The English Department will be honoring today book authors whose works were published during the years 1996-2000. Please join us at a reception for them at
3:00 p.m. at Pebble Hill. During these five years, the 17 authors to be honored
have produced a total of 22 books! For a preview of things to come, check out the books below:
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Paula Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford University Press, 1999):
Reflections on Biography, written by the author of an award-winning life of Daniel Defoe, is an
invitation to turn "biography" over in the mind as we turn an artefact in our hands. Intended for all
readers of biography--lifelong or occasional, critical or casual--it examines the subject from many
angles, and gives a tour of the decisions biographers make and the implications of those
choices. Its aim is to increase the pleasure of reading biographies, to add new, enjoyable dimensions even
as it increases readers' insights into the art of writing them. Among the biographies given special
attention are prize-winning lives of writers, mathematical geniuses, intellectual women,
the Roosevelts, and unusual marriage partners. The book is full of lively comparisons, for
instance of Keats by Walter Jackson Bate, Andrew Motion, and others, and of a century of
biographies of Edith Wharton. |
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Paula Backscheider, editor, Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and
Social Engagement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000): Revising Women is a collection of
essays by a distinguished group of feminist critics. Each essay is a contribution to the history of
the English novel and demonstrates the "reactivation" of texts, a kind of criticism that
produces rich contextualization in order to reveal the story beneath--not only of the individual writer
but also of a text that is a cultural production with the potential to reveal why we and our society are as we
are. Developing ways of using history in relation to literature, each essay takes up large
historical events and issues, and interprets in fine detail what individuals do with them. The
essays are characterized by informed historicizing, detailed textual explication, sophisticated feminist theory, and
dedicated attention to the interrelationship between life and work and between everyday
existence and political processes. |
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Paula Backscheider, editor, Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (Oxford University
Press, 1999): Although Eliza Haywood was one of the best known and most
prolific writers in her own time and is now recognized as an important early woman writer, there
is no modern edition of representative texts. The generation before ours knew her primarily as the object
of scurrilous and quotable attacks by Alexander Pope and others, but contemporary students and
scholars know her as the writer who initiated an autonomous tradition in romantic fiction,
established the English seduction novel, and contributed to the development of the English novel
as we know it. This volume includes two of her racy 1720s novellas, one of them among the best of all the
"revenge fantasy fiction" written by women of the period; an excerpt from
The Fruitless Enquiry, a fine example of the Southern European-style tale; and
three examples of her most experimental prose fiction written between 1730 and her death in
1756. Also considered is Haywood's lesser known dramatic career as an actress and a writer. Her first original
play, A Wife to Be Left, is included, along with The Opera or Operas, an adaptation of Fielding's
The Invisible Spy. |
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Paula Backscheider and John J. Richetti, editors, Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730: An Anthology (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996): Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730 gathers together for the first time
a representative selection of the shorter fiction by the most successful women writers of the period, from
Aphra Behn, the first important English female professional writer, to Penelope Aubin and Eliza
Haywood, who with Daniel Defoe dominated prose fiction in the 1720s. The texts included
were among the best-selling titles of their time, and played a key role in the expanding market for
narrative in the early eighteenth century. Crucial to the development of the longer novel of manners and
morals that emerged in the mid-eighteeth century, these novellas have been much neglected by literary
historians, but now--with the impetus of feminist criticism--they have been re-established as an essential
chapter in the history of the novel in English and are widely-studied. Though strikingly varied in narrative
format and purpose, ranging as they do from the erotic and sensational to the sentimental and pious,
they offer a distinct fictional approach to the moral and social issues of the age from a female
standpoint. |
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Paula Backscheider and Hope D. Cotton, editors, The Excursion by Frances Brooke (Lexington:
The University of Kentucky Press, 1997): Frances Brooke (1724-1789), journalist, translator, playwright, novelist,
and even co-manager of a theater, was described as "perhaps the first female novel-writer who attained a
perfect purity and polish of style." Today Brooke is known primarily for The History of Emily Montague, one of
the earliest novels about Canada, where she lived for a number of years. But it is her third novel, The
Excursion, that is an important example of the fashionable and popular English novels of the
late 1770s. |
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Paula Backscheider and Tim Dykstal, editors, The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England (London: Frank Cass, 1996): The public and
private spheres--conceived to be separate, complementary, useful in understanding human
experience and social phenomena, gendered, perhaps 'natural.' Perhaps not, this collection
of stimulating, revisionary essays proposes. Taking as their shared focus the usefulness of the model,
the contributors neither assume that the spheres can be separated unproblematically nor
that the separation is simply irrelevant. Unique in that they unite theory with practice, they
ask how the spheres interpenetrate, and provide, in fresh readings of
important early modern texts, clear evidence that they do. |
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Jonathan Bolton, Personal Landscapes: British Poets in Egypt During the
Second World War (St. Martin's Press, 1997): The work of British writers living abroad during
World War II is the focus of this intriguing volume from Jonathan Bolton. Personal Landscapes: British
Poets in Egypt during the Second World War takes its title from a verse periodical, Personal Landscape,
which published the work of British poets who lived and wrote in Egypt in the 1940s. Bolton
examines the poetry of such distinguished writers as Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, G. S. Fraser, and
Keith Douglas, arguing that their work served as the central poetical achievement of the decade. In
addition, Bolton goes on to explore the larger realm of the literature of exile, its uniqueness to the twentieth
century, its connection to war poetry, and its presence in the work of these poets.
