collections of nothing contain nothing at all."—<I>New Yorker</I></P><P> </P><P>"King's extraordinary book is a memoir served up on the backs of all things he collects. . . . His story starts out sounding odd and singular—who <I>is</I> this guy?—but by the end, you recognize yourself in a lot of what he does."—Julia Keller, <I>Chicago</I><I> Tribune</I></P><P> </P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Obsession http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=5856991 Lennard J. Davis <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>We live in an age of obsession. Not only are we hopelessly devoted to our work, strangely addicted to our favorite television shows, and desperately impassioned about our cars, we admire obsession in others: we demand that lovers be infatuated with one another in films, we respond to the passion of single-minded musicians, we cheer on driven athletes. To be obsessive is to be American; to be obsessive is to be modern.</P><P> </P><P>But obsession is not only a phenomenon of modern existence: it is a medical category—both a pathology and a goal. Behind this paradox lies a fascinating history, which Lennard J. Davis tells in <I>Obsession</I>. Beginning with the roots of the disease in demonic possession and its secular successors, Davis traces the evolution of obsessive behavior from a social and religious fact of life into a medical and psychiatric problem. From obsessive aspects of professional specialization to obsessive compulsive disorder and nymphomania, no variety of obsession eludes Davis’s graceful analysis. </P><P> </P><P>"This is an engaging book which I read with considerable—dare I say, obsessive?—enjoyment. . . . The book is laced with rich examples exemplifying obsessional people and their work."—Christine Purdon, <I>Times Higher Education</I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>"Intellectually bold and constantly insightful, this work . . . manages to link <I>Moby-Dick</I> and the TV show <I>Monk</I>."—Julia Keller, <I>Chicago Tribune </I></P><P><I></I> </P><P>"Those with a keen interest in (or perhaps an obsession with) obsession and its place in human culture will enjoy Davis’s book."<I>—</I>Melinda Wenner, <I>Scientific American Mind</I></P><P> </P><P>"If you should pick up the book expecting an obsessively thorough discourse, you won’t be disappointed. But Davis is a fine writer, and he grabs the reader at the outset by confessing his own childhood rituals."—Deanna Isaacs, <I>Chicago Reader</I></P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Ancient Shore http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6021791 Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. <I>The Ancient Shore </I>collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic <I>New Yorker</I> essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present.</P><P> </P><P>With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.</P><P> </P><P>Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, <I>The Ancient Shore </I>is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.</P><P> </P><P>“Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—<I>Bookforum</I></P><P> </P><P>“Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, <I>Los Angeles Times</I></P><P><B></B> </P><P>“The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—<I>Booklist</I>, starred review</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> In the Forest of Faded Wisdom http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6136205 Gendun Chopel <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In a culture where poetry is considered the highest form of human language, Gendun Chopel is revered as Tibet’s greatest modern poet. Born in 1903 as British troops were preparing to invade his homeland, Gendun Chopel was identified at any early age as the incarnation of a famous lama and became a Buddhist monk, excelling in the debating courtyards of the great monasteries of Tibet. At the age of thirty-one, he gave up his monk’s vows and set off for India, where he would wander, often alone and impoverished, for over a decade. Returning to Tibet, he was arrested by the government of the young Dalai Lama on trumped-up charges of treason, emerging from prison three years later a broken man. He died in 1951 as troops of the People’s Liberation Army marched into Lhasa.</P><P>Throughout his life, from his childhood to his time in prison, Gendun Chopel wrote poetry that conveyed the events of his remarkable life. <I>In the Forest of Faded Wisdom</I> is the first comprehensive collection of his oeuvre in any language, assembling poems in both the original Tibetan and in English translation. A master of many forms of Tibetan verse, Gendun Chopel composed heartfelt hymns to the Buddha, pithy instructions for the practice of the dharma, stirring tributes to the Tibetan warrior-kings, cynical reflections on the ways of the world, and laments of a wanderer, forgotten in a foreign land. These poems exhibit the technical skill—wordplay, puns, the ability to evoke moods of pathos and irony—for which Gendun Chopel was known and reveal the poet to be a consummate craftsman, skilled in both Tibetan and Indian poetics. With a directness and force often at odds with the conventions of <I>belles lettres</I>, this is a poetry that is at once elegant and earthy. <I>In the Forest of Faded Wisdom</I> is a remarkable introduction to Tibet’s sophisticated poetic tradition and its most intriguing twentieth-century writer.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Digby Poems http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6166447 Edited by Helen Barr <br><br><DIV><DIV><I>The Digby Poems</I> are the twenty-four short lyrics of Oxford Bodleian MS Digby 102—a remarkable sequence of late medieval poetry that until now had only been edited once in its entirety, and that more than a century ago. With this new edition, Helen Barr includes, for the first time, a full critical apparatus, a substantial introduction, and annotation to each of the twenty-four poems in the Digby manuscript. Gathering new evidence that suggests that this sequence was probably written by a Benedictine monk eager to demonstrate his support for the King in the early years of Henry V’s reign, Barr’s critical analysis and historical research brings out the political emphasis of the poems and their place in the tradition of devotional writing. This volume marks the first classroom-oriented edition of the poems and should be of interest to any student of medieval poetry, devotional literature, and historical manuscript studies.