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  Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England

  Brooke Conti

  As seventeenth-century England wrestled with the aftereffects of the Reformation, the personal frequently conflicted with the political. In speeches, political pamphlets, and other works of religious controversy, writers from the reign of James I to that of James II unexpectedly erupt into autobiography. John Milton famously interrupts his arguments against episcopacy with autobiographical accounts of his poetic hopes and dreams, while John Donne's attempts to describe his conversion from Catholicism wind up obscuring rather than explaining. Similar moments appear in the works of Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, and the two King Jameses themselves. These autobiographies are familiar enough that their peculiarities have frequently been overlooked in scholarship, but as Brooke Conti notes, they sit uneasily within their surrounding material as well as within the conventions of confessional literature that preceded them.

  Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England positions works such as Milton's political tracts, Donne's polemical and devotional prose, Browne'sReligio Medici, and Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners as products of the era's tense political climate, illuminating how the pressures of public self-declaration and allegiance led to autobiographical writings that often concealed more than they revealed. For these authors, autobiography was less a genre than a device to negotiate competing political, personal, and psychological demands. The complex works Conti explores provide a privileged window into the pressures placed on early modern religious identity, underscoring that it was no simple matter for these authors to tell the truth of their interior life—even to themselves.

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  We Practice For It: Poems

  Ted Lardner

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  Twice Told

  Caryl Pagel

  Twice Told is a grave collection of accounts and encounters in which premonitions, visions, whispers, and coincidences circle a dire, unidentified plot. Disturbed and disturbing, over-heard and beheld, Pagel's “perpetual disclosures” chillingly foretell the past and regret the future. How terrifying! How thrilling! Sung in the hushed tones of secret, instinctual, and incremental rhythms, Pagel's beautiful “catastrophic underground echoes” have the urgent intensity of a steady descent down a spiral staircase in a dream. Moreover, Twice Told has “a frantic animal soul” that plays dead to survive its own death. When you put down this book of poems you will fear your own shadow. — Robyn Schiff

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  Artistic Liberties: American Literary Realism and Graphic Illustration, 1880-1905

  Adam T. Sonstegard

  Artistic Liberties is a landmark study of the illustrations that originally accompanied now-classic works of American literary realism and the ways editors, authors, and illustrators vied for authority over the publications.

  Though today, we commonly read major works of nineteenth-century American literature in unillustrated paperbacks or anthologies, many of them first appeared as magazine serials, accompanied by ample illustrations that sometimes made their way into the serials’ first printings as books. The graphic artists creating these illustrations often visually addressed questions that the authors had left for the reader to interpret, such as the complexions of racially ambiguous characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The artists created illustrations that depicted what outsiders saw in Huck and Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, rather than what Huck and Jim learned to see in one another. These artists even worked against the texts on occasion—for instance, when the illustrators reinforced the same racial stereotypes that writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar had intended to subvert in their works.

  Authors of American realism commonly submitted their writing to editors who allowed them little control over the aesthetic appearance of their work. In his groundbreaking Artistic Liberties, Adam Sonstegard studies the illustrations from these works in detail and finds that the editors employed illustrators who were often unfamiliar with the authors’ intentions and who themselves selected the literary material they wished to illustrate, thereby taking artistic liberties through the tableaux they created.

  Sonstegard examines the key role that the appointed artists played in visually shaping narratives—among them Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Stephen Crane’s The Monster, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—as audiences tended to accept their illustrations as guidelines for understanding the texts. In viewing these works as originally published, received, and interpreted, Sonstegard offers a deeper knowledge not only of the works, but also of the realities surrounding publication during this formative period in American literature.