Concluding with a look at the influence of these poets on the direction of British poetry
after the war, Personal Landscapes is a masterful glimpse into the world of some
remarkable artists at a pivotal period in twentieth-century literature. |
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George Crandell, editor, The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (Greenwood Press, 1996):
Tennessee Williams is generally regarded, along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, as one of the greatest
American dramatists of the twentieth century. This reputation rests upon more than forty years
of critical acclaim accrued by his two masterpieces--A Streetcar Named Desire and The
Glass Menagerie--and by more than sixty other plays, such as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The
Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, and The Night of the Iguana. The selection of reviews
and criticism in this volume reflects the critical response to thirty plays by Tennessee Williams
produced in New York, Chicago, or Boston from 1940 to 1982. Through representative
reviews and articles, this collection reflects the diversity of opinion generated by the production
and publication of Williams's plays. Crandell's judicious selection provides not only an
interesting commentary on individual plays, but also a documentary history of the changing
attitudes and differing perspectives within the critical community. |
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Donald H. Cunningham, The Simon and Schuster Guide to Writing (Prentice
Hall, 1997): This purpose-based rhetoric with student and professional readings
emphasizes the interactions between reading and writing. The text provides an innovative
five-part organization comprised of a Concepts section that introduces purpose and audience and the
reading/writing processes; the main section of the book, Purposes, that explains reading and writing
purposes by way of thematically organized reading selections and writing assignments; a Research
section that focuses on the resources and strategies requried for both library and field research; a
Strategies section that explains the strategies, techniques, and concepts writers use to create
effective texts; and a Handbook that offers guidelines for diction, usage, punctuation, and ensures
that students have easy access to important concepts without the repetition of most purpose-based
rhetorics.
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Donand H. Cunningham and Elizabeth O. Smith, How to Write for the World of Work, sixth edition (Harcourt, 2000): How
to Write for the World of Work incorporates up-to-date research and communication practices
and many other developments in the work place. The long anticipated revision reflects the increased
diversification and professionalism of the workforce, the globalization of the workplace, and the expansion of
computers and electronic media that have influenced all aspects of communication. |
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Jeremy Downes, Recursive Desire: Rereading the Epic Tradition (University of Alabama Press, 1997):
Recursive Desire rereads epic tradition and specific epic poems in ways that challenge traditional notions of the
genre and opens up unexplored fields of endeavor to students of epic, of poetry, and of narrative. With its more
powerful and comprehensive psychological model of poetic relations, the book provides readers with a new understanding
of epic poetry and its vital, shifting, polyvocal array--and disarray--of textual forces. |
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Bert Hitchcock
and Eugene Current-Garcia, editors, American Short Stories (Addison Wesley Longman, 1996): American Short
Stories offers a rich and diverse collection of stories by a representative selection of America's
foremost and less well-known writers. Section introductions place the stories within their
literary, cultural, and historical contexts and help readers identify the forces shaping
the American short story at each of the five periods discussed. |
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Peter Huggins, Hard Facts (Livingston Press, 1998):
"In his deft, witty, learned poems, Peter Huggins treats hard facts with a delightful, deceptive ease. He
is able to do so because he is, after all, that rarity among poets, a good writer of graceful sentences.
Such clear language handled with such a light touch welcomes the reader into the world of the poem; after all,
Huggins wants us to see and to understand as brightly and truly as he does. In poem after poem
we do." --Thomas Rabbitt
"This first collection of poems by Peter Huggins reveals a distinctive new Southern
voice. His poems pass freely from registers of homegrown surrealistic wit to intensities of feeling, plainly
expressed; he is capable of making high comedy out of the dead who return to vote in
our elections and of mourning the living, who 'take/Their place among a thousand weary
stars.' This is a book to read and read again." --Charles Martin |
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Taylor D. Littleton, The Color of Silver: William Spratling: His
Life and Art (Louisiana State University Press, 2000): In this lavishly illustrated biography of silversmith and
graphic artist William Spratling (1900-1967), Taylor D. Littleton reintroduces one of the most fascinating
American expatriates of the early twentieth century. Best known for his revolutionary silver designs,
Spratling influenced an entire generation of Mexican and American silversmiths and transformed the tiny
village of Taxco into the "Florence of Mexico." Littleton widens the context of Spratling's popular
reputation by examining the formative periods in his life and art that preceded his brilliant entrepreneurial
experiment in the Las Delicias workshop in Taxco, which left a permanent mark on Mexico's
artistic orientation and economic life.