<BR /></DIV></DIV><br></div> Bulletproof http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6676834 Jennifer Wenzel <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>In 1856 and 1857, in response to a prophet’s command, the Xhosa people of southern Africa killed their cattle and ceased planting crops; the resulting famine cost tens of thousands of lives. Much like other millenarian, anticolonial movements—such as the Ghost Dance in North America and the Birsa Munda uprising in India—these actions were meant to transform the world and liberate the Xhosa from oppression. Despite the movement’s momentous failure to achieve that goal, the event has continued to exert a powerful pull on the South African imagination ever since. It is these afterlives of the prophecy that Jennifer Wenzel explores in <I>Bulletproof</I>.</P><P>            Wenzel examines literary and historical texts to show how writers have manipulated images and ideas associated with the cattle killing—harvest, sacrifice, rebirth, devastation—to speak to their contemporary predicaments. Widening her lens, Wenzel also looks at how past failure can both inspire and constrain movements for justice in the present, and her brilliant insights into the cultural implications of prophecy will fascinate readers across a wide variety of disciplines.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6683606 Sarra Copia Sulam <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon. </P><P> </P><P>For this bilingual edition, Don Harrán has collected all of Sulam’s previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a <I>Manifesto</I>—into a single volume. Harrán has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this volume will provide readers with insight into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6710234 Francisco de Quevedo <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), one of the greatest poets of the Spanish Golden Age, was the master of the baroque style known as “conceptismo,” a complex form of expression fueled by elaborate conceits and constant wordplay as well as ethical and philosophical concerns. Although scattered translations of his works have appeared in English, there is currently no comprehensive collection available that samples each of the genres in which Quevedo excelled—metaphysical and moral poetry, grave elegies and moving epitaphs, amorous sonnets and melancholic psalms, playful romances and profane burlesques.</P><P>            In this book, Christopher Johnson gathers together a generous selection of forty-six poems—in bilingual Spanish-English format on facing pages—that highlights the range of Quevedo’s technical expertise and themes. Johnson’s ingenious solutions to rendering the difficult seventeenth-century Spanish into poetic English will be invaluable to students and scholars of European history, literature, and translation, as well as poetry lovers wishing to reacquaint themselves with an old master. </P><P> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Algebra http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6733316 Don Bogen <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>from <I>Bagatelles</I></P><P><B></B> </P><P>Bagatelles, </P><P>mere gestures </P><P>                        in dry air, </P><P>each pluck a dot, </P><P>strokes marked on silence </P><P>reaching into the dark.  </P><P> </P><P>Beauty is strict, </P><P>                          it passes:  </P><P> </P><P>an echo, a wedge </P><P>of harmony, sudden, </P><P>broken—<I>Who goes there?</I></P><P> </P><P><I>An Algebra</I> is an interwoven collection of eight sequences and sixteen individual poems, where images and phrases recur in new contexts, connecting and suspending thoughts,   emotions and insights. By turns, the poems leap from the public realm of urban decay and outsourcing to the intimacies of family life, from a street mime to a haunting dream, from elegy to lyric evocation. Wholeness and brokenness intertwine in the book; glimpsed patterns and startling disjunctions drive its explorations.</P><P> </P><P><I>An Algebra</I> is a work of changing equivalents, a search for balance in a world of transformation and loss. It is a brilliantly constructed, moving book by a poet who has achieved a new level of imaginative expression and skill. </P><P> </P><P>Praise for <I>After the Splendid Display</I></P><P>“In his best work . . . conscience and craft fuse seamlessly, and the result is original and arresting."—<I>The Nation </I></P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6740814 Emilie Du Châtelet <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of Newton’s <I>Principia Mathematica</I> that is still the standard edition of that work in French. Had she been a man, her reputation as a member of the eighteenth-century French intellectual elite would have been assured.</P><P> </P><P>In the 1970s, feminist historians of science began the slow work of recovering Du Châtelet’s writings and her contributions to history and philosophy. For this edition, Judith P. Zinsser has selected key sections from Du Châtelet’s published and unpublished works, as well as related correspondence, part of her little-known critique of the Old and New Testaments, and a treatise on happiness that is a refreshingly uncensored piece of autobiography—making all of them available for the first time in English. The resulting volume will recover Châtelet’s place in the pantheon of French letters and culture.  </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Manly Love http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6817179 Axel Nissen <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In <I>Manly Love</I>, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men.</P><P> </P><P>Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, <I>Manly Love</I> also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Science for All http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6885673 Peter J. Bowler <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Recent scholarship has revealed that pioneering Victorian scientists endeavored through voluminous writing to raise public interest in science and its implications. But it has generally been assumed that once science became a profession around the turn of the century, this new generation of scientists turned its collective back on public outreach. <I>Science for All</I> debunks this apocryphal notion.</P><P>Peter J. Bowler surveys the books, serial works, magazines, and newspapers published between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II to show that practicing scientists were very active in writing about their work for a general readership. <I>Science for All</I> argues that the social environment of early twentieth-century Britain created a substantial market for science books and magazines aimed at those who had benefited from better secondary education but could not access higher learning. Scientists found it easy and profitable to write for this audience, Bowler reveals, and because their work was seen as educational, they faced no hostility from their peers. But when admission to colleges and universities became more accessible in the 1960s, this market diminished and professional scientists began to lose interest in writing at the nonspecialist level. </P><P>Eagerly anticipated by scholars of scientific engagement throughout the ages, <I>Science for All </I>sheds light on our own era and the continuing tension between science and public understanding. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Ancrene Wisse/Guide for Anchoresses http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6899660 Bella Millett <br><br><DIV><P>This new annotated translation of the <I>Ancrene Wisse</I>, the early thirteenth-century guide for female recluses, presents a key document for the development of medieval spirituality and one of the major works of early Middle English prose. Reflecting the “democratization” of religious experience, one of the outcomes of the Medieval Reformation, the <I>Ancrene Wisse </I>drew on new kinds of pastoral literature designed to appeal to a more general audience, while its insight, wit, and charm made it a perennial devotional favorite throughout the Middle Ages. This is the first translation based on the full manuscript evidence, and it also offers an accessible and up-to-date introduction for both scholars and students. </P></DIV><br></div> Zapolska's Women http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6914380 Gabriela Zapolska <br><br><DIV><P>Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921) was one of the foremost modernist Polish playwrights. <I>Zapolska’s Women</I> features three of her performance texts that focus on the economic and social pressures faced by women in partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to the plays, <I>Zapolska’s Women</I> provides a detailed biography of Zapolska, relating her life story to the themes of each play; an analysis of her significance within Polish and European literary and theatrical traditions; and background on the social and historical conditions within Poland during the time the plays were written and originally performed. This informative collection of groundbreaking plays will introduce an English-speaking audience to Zapolska’s important work.</P></DIV><br></div> Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6930898 Garcilaso de la Vega <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Garcilaso de la Vega (ca. 1501–36), a Castilian nobleman and soldier at the court of Charles V, lived a short but glamorous life. As the first poet to make the Italian Renaissance lyric style at home in Spanish, he is credited with beginning the golden age of Spanish poetry. Known for his sonnets and pastorals, gracefully depicting beauty and love while soberly accepting their passing, he is shown here also as a calm student of love’s psychology and a critic of the savagery of war.</P><P> </P><P>This bilingual volume is the first in nearly two hundred years to fully represent Garcilaso for an Anglophone readership. In facing-page translations that capture the music and skill of Garcilaso’s verse, John-Dent Young presents the sonnets, songs, elegies, and eclogues that came to influence generations of poets, including San Juan de la Cruz, Luis de Leon, Cervantes, and Góngora. The <I>Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega</I> will help to explain to the English-speaking public this poet’s preeminence in the pantheon of Spanish letters. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Terror of Natural Right http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6933689 Dan Edelstein <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. But during the French Revolution, this tradition was interpreted to justify the most repressive actions of the violent period known as the Terror.</P><P>In <I>The Terror of Natural Right</I>, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.</P><P>A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, <I>The Terror of Natural Right </I>challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Sojourners in a Strange Land http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6963841 Florence C. Hsia <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise.</P><P> </P><P><I>Sojourners in a Strange Land</I> develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China.  </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Watch http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6963860 Greg Miller <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>                            Strasbourg</P><P> The yellow and green rose, and the pink rock,</P><P>The chestnuts blooming, the cobblestone square,</P><P>Our Lady’s tower rising everywhere,</P><P>Dark timbered fronts; the mechanical clock</P><P>Whose rooster crows three times for Peter’s flock,</P><P>The Apostles, the old man’s and the child’s share</P><P>Of time—aspire I’d say to make me stare</P><P>And stop. I praise what I might otherwise mock,</P><P>The locked contingencies, the stock of losses,</P><P>Bright liquidity everywhere channeled,</P><P>A storied cityscape of destinies</P><P>Averted as when, turning, a young Turk tosses</P><P>His hands in the air and my chest’s pummeled,</P><P>“My brother, forgive me!” and my thoughts freeze.</P><P>                                                                                                 </P><P>In <I>Watch</I>, Greg Miller describes a fresh purposefulness in his life and achieves a new level of poetic thinking and composition in his writing. Artfully combining the religious and secular worldviews in his own sense of human culture, Miller complicates our understanding of all three. The poems in <I>Watch </I>sift layers of natural and human history across several continents, observing paintings, archeological digs, cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes—all in an attempt to envision a clear, grounded spiritual life. Employing an impressive array of traditional meters and various kinds of free verse, Miller’s poems celebrate communities both invented and real.</P><P> </P><P>Praise for <I>Iron Wheel</I></P><P>“Miller demonstrates that what Eliot said about reading a poem may be equally true of writing them: the best thing ‘is to be very, very intelligent’ and intelligence is not the same as erudition. Whether the world is made, found, or named, Miller offers an engaging portrait of things as they are.’’