A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations.
Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.
Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.
Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio includes some of the best regional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from forty contemporary writers, both established and up-and-coming. The wide range of material from authors such as David Baker, Don Bogen, Michelle Burke, Richard Hague, Donald Ray Pollock, and others, offers the reader a window into daily life in the region. The people, the landscape, the struggles, and the deepest undercurrents of what it means to be from and of a place are revealed in these original, deeply moving, and sometimes shocking pieces.
The book is divided into four sections: Family & Folks, The Land, The Grind, and Home & Away, each of which explores a different aspect of the place that these authors call home. The sections work together beautifully to capture what it means to live, to love, and to die in this particular slice of Appalachia. The writing is accessible and often emotionally raw; Every River on Earth invites all types of readers and conveys a profound appreciation of the region’s character.
The authors also offer personal statements about their writing, allowing the reader an intimate insight into their processes, aesthetics, and inspirations. What is it to be an Appalachian? What is it to be an Appalachian in Ohio? This book vividly paints that picture.
Every River on Earth
David Lee Garrison
I look out the window and see
through the neighbor’s window
to an Amish buggy
where three children are peeping back,
and in their eyes I see the darkness
of plowed earth hiding seed.
Wind pokes the land in winter,
trying to waken it,
and in the melting snow
I see rainbows and in them
every river on earth. I see all the way
to the ocean, where sand and stones
embrace each falling wave
and reach back to gather it in.
Here is the first major-figure anthology of American poetry of the colonial and early national periods, an indispensable volume for both students and scholars of American literature and civilization.
Five major literary figures are spotlighted: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Edward Taylor (1642?"-1729), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Philip Freneau (1752-1832), and William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878). An introduction to each chapter summarizes the life of the poet, reviews his or her literary career, describes and