Littleton chronicles Spratling's boyhood and college years in Alabama and his periods of residency
within the artistic "renaissance" communities of 1920s New Orleans and 1930s Mexico, analyzing the
artist's correspondence, much of it previously unavailable; his published drawings of the varied
architectural styles of Europe, the antebellum South, and colonial New Spain; and the
eclectic content of his posthumously published autobiography. Littleton also considers the influence
of young Spratling's friendships with the Sherwood Andersons, Diego Rivera, Dwight and Elizabeth
Morrow, Natalie Scott, and especially his roommate and fellow European traveler William
Faulkner, their New Orleans companionship being whimsically recorded in Sherwood
Anderson and Other Famous Creoles (1926). Finally, he outlines Spratling's recovery
from the economic collapse of Spratling y Artesanos (formerly Las Delicias) following World War
II and the resurrection of the international eminence of his designs and assesses the significance of
Spratling's cultural legacy. |
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Patrick D. Morrow, Post-Colonial Essays on
South Pacific Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, 1998): Morrow's sixth book of literary
theory and criticism, Post-Colonial Essays on South Pacific Literature draws its inspiration from
the work of Edward W. Said, beginning with an examination of Orientalism from three
critical perspectives and concluding with a commentary on Said's Culture and Imperialism.
In between, Morrow directs his critical attention to the literature of Australia, New Zealand,
and Oceania: the South Pacific Islands. |
 | Thomas E. Nunnally and Michael B. Montgomery, editors. From the
Gulf States and Beyond (University of Alabama Press, 1998). This collection of essays
demonstrates the importance of the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) as a defining linguistic
study of this century, though one of the most underused.
Emory University's Lee Pederson directed and brought to completion the Linguistic
Atlas of the Gulf States, a cumulative study of the language patterns for eight states of the interior
South, from Georgia west to Texas. The essays constituting From the Gulf States and Beyond
include a comprehensive introduction to and assessment of that mammoth project along with ten essays of
linguistic exploration.
From the Gulf States and Beyond demonstrates how LAGS material can be
used to address issues important to socio-linguists, dialectologists, folklorists, and others about the
speech and culture of the 20th-century South. In addition to the authors' own insights, these essays
show how the LAGS project has created an enormous treasury for future research.
The in-depth introduction to LAGS and the essays analyzing linguist-atlas data make
this volume an essential text for scholars analyzing LAGS and other linguistic-atlas data, as
well as for linguistics courses and modern areal dialectology. |
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Thomas Nunnally, Robin Sabino, and Cynthia Bernstein, editors. Language Variety in the South Revisited (University of
Alabama Press, 1997): Language Variety in the South Revisited is a comprehensive collection of new
research on Southern United States English by foremost scholars of regional language variation. Like its predecessor,
Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (The University of Alabama Press, 1986), this
book includes current research into African American vernacular English, but it greatly expands the
scope of investigation and offers an extensive assessment of the field. The volume encompasses studies of
contact involving African and European languages; analyses of discourse, pragmatic, lexical, phonological, and
syntactic features; and evaluation of methods of collection and examining data. The 38 essays
not only offer a wealth of information about Southern language varieties but also serve as models for regional
linguistic investigation. |
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Constance Relihan, Framing
Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative
Prose (Kent State University Press, 1996): Literary historians have been giving increased
attention to texts that have hitherto been largely ignored. The works of women, the disenfranchised, and
"commoners" have all benefited from such critical analysis. Similarly, letters, memoirs, popular poetry,
and serialized fiction have become the subject of scholarly inquiry.
Elizabethan fiction has also profited from the newer modes of critical
inquiry. Such texts as George Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F.J., John Lyly's Euphues,
George Pettie's A Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, or Nicholas Breton's The Miseries of Mavilla have often been seen as
the work of "hack" writers, inelegant aberrations that demonstrated little about the culture
of 16th-century Britain of the development of English fiction.
This collection of original essays draws on a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches, especially those influenced
by various elements of feminisim, Marxism, and cultural studies. They illuminate the richness of canonical
examples of Elizabethan fiction (Sidney's Arcadia) and less widely read works
(Henry Chettle's Piers Plainess). |
 | Miller Solomon, The Rise
of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996):
Robert Dodsley (1703-1764) started life humbly for a man destined to become his century's premier bookseller
and publisher. He began as an apprentice weaver and developed into a poet and playwright. Virtually all
significant midcentury English writers had some connection with Dodsley or with Tully's
Head, the bookshop Alexander Pope helped the young Dodsley initiate. Tully's Head, in
fact, evolved into the center for the "Athenian Nights" memorialized by Dodsley's friend Samuel Johnson.
Harry M. Solomon is the first scholar to integrate recent research by Elizabeth
Eisenstein and Alvin Kernan on the impact of print--including print's impact on political activism and canon
formation--into the study of an individual bookseller. Dodsley, he notes, presided over a period of
transition: as Edmund Moore observed in a 1753 issue of Dodsley's periodical The World, the old patronage
of learning by "the GREAT" has been superseded by "the new patrons, the BOOKSELLERS." Solomon takes this transformation
seriously, treating Dodsley as much more than the stereotypical bookseller unimaginatively reacting to the marketplace.
Solomon documents Dodsley's ingenious articulation of his financial
interests in newspapers, journals, and book publishing, proving that contrary to the traditional
view of booksellers, Dodsley was no insignificant tradesman accidentally associated with genius. Solomon
presents Dodsley, in fact, as the most influential English literary force during his lifetime. Chronicling
Dodsley's close involvement first with the couplet masterpieces of Pope and Johnson and later with
the ambitious odes of Thomas Gray and the Wartons, Solomon argues that Dodsley's enterprises were the
impetus for a conscious shift from the Augustan to the Romantic era--a shift that mirrors precisely the
development of Dodsley's own plays and poems.
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Judy Troy, From the Black Hills (Random House, 1999): A decent ordinary
life jeopardized by a catastrophic event: this is the story, mythic in its outline and substance, that Judy Troy--author
of two New York Times Notable Books and Whiting award winner--tells in From the Black
Hills.
In Wheatley, South Dakota, during the summer before Mike
Newlin is to begin college, his father, an insurance salesman, shoots and kills the young woman who
works for him as his receptionist. He disappears, and Mike is left behind in shock
and grief. With his future suddenly obscured, Mike must deal with his mother's distress, the insinuating
methods of a criminal investigator named Tom DeWitt, his girlfriend's anxieties, his longing for
an older woman who lives nearby--and the question of whether he will ever see his father again and what
will happen if he does.
As imposing as the landscape that forms its
setting, From the Black Hills conveys with compassionate power the drama of a young
man who must try to overcome his father's dark legacy. |
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Judy Troy, West of Venus (Random House, 1997):
Holly Parker has no one to turn to. Her best friend, Marvelle Holman, is consumed by grief and guilt about
the suicide of her husband. Holly's ex-husband, Burke Parker, yearns to own an automatic rifle and enjoys
blowing up gopher holes, so he's no help. Holly's affair with the married man who runs the
restaurant in Venus, Kansas, where she works as a waitress, has turned complicated and unhappy, and Owen, her
teenaged son, flirts with delinquency and sleeps with his former sixth-grade teacher. Meanwhile, her
next-door-neighbor, a veterinarian, offers Holly passion that she can't quite requite.
But there is this state trooper named Gene Rollison, who lives a life to himself in a neat, respectable trailer
on the edge of Venus. He has a knack for turning up at tough moments in Holly's life--after a traffic
accident or when someone has locked himself in a garage or before a high school kid gets into trouble.
Gene also stops by the Hearth, where Holly works (but the fireplace doesn't), and orders coffee or
a haute Midwestern meal like chicken-fried steak. He leaves Holly flustered and sometimes annoyed. Out of
self-doubt and sadness, she keeps her distance from Gene and thus from her own feelings--she can't know
the comfort and love he might offer her until she knows herself.
West of Venus is a quiet and powerful novel, rich in heartland human and small-town detail. In this
book, as in her widely praised short stories, Judy Troy demonstrates how in matters of loss and love ordinary
people lead extraordinary lives.
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Hilary Wyss, Writing Indians:
Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (University of Massachusetts
Press, 2000): A study of cultural encounter, this book takes a fresh look at the much ignored and often
misunderstood experience of Christian Indians in early America. Focusing on New England missionary
settlements from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, Hilary E. Wyss examines the ways in which
Native American converts to Christianity developed their own distinct identity within the context of a
colonial culture.
With an approach that weaves together literature, religious studies, and ethnohistory,
Wyss grounds her work in the analysis of a rarely read body of "autobiographical" writings by Christian Indians,
including letters, journal entries, and religious confessions. She then juxtaposes these
documents to the writings of better-known Native Americans such as Samson Occom as well as to the published works
of Anglo-Americans, such as Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity narrative and Eleazor Wheelock's accounts of his
charity schools.
In their search for ostensibly "authentic" Native voices, scholars have tended
to overlook the writings of Christian Indians. Yet, Wyss argues, these texts reveal the emergence of
a dynamic Native Americn identity through Christianity. More specifically, they show how the active
appropriation of New England Protestantism contributed to the formation of a particular
Indian identity that resisted colonialism by using its language against itself.
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