—David Orr, <I>Poetry</I></P><P><EM></EM> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> War Bird http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6963863 David Gewanter <br><br><DIV><DIV>In his third book of poems, David Gewanter takes on wartime America, showing our personal costs and inextricable complicities. The constructs of our social lives, the conventions of our political values, the ambitions of our private fantasies—all these collide comically and tragically. Here, the far right marries the far left, and the sacred is undone by the profane. Gewanter's ironic vision pulls together details from science, history, philosophy, the disappearing dailies, and the emotional life of an engaged and singular mind into poems on the move with tense rhythms, rich correspondences, and daring hairpin turns. <I>War Bird</I> gives the lie to the shining moral complacencies of the homefront. Unsettling yet radiant, this collection is a book for troubled times, for what Whitman called, in “1861,” our “hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”</DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV> </DIV></DIV><br></div> Likeness of the King http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=6966957 Stephen Perkinson <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson’s <I>The Likeness of the King</I> challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as “the first modern portraits.”</P><P> </P><P>Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.</P><P> </P><DIV>“A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual context. <I>The Likeness of the King</I> provides a strong account of late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources; close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to counter received ideas.”—Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago </DIV><P> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7873526 Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin<I> </I>break that critical silence to readdress some of the<B> </B>fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.  </P><P> </P><P>Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary <I>avant-garde</I>, the contributors to <I>The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound</I> explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme,<B> </B>the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the<B> </B>connections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays<B> </B>take on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s <I>Délie,</I> Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing. </P><P> </P><P>A genuinely comparatist study, <I>The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound </I>is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Infidel Poetics http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=7878012 Daniel Tiffany <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV><P>Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop?  <I>Infidel Poetics</I> examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture.       </P><P> </P><P>Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations—networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde—Daniel Tiffany shows that obscurity in poetry has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies.  For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres—thieves’ carols, drinking songs, beggars’ chants—a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal <I>substance</I>, a demimonde for sale. </P><P> </P><P>Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy <I>logos</I> of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to Mallarmé, <I>Infidel Poetics</I> offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.</P></DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Physiologus http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8324778 Translated by Michael J. Curley <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>One of the most popular and widely read books of the Middle Ages, <I>Physiologus </I>contains allegories of beasts, stones, and trees both real and imaginary, infused by their anonymous author with the spirit of Christian moral and mystical teaching.  Accompanied by an introduction that explains the origins, history, and literary value of this curious text, this volume also reproduces twenty woodcuts from the 1587 version. Originally composed in the fourth century in Greek, and translated into dozens of versions through the centuries, <I>Physiologus </I>will delight readers with its ancient tales of ant-lions, centaurs, and hedgehogs—and their allegorical significance.   </P><P> </P><P>“An elegant little book . . . still diverting to look at today. . . . The woodcuts reproduced from the 1587 Rome edition are alone worth the price of the book.”—Raymond A. Sokolov, <I>New York Times Book Review</I></P></DIV></DIV><br></div> New Life of Dante http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8342367 Stephen Bemrose <br><br><DIV><P>This fully revised and updated biography of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), one of world literature’s foremost writers and thinkers, weaves the life and works of the Florentine poet into a single accessible thread. Aimed at students, as well as the curious but non-specialist reader, <I>A New Life of Dante </I>takes into account the philosophies running through Dante’s major and minor works while still paying particular attention to the social and political contexts surrounding their production. The volume includes English-language translation of all quotations and an updated bibliography, making it an excellent introductory text for anyone with an interest in this master poet of the Middle Ages.</P></DIV><br></div> Performing Violence http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364207 Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>The so-called “New Russian Drama” emerged at the end of the twentieth century, following a long period of decline in dramatic writing in the late Soviet and post-Soviet era. In <I>Performing Violence</I>, Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in these new dramatic works by young Russian playwrights. Reflecting the disappointment in Yeltsin’s democratic reforms and Putin’s neoconservative politics, the plays focus on political and social representations of violence, its performances, and its justifications. </P><P>As the first English-language study of Russian drama and theatre in the twenty-first century,<I> Performing Violence</I> seeks a vantage point for the analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture. While previous generations had preferred poetry and prose, this new breed of authors—the Presnyakov brothers, Evgeni Grishkovets, and Vasili Sigarev among them—have garnered international recognition for their fierce plays. This book investigates the violent portrayal of the identity crisis of a generation as represented in their theatrical works, and will be a key text for students and scholars of drama, Russian studies, and literature.