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  Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death

  Caryl Pagel

  "Caryl Pagel's Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death provides a posthumous glimpse into a room where poems are knocking inside the walls and the ascending reader floats out into gaps of particulars, particles, and parts—or 'Names you will not recognize' owing to the relentless intercalation of bodiless bodies. Here is spectral evidence to be used in peeling away the argument that we don't exist. Alternatively, here are 'vestments' to clothe that existence, whose character and purpose are repeatedly reshaped atop a discontinuous ridge of occult figuration. Look out for that."—William Fuller

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  Britain Colonized: Hollywood's Appropriation of British Literature

  Jennifer Jeffers

  Britain Colonized analyzes how and why filmmakers use clichéd Hollywood formulas and American cultural standards when adapting British literature. The films discussed in this book are evidence of the way one nation remakes another, often in the image of itself or what it needs the Other to be (as the British Empire once did). Reterritorialization on the part of Hollywood manifests American cultural and capitalist hegemony over the English speaking world. Britain Colonized identifies the phenomena portending the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.

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  The Purloined Islands: Caribbean-U.S. Crosscurrents in Literature and Culture, 1880–1959

  Frederick Jeff Karem

  The Purloined Islands offers the first book-length exploration of literary and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean during the roughly eighty-year period of their greatest interaction, from the close of the Spanish-American War to the Cuban Revolution. The interconnected histories of colonization, migration, slavery, and political struggle thrust writers from both regions into a vibrant literary conversation across national borders. Jeff Karem charts this dialogue and its patterns of influence through an analysis of key literary and cultural sources in English, French, and Spanish, including a large body of rare archival evidence.

  What the author identifies in this wide-ranging exchange is the Caribbean’s vital contribution not only to the literatures of the American hemisphere but also to the literary and intellectual culture of the United States itself. Specifically, he shows how such movements as pan-Africanism, the New Negro Renaissance, and pan-American modernism have significant Caribbean roots, although the United States has often failed to recognize them, effectively "purloining" those resources without acknowledgment. As his title’s allusion to Poe’s "The Purloined Letter" suggests, Karem argues that the contributions of the Caribbean have been borrowed, appropriated, and nationalized by U.S. culture but are hidden in plain sight.

  Both its multilingual character and its emphasis on the reciprocity in cultural cross-currents will make the book of interest to readers not only in Caribbean and American cultural and literary studies but also in pan-American or border studies, Black Atlantic studies, and African American studies.

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  Owning William Shakespeare: The King's Men and Their Intellectual Property

  James J. Marino

  Copyright is by no means the only device for asserting ownership of a work. Some writers, including playwrights in the early modern period, did not even view print copyright as the most important of their authorial rights. A rich vein of recent scholarship has examined the interaction between royal monopolies, which have been identified with later notions of intrinsic authorial ownership, and the internal copy registration practices of the English book trades. Yet this dialogue was but one part of a still more complicated conversation in early modern England, James J. Marino argues; other customs and other sets of professional demands were at least as important, most strikingly in the exercise of the performance rights of plays.

  In Owning William Shakespeare James Marino explores the actors' system of intellectual property as something fundamentally different from the property regimes exercised by the London printers or the royal monopolists. Focusing on Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, and other works, he demonstrates how Shakespeare's acting company asserted ownership of its plays through intense rewriting combined with progressively insistent attribution to Shakespeare. The familiar versions of these plays were created through ongoing revision in the theater, a process that did not necessarily begin with Shakespeare's original manuscript or end when he died. An ascription by the company of any play to "Shakespeare" did not imply that it was following a fixed, authorial text; rather, Marino writes, it indicates an attempt to maintain exclusive control over a set of open-ended, theatrically revised scripts.

  Combining theater history, textual studies, and literary theory, Owning William Shakespeare rethinks both the way Shakespeare's plays were created and the way they came to be known as his. It overturns a century of scholarship aimed at re-creating the playwright's lost manuscripts, focusing instead on the way the plays continued to live and grow onstage.

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  Beckett's Masculinity: New Interpretations of Beckett in 21st C

  Jennifer Jeffers

  From Murphy to Rockaby to Worstward Ho, Beckett’s Masculinity illustrates how Samuel Beckett’s work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett’s work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. Beckett’s Masculinity shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century literary landscape by harnessing the power of parodied masculinity and perverted gender in his work.

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  A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley

  Rachel K. Carnell

  This is the first full-length biography of Delarivier Manley(c.1670-1724). A Tory pamphleteer, playwright, and satirical historian, Manley was regarded by her contemporaries Jonathan Swift and Robert Harley as a key member of the Tory propaganda team. Her best-selling political scandal chronicle The New Atlantis(1709) helped to bring down the Whig ministry in 1710. Her reputation was tarnished, however, in subsequent generations and twentieth-century scholars often misread her works as under-developed novels rather than as complex works of political satire. Carnell argues that Manley's quasi-autobiographical writings Letters Writen [sic] by Mrs. Manley (1696) and The Adventures of Rivella (1714)are coyly political self-portraits which must be read in their historical context. This is the first book to take account of all known information about Manley's life and work. It corrects many oft-repeated errors in extant scholarship, and uncovers previously unknown details about her life, including evidence about three illegitimate children by John Tilly, Governor of Fleet Prison. Carnell explores the delicate verbal negotiations required for a woman to enter the partisan hotbed of the early eighteenth-century political debate, thus offering an important historical perspective on women's continuing efforts today to be taken seriously in the political public sphere.

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  The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power

  Jennifer Jeffers

  This text interprets a wide range of Irish novels of the 1990s, focusing on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. It looks at how identities do, or don't, conform to familiar notions of sexuality, gender and culture and goes on to say that Irish identity is a matter of economics.

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  Tornado

  Ted Lardner

  “Tornado is a book of ravishing and precise beauty. Death, said Wallace Stevens, is the mother of beauty, and so it is here; around the loss of a beloved sister in childhood, Ted Lardner has spun a radiant web of language by which he reveals what does not and cannot die, in the scale of nature above and underground, in the movements of time, and in the ongoing reach of human tenderness that ‘glides through our skins like a wave, lighting it up from inside.’”—Alicia Ostriker

  “Ted Lardner enlarges our range of wonder. For him, the task is to bring the jolt of another world to us by showing us that a springtime apple tree is ‘a brain in flower’ that comes to us ‘from the other side of human language.’ Each line of Tornado sends out a beam that flashes in the line then bounces like sonar in the reader’s deeper parts where we keep our beloved dead. . . . It’s as if Lardner did not write on a keyboard but with a typewriter ball with images, not letters. The ‘tornado’ is his image for leaving, for an ‘intersection’ where the living pass beyond the visible yet begin the Orphic need for imagination. At the center of this vortex Ted Lardner creates the space where the dead still have their Being and make their Rilkean demand that we change our lives. This is a wonderful book.”—Bill Tremblay

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  Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel

  Rachel K. Carnell

  Narrative realism has long been understood as a full account of “real life” and the individual self. Breaking with this traditional history, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel demonstrates that the formal conventions of narrative realism emerged at the end of the seventeenth century in response to an explosion of partisan writings that offered rival versions of political selfhood. The novel mediated between the competing Whig, Tory, and Jacobite versions of selfhood that emerged during the upheavals of the 1680s and flourished through the mid 1750s. The rise of the novel was connected to the rise of “the individual,” as traditional accounts proposed, but this Whig individual was just one of several partisan versions of the self that were vying for pre-eminence during this period.

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  British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832

  Gary Dyer

  Gary Dyer breaks new ground by surveying and interpreting hundreds of satirical poems and prose narratives published in Britain during the Romantic period. These works have been neglected by literary scholars, satisfied that satire disappeared in the late eighteenth century. Dyer argues that satire continued to be a major and widely-read genre, and that contemporary political and social conflicts gave new meanings to conventions inherited from classical Rome and eighteenth-century England. He includes a bibliography of more than 700 volumes containing satirical verses.

  Revisionary survey of satire in the Romantic period, setting work of major Romantic figures such as Byron in new context

  Was the first comprehensive bibliography of volumes containing satirical verse

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  Images of Matter : Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

  Yvonne Bruce

  Itineraries, perambulations, and surveys : the intersections of chorography and cartography in the sixteenth century / John M. Adrian -- To serve my purpose : interpretive agency in George Wither's A collection of emblemes / Rob Browning -- The three noble kinsmen : Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher / Kathryn L. Lynch -- Ovid and the question of politics in early modern England / Heather James -- Parodies lost : Aretino reads Raimondi /Helen M. Whall -- Accepting the flesh : George Herbert and the sacrament of Holy Communion / Jeannie Sargent Judge -- Twixt treason and convenience : some images of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford / Julia B. Griffin -- Backbiters, flatterers, and monarchs : domestic politics in The tragedy of Mariam / Heather E. Ostman -- Gender and the market in Henry VI, I / Jennifer A. Rich -- Hrethel's heirloom : kinship, succession, and weaponry in Beowulf / Erin Mullally -- Shylock : Shakespeare's bad Jew / Jay L. Halio -- Coping with providentialism : trauma, identity, and the failure of the English Reformation / Scott Lucas.

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  The Selected Works of Delarivier Manley

  Rachel K. Carnell

  A modern critical edition of the works of Delarivier Manley, providing complete texts of all works, re-set with scholarly annotation. Her work bridges the sphere of literary and political history and this edition should be of interest to academics in women's writing and history, eighteenth-century studies and the history of journalism. Manley is on the cusp of rediscovery, as over the last decade and a half, scholars have touched on her significance as a political journalist, playwright and novelist and examined her work within its political and historical contexts. An annotated edition of The New Atalantis is reprinted here along with current findings on Manley's work as a political propagandist and the most recent scholarship on her part in the history of the novel.

  • Includes all of Manley's known journalism
  • Brings scholarship up to date on The New Atlantis, first republished over ten years ago by Pickering & Chatto

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  African American Literacies Unleashed Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom, 1st Edition

  Ted Lardner and Arnetha Ball

  This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.

  Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.

  African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.

  Arnetha Ball is an associate professor of education at Stanford University. She is the author of Carriers of the Torch and coeditor of Black Linguistics and Bahktinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning.

  Ted Lardner is an associate professor of English at Cleveland State University and codirector of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. His poetry and essays have been published in LUNA, Pleiades, and other journals.

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  The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures

  Frederick Jeff Karem

  To what extent has the growing popular demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fueled the expectation that the most important task for regional and ethnic writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material to their readers? In The Romance of Authenticity, Jeff Karem argues that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions that authenticity should be prized as a goal of regional and ethnic literatures, it is in fact a dangerously restrictive category of literary judgment. He draws on a large body of archival evidence to show how intense political and economic interests have determined what literary representations are deemed authentic, not only constraining what such writers can publish but also limiting the ways in which their works are interpreted.

  The author specifically discusses the work of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, Rolando Hinojosa, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Exploring these writers’ different responses to the expectation that they act as cultural representatives of the Southern, Southwestern, African American, Latino, or Native American experience, Karem finds that some refuse that role and others embrace it. The Romance of Authenticity concludes that despite the celebration of hybridity in contemporary theories of identity, the politics of cultural authenticity in publishing and criticism produce precisely the opposite effect, reducing regional and ethnic writers to exotic objects of desire.

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  I Dream of Microwaves

  Imad Rahman

  Amazon.com review--In his smashing debut story collection I Dream of Microwaves, Imad Rahman navigates the world of marginal actors looking for work--and love--in quirky, unseemly venues. Following the travails of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a young Pakistani actor whose career highlight has been playing perpetrators in crime reenactments on America's Most Wanted, Rahman offers over-the-top episodes of astounding wit and hilarity, in no particular chronological order, as Kareem: finds work as a costumed hawker of a trendy drink at a dive bar where he battles a dwarven rival for the crowd's business; reprises Brando's role of Kurtz in a musical production of Apocalypse Now at the Steak 'N Stage dinner theatre; and partakes in his recurring girlfriend, Eileen's, plan to pry money from her philanthropic grandmother. In the latter, title story, Kareem pretends to be a Bosnian war survivor, pitted against Eileen's ruse. The B-listers recognize each other and, rather than tattle, enter into a duel of "acting one-upsmanship," telling increasingly grandiose stories of atrocity and third-world living. After joining a Shakespeare troupe stranded in Pakistan and watching their driver revive his van with a mouthful of gas, then immediately light a cigarette without incident, Kareem: "expected his head to pop off with a bang, flames bellowing out his open neck." Self-deprecating and funny, Kareem is a memorable thespian worth following around. --Michael Ferch

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  I Dream of Microwaves: Stories

  Imad Rahman

  A bitingly funny debut story collection trails a Pakistani-American actor searching for a way to play himself in "real, actual life."
  
  When B-movie-grade actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar opens the mail one day, he find a one-way bus ticket to Cleveland and a note from his ex-girlfriend Eileen that reads, "Good news. I am through with big dicks and henceforth thinking constantly of you." So begin the linked misadventures of one of the most endearing ne'er-do-wells to grace recent American fiction.
  Kareem drops his job portraying Hispanic criminals on America's Most Wanted and makes his way to Ohio, where he puts his dramatic skills to the test by impersonating a Bosnian refugee, in an attempt to help Eileen cash in on her grandmother's philanthropy. Such virtuosity can't last, however, and Kareem moves on, looking for a way to be himself when the camera isn't rolling. In one story, he pushes drinks as the Zima Zorro at the Ancient Mariner Sports Bar and Grill; in another he roughs up Unrepentant Privilege Abuse Perpetrators as a rental video repossessor. He returns to the theater, as stage manager to an incestuous Shakespearean troupe adrift in Pakistan, and as a Kilgore hell-bent on getting bumped up to Kurtz in a musical dinner theater production of Apocalypse Now. As he follows Kareem's quest for the big breaks in work and love, Imad Rahman explores the struggle for success and self-invention in contemporary life with originality, irreverence, and an absurdist wit that strikes unerringly close to the bone.

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  Idleness Working: The Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower

  Gregory M. Sadlek

  Inspired by the critical theories of M. M. Bakhtin, Idleness Working is a groundbreaking study of key works in the Western literature of love from Classical Rome to the late Middle Ages. The study focuses on the evolution of the ideologically-saturated discourse of love's labor contained in these works and thus explores them in the context of ancient and medieval theories of labor and leisure, which themselves are seen to evolve through the course of Western history. What emerges from this study is a fresh appreciation and deepened understanding of such well-known classics of love literature as Ovid's Ars amatoria, Andreas Capellanus' De amore, Alan of Lille's Complaint of Nature, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.

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  Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative

  Jennifer Jeffers

  In the twentieth century painters, playwrights, and novelists began to produce non-representational works that eschewed narrative and were entirely devoted to an achromatic colorscape. Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative overturns critical exegesis that interprets these works as negative or as the «end» of art by offering a new way to think about and to articulate works devoid of narrative and color. When understood from a different critical perspective, art and literature produced at the end of narrative challenge our traditional ways of interpreting all art production.

  Nominated for Rene Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association

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  Exchanges: Reading and Writing About Consumer Culture

  Ted Lardner

  With general discussions from focused case studies, and academic and popular sources, Exchanges engages students and teachers in an analysis of consumer culture. Through readings that explore the intersection between consumerism and key themes-such as group and personal identity, education, entertainment, and place-the book documents the social space we inhabit. Pre-writing exercises, group work, and writing assignments involving Internet research explore consumer culture and illustrate how human beings are consumers, biologically and socially. For anyone interested in consumer culture.

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  Multicultural Detective Fiction: Murder from the "Other" Side

  Adrienne Gosselin

  Explores detective stories by authors whose cultural communities are not those of the traditional Euro-American male hero, whose cultural experiences have been excluded from the traditional detective formula, and whose cultural aesthetic alters the formula itself.

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  Contextualizing Aesthetics: From Plato to Lyotard

  Jennifer Jeffers

  History. The ancient (Greek and Roman) period ; The modern (18th- and 19th-century) period -- The analytic critique of the aesthetic. The analytic critique of aesthetic experience ; The problem of defining art ; The status of the work of art ; The analytic critique of the expression theory of art -- Continental and contemporary theory. Myths of modernism ; Art and postmodernity ; The critique of truth ; Cultural materialism ; The postmodern sublime