</P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Walking, Writing and Performance http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364217 Edited by Roberta Mock <br><br><DIV><P>This collection charts three projects by performers who generate autobiographical writing by walking through inspirational landscapes. Included in the book are the full texts of <I>The Crab Walks</I> and <I>Crab Steps Aside</I> by Phil Smith, <I>Mourning Walk</I> by Carl Lavery, and <I>Tree</I> by Deirdre Heddon, each accompanied by photographs and contextual essays. Taken together or separately, the work of all three artist-scholars raises important issues about memory, the ethics of autobiographical performance, ritual, life writing, and site-specific performance. </P></DIV><br></div> Directors & Designers http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364234 Edited by Christine White <br><br><DIV><P><I>Directors and Designers </I>explores the practice of scenography—the creation of perspective in the design and painting of stage scenery—and offers new insight into the working relationships of the people responsible for these theatrical transformations. With contributions from leading practitioners and theorists, editor Christine White describes the way in which the roles of director and designer have developed over time. Featuring chapters on theater and site-specific performance, theatrical communication and aesthetics, and the cognitive reception of design by the audience, this volume provides a valuable resource on current approaches to scenography for professionals and students.</P></DIV><br></div> Performance in Place of War http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364297 James Thompson, Jenny Hughes, and Michael Balfour <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, war has often been a major theme of dramatic performances. However, many of the most extraordinary theater projects in recent years not only have been about war but also have originated in actual conflict zones themselves. <I>Performance in Place of War</I> is concerned with these initiatives, including theater in refugee camps, in war-ravaged villages, in towns under curfew, and in cities under occupation. It looks at theater and performances that often occur quite literally as bombs are falling, as well as during times of ceasefire and in the aftermath of hostilities.</P><P> </P><P><I>Performance in Place of War</I> draws on extensive original material and includes interviews with artists, short play extracts, and photographs from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, and others. The authors combine critical commentary, overviews of the conflicts and first-hand accounts in order to consider such questions as: Why in times of disruption have people turned to performance? And what aesthetic, ethical, and political choices are made in these different contexts? <I>Performance in Place of War</I> is a fascinating perspective on the role of theater in unpredictable, war-torn times. </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Grotowski's Empty Room http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364303 Edited by Paul Allain <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) was a Polish stage director, theatrical theorist, and founder and director of the small but influential Polish Laboratory Theatre. Most of Grotowski’s theater-making took place in this and similar small theaters and studio spaces, and as a result one of his central fascinations was the actor’s work within the context of an empty room. The essays in <I>Grotowski's Empty Room</I> analyze how Grotowski’s explorations in the theater continue to challenge dramatists and directors.</P><P> </P><P>The contributors to this volume reflect with special insight on how theater scholars and practitioners can further Grotowski’s work and how his legacy will be developed in the theater. Among the contributors are Leszek Kolankiewicz and Zbigniew Osinski, his close collaborators; Marco de Marinis, Franco Ruffini, and Fernando Taviani, scholars who have followed Grotowski’s works from the 14 years he spent in Italy; and Swedish filmmaker and writer Marianne Ahrne and director Eugenio Barba, who reveal the strong impression Grotowski left on all those who met him and express the challenge of those who must now work in the empty rooms he has left behind. </P><P> </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Republicanism and the American Gothic http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364486 Marilyn Michaud <br><br><DIV><P><I>Republicanism and the American Gothic</I> offers a comparative study of British and American literature and culture in the 1790s and 1950s, as it recontextualizes American gothic fiction from the perspective of the cold war. Exploring the republican tradition of the British Enlightenment and the effect of its translation and migration to the American colonies, Marilyn Michaud pays particular attention to the transatlantic influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century libertarian and anti-authoritarian thought on British and American revolutionary culture.</P></DIV><br></div> Bright Stars http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364547 Richard Marggraf Turley <br><br><DIV><P>The most celebrated poet of his day after Byron, Barry Cornwall, pseudonymous identity of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), was a solicitor, dandy, and pugilist championed by Leigh Hunt, as well as the author of three books of heralded verse. This volume attempts to square Cornwall’s early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus, and exploring the fascinating mirror between this own trajectory into celebrity with that of his now better-known contemporary, John Keats.</P></DIV><br></div> Cinematic Fictions http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364551 David Seed <br><br><DIV><P>The phrase “cinematic fiction” generally has been accepted into critical discourse, but usually only in the context of postwar novels. This volume examines the influence of a particular medium, film, on another, the novel, in the first half of twentieth-century American literature. Offering new insights into classics such as <I>The Great Gatsby </I>and <I>The Grapes of Wrath</I>, as well as discussing critical writings on film and active participation in filmmaking by major writers such as William Faulkner, <I>Cinematic Fictions</I> will be compulsory reading for scholars of American film and literature alike.</P></DIV><br></div> Postcolonial Eyes http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364576 Aedín Ní Loingsigh <br><br><DIV><P>Over the past two decades, scholarly interest in travel and travel writing has developed significantly. Critical engagement with issues such as imperialism, postcolonialism, ethnography, and cultural anthropology has led to increasingly sophisticated readings of the travel writing genre and a growing acknowledgement of its complex history. This volume is the first of its kind to identify a specifically Sub-Saharan African lineage within the broader tradition of travel writing, and it explores the reason for Africans’ exclusion from the genre, as well as the important relationship between ethnicity and travel in the concerns that define African writers’ approaches to travel.</P></DIV><br></div> Reparative in Narratives http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364591 Mireille D. Rosello <br><br><DIV><P>The authors studied in this volume represent a Francophone archipelago unfamiliar to any mapmaker, but drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors, then, Mireille D. Rosello argues, repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes—and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim’s range of possibilities. Rosello contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.</P></DIV><br></div> Underground Writing http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364609 David Welsh <br><br><DIV><P>This exciting volume explores the way in which the London Underground (“The Tube”) was mapped by a number of writers, including George Orwell, H. G. Wells, George Gissing, and Virginia Woolf, from the late Victorian era to the end of World War II. Represented diversely as a Dantean underworld, a psychological looking-glass, and a place for safety and security, the Underground is evaluated here as portrayed in fiction, poetry, and art, as well as a borderland for cultural construction in transport history, anthropology, and urban studies. Linking adventurous literature with the actual underground modes of transit, author David Welsh reshapes the metaphorical world of “underground writing” and places it in its proper social and political context.</P></DIV><br></div> Changing Paths http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364739 Bill Sherwonit <br><br><DIV><DIV><P><I>Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in </I><I>Alaska</I><I>’s Arctic Wilderness</I> is an autobiographical exploration of author Bill Sherwonit’s relationship with the Alaska wilderness. Written in three parts, it first describes Sherwonit’s introduction to the Brooks Range and his years as an exploration geologist. Taking a step back, the author then takes us into the past to explore his childhood roots in rural Connecticut and his recognition of wild nature as a refuge. He concludes with his emergence as a nature writer and wilderness advocate. </P><P>An engrossing, fascinating, and eye-opening tale of one man’s life and of wilderness conceptions, this vivid description of an area of Alaska that few people get to experience is authentic and enlightening. It is an extraordinary contribution to the literature of place from one of Alaska’s most accomplished nature writers. </P><P> </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Push http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364886 Ronald F. Smits <br><br><DIV><P>In this sophisticated debut collection, Ronald F. Smits deftly weaves the comic with the tragic as he vividly recreates days past in rural Pennsylvania. With a boyish charm, the eighty poems in <I>Push </I>lyrically recall baseball games, campouts under the stars, and dusty treks along lonely back roads—bringing to life a vision of mid-century America that is by turns nostalgic and clear-eyed, humorous and heartfelt. A masterly evocation of a place and a time that feel quintessentially American, <I>Push </I>opens our eyes to the twinned power of literature and memory.</P></DIV><br></div> John Keats http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8364898 Stephen Hebron <br><br><DIV><P>In his brief lifetime, John Keats (1795–1821) published just three volumes of poetry: a collection of early verse in 1817; <I>Endymion</I>, a long and fairly unsuccessful poem in 1819; and a final collection in 1820, which included most of the poems for which he is now famous. For many years these anthologies contained all that the public knew of Keats, but over time it has become readily apparent that an extraordinary wealth of manuscripts lay behind these few volumes.</P><P> </P><P><I>John Keats: A Poet and His Manuscripts</I> presents, in chronological order, the surviving manuscripts of his finest poems and letters—often illustrated at actual size and in their entirety—providing a record of the poet’s visual processes of composition and offering a vivid portrait of his rich imagination and swift progress as a writer and thinker. Stephen Hebron, in his masterly introduction, offers the intriguing story of how Keats’s manuscripts were jealously guarded after his death, before they were finally bequeathed to public and private collections, revealing as much about the fame of the poet as the social and literary fashions of the past two-hundred years.</P></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: The Bloomsbury Group http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8367561 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV>  <P>The Bloomsbury Group remains, to this day, one of modern culture’s most remarkable associations of individuals—the diverse contributions of the Bell siblings alone, not to mention their lovers, peers, and acquaintances, rival the output of the rest of the Modernist canon in terms of experimentation, collaboration, and peerless acclaim in literature, art, and theory. This informal group of poets and painters, writers and critics, which included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Vita Sackville-West, and Bertrand Russell, among others, may have called then-fashionable central London their home, but to generations of future scholars, writers, and cultural aficionados, they helped to locate Modernism both critically and geographically. Now, for the first time, the British Library has gathered their voices and reminiscences together on a masterly two-disc set, which draws on long-unheard BBC archives, many of which will be available for the first time. Among the unforgettable tracks heard in this collection are:</P><P> </P><P><B>Virginia Woolf</B> reading an extract from a radio talk on the importance of language<B></B> </P><P><B>Leonard Woolf</B> proffering a Who’s Who of the Bloomsbury Group<B></B> </P><P><B>Desmond McCarthy</B> meditating on “tears” in literature<B></B> </P><P><B>Duncan Grant</B> discussing the infamous Dreadnought Hoax</P><P><B>Clive Bell</B> remembering Lytton Strachey asking, “Who would you most like to see coming up the drive?”<B></B> </P><P><B>Frances Partridge </B>speaking about the Group’s larger influence<B></B> </P><P><B>William Plomer </B>discussing the Group’s exclusivity<B></B> </P><P><B>David Garnett </B>candidly describing the relationship between Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington<B></B> </P><P><B>David Cecil </B>detailing Virginia Woolf’s day-to-day appearance </P><P><B>Angelica Garnett </B>opining on various attitudes towards members of the Group<B></B> </P><P><B>Harold Nicholson</B> reciting a talk on the members and attitudes that dominated the Group<B></B> </P><P><B>Vita Sackville-West</B> talking about the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s <I>Orlando</I><B></B> </P><P><B>Quentin Bell</B> exactingly describing the fashions of Virginia Woolf<B></B> </P><P><B>Margery Fry</B> holding court on Virginia Woolf’s flights of fancy<B></B> </P><P><B>Benedict Nicholson </B>remembering Virginia Woolf’s visits to Sissinghurst<B></B> </P><P><B>Elizabeth Bowen</B> recalling Bloomsbury parties and Virginia Woolf’s antics<B></B> </P><P><B>Ralph Partridge</B> reminiscing on time spent with Leonard and Virginia Woolf<B></B> </P><P><B>John Lehmann </B>describing his reactions to Woolf’s final novel, <I>Between the Acts</I><B></B> </P><P><B>Bertrand Russell</B> on Lytton Strachey and his family<B></B> </P><P><B>Gerald Brenan </B>recalling times spent with Lytton Strachey, Ralph Partridge, and Dora Carrington<B></B> </P><P><B>Grace Higgins</B> describing daily life at Charleston, the Bloomsbury outpost in Sussex<B></B></P></DIV></DIV><DIV> </DIV><DIV>Running time: </DIV><DIV>CD1 - 60 mins, CD2 - 68 mins</DIV><br></div> Spoken Word : Bob Cobbing http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8367571 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete, and performance poet; a central member of the British Poetry Revival; and an influence on generations of artists, sound experimenters, educators, poets, and printmakers. Perhaps his most famous work is <I>26 Sound Poems</I>, several poems of which are included here, alongside collaborations with Annea Lockwood, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and others, as well as previously unreleased archival recordings from the BBC and the British Library’s Sound Archive, in which the listener can hear Cobbing’s unique exploration of the visual and auditory possibilities inherent in the English alphabet. In a career marked by the emergence of the 1960s counterculture and the thrilling potential for sound-based performance poetics, the work of Bob Cobbing stands alone as an instrument at play for the human voice; a testament to the core interdisciplinarity between writings for print and sound; and the strangely verbal incantations implicit in the concrete poetry he championed.</P><P> </P><P><B>PREVIOUS TITLES IN THE SPOKEN WORD SERIES:</B></P><P><B></B> </P><B>British Writers (2-CD set, 2008)</B> <B>American Writers (2-CD set, 2008)</B> <B>Edith Sitwell (2008)</B> <B>George Barker (2008)</B> <B>Ted Hughes (2008)</B> <B>Evelyn Waugh (2008)</B> <B>Graham Greene (2007)</B> <B>W.H. Auden (2-CD set, 2007)</B> <B>H.G. Wells (2006)</B> <B>Bernard Shaw (2-CD set, 2006)</B><P><B>Running time 66 minutes.</B></P></DIV></DIV><br></div> History of the Gothic http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388045 Jarlath Killeen <br><br><DIV><P>In this volume, Jarlath Killeen provides a detailed and accessible introduction to the gothic literature of the nineteenth century. Examining how themes and trends associated with early gothic novels were diffused in many different genres throughout the Victorian period—including the ghost story, the detective story, and the adventure story—<I>History of the Gothic</I> pays particular attention to how the gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems introduced with the modernization and secularization of British society, as well as the relationship between the child and horror.</P></DIV><br></div> History of the Gothic http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388052 Charles L. Crow <br><br><DIV><P>Defining the American gothic tradition both within the context of the major movements of intellectual history over the past three-hundred years, as well as within the issues critical to American culture, this comprehensive volume covers a diverse terrain of well-known American writers, from Poe to Faulkner to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Charles L. Crow demonstrates how the gothic provides a forum for discussing key issues of changing American culture, explores forbidden subjects, and provides a voice for the repressed and silenced.</P></DIV><br></div> Embodying Identity http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388059 Harri Garrod Roberts <br><br><DIV><P>Since the time of Freud, our most radical innovators in critical theory have stressed the importance of the body and the means through which it helps to constitute our subjectivity. Exploring some of these debates surrounding the body and assessing its value as a critical concept in both Welsh literary texts in English and the larger discourse surrounding Wales, this volume combines psychoanalysis with more culturally oriented approaches to the body. Harri Garrod Roberts stresses the role of the body in the construction of identity at both a cultural and individual level, contributing to the growing critical literature concerned with identity in a Welsh cultural context.</P></DIV><br></div> Emyr Humphreys http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388077 Diane Green <br><br><DIV><P>Emyr Humphreys is perhaps best known for his works of fiction, such as <I>A Toy Epic </I>and <I>Outside the House of Baal</I>, which are important in part because of Humphrey’s ideas about Wales, Welsh history and culture, and the importance of a separate Welsh identity. Here Diane Green explores Humphreys’ practice in light of both his own theories of culture and fiction and from the viewpoint of a variety of models derived from postcolonial theory.</P></DIV><br></div> Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8388092 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas <br><br><DIV><P>Throughout his career, Wilkie Collins made changes to the prototypical gothic scenario, reworking and adapting aristocratic villains, victimized maidens, and medieval castles in order to thrill his Victorian readership. Drawing upon contemporary anxieties introduced by advances in neuroscience and the development of criminology, Collins transformed Moorish castles into modern medical institutions and ghost-fearing heroines into nineteenth-century women who feared the surgeon’s knife. This volume uniquely explores the way in which Collin’s gothic revisions increasingly tackled such medical questions, using the terrain of scientific changes to capitalize on his readers’ fears.</P></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: Ted Hughes http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8402013 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV>This first of a pair of two CD set is drawn from the BBC Radio broadcasts of Ted Hughes and features live and studio recordings of the poet introducing and reading his own work. The recordings include his earliest surviving poetry broadcast and extensive selections from <I>Remains of Elmet</I> and <I>Moortown Diary</I>, plus selections from his <I>Crow</I> poems and two complete short stories, <I>The Harvesting</I> and <I>Snow</I>.<BR /> <BR />Hughes was Poet Laureate from 1984 till his death in 1998 and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished British poets of the post-war period. Most of the broadcasts are previously unpublished.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: Evelyn Waugh http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8402019 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV>Evelyn Waugh was widely regarded as the most brilliant satirical novelist of his day. Drawing on previously unpublished BBC broadcasts, this CD presents Waugh in some of his most significant radio appearances. The recordings range from the earliest surviving example of Waugh’s voice, dating from 1938, to a speech given at the Royal Society of Literature in 1963, when he was just three years from death. We hear the writer as a 35 year-old, 10 years into his first flush of literary success; as a middle-aged abhorrer of post-war society; and as a venerated old master. All the recordings are being made commercially available for the first time.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: W.H. Auden http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8402025 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV>This two CD set was released to mark the centenary of W.H. Auden's birth. The two discs feature Auden in live and studio readings of his own poetry taken from rare BBC radio broadcasts.  Over 40 poems are included, from early works such as 'On This Island' and 'A Bride in the '30s', to mature masterpieces like 'The Shield of Achilles' and 'In Praise of Limestone'. The broadcasts span the period from 1936 to 1973 - the year of Auden's death – and are are an essential purchase for anybody interested in study or enjoyment of one of the 20th-century’s greatest poets.  The majority of the recordings have not previously been released.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: H. G. Wells http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8402028 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV>This CD makes available for the first time all the surviving BBC radio broadcasts of H.G. Wells. The earliest dates from 1931, by which time Wells was already in his sixties and a renowned public figure, recognised not only for his science fiction, but also his far sighted commentary on social and political affairs. Like his contemporary Bernard Shaw, Wells was invited regularly into the radio studio to air his views on a wide range of issues.</DIV></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: Bernard Shaw http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8402031 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV><DIV>Bernard Shaw was one of the most celebrated English-language writers of the 20th century and a very prominent figure in the early years of radio in Britain.</DIV><DIV><BR />Fuelled by his determination to use radio to promote some of his more controversial views, Shaw made regular broadcasts over a period of almost 25 years. The surviving recordings address a characteristically wide range of topics, from social equality and the evils of capitalism to the nature of drama.</DIV></DIV></DIV><br></div> Armed Response http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8561135 Edited by David Peimer <br><br><DIV><DIV>As a phenomenon of history with social, political, cultural implications, the entire 'negotiated' experience makes the South African situation unique in both the African and global context. As this phenomenon unfolds, many fascinating new artistic influences are being explored to capture the diverse cultural depths and questions of identity unleashed by the demise of apartheid. This collection of plays reflects certain key trends in both subject matter and aesthetics prevalent in South Africa at this crucial moment in history. An introductory essay for the anthology will provide the reader with the artistic, cultural, and political background to the plays. <P></P><P>Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Presley Chweneyagae's <EM>Relativity: Township Stories</EM> is about a serial killer on the loose and has been widely performed in South Africa and the UK. Martin Koboekae's <EM>The Bush Tale</EM> exposes the mistrust between two people from extremely different cultural backgrounds who meet through circumstance. Yael Farber's <EM>Molora</EM> explores the rage and pain of generations shattered by the Apartheid.  Norman Mxosolisa's <EM>Hallelujah!</EM> is about the murderous, random violence engulfing the country. David Peimer's <EM>Armed Response</EM> is about a young German photographer who arrives to do her first assignment in Johannesburg. </P></DIV></DIV><br></div> Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/rssresolve.cgi?id=8849107 The British Library <br><br><DIV><DIV><P>Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete, and performance poet; a central member of the British Poetry Revival; and an influence on generations of artists, sound experimenters, educators, poets, and printmakers. Perhaps his most famous work is <I>26 Sound Poems</I>, several poems of which are included here, alongside collaborations with Annea Lockwood, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and others, as well as previously unreleased archival recordings from the BBC and the British Library’s Sound Archive, in which the listener can hear Cobbing’s unique exploration of the visual and auditory possibilities inherent in the English alphabet. In a career marked by the emergence of the 1960s counterculture and the thrilling potential for sound-based performance poetics, the work of Bob Cobbing stands alone as an instrument at play for the human voice; a testament to the core interdisciplinarity between writings for print and sound; and the strangely verbal incantations implicit in the concrete poetry he championed.</P><P> </P><P><B>PREVIOUS TITLES IN THE SPOKEN WORD SERIES:</B></P><P><B></B> </P><B>British Writers (2-CD set, 2008)</B> <B>American Writers (2-CD set, 2008)</B> <B>Edith Sitwell (2008)</B> <B>George Barker (2008)</B> <B>Ted Hughes (2008)</B> <B>Evelyn Waugh (2008)</B> <B>Graham Greene (2007)</B> <B>W.H. Auden (2-CD set, 2007)</B> <B>H.G. Wells (2006)</B> <B>Bernard Shaw (2-CD set, 2006)</B><P><B>Running time 66 minutes.</B></P></DIV></DIV><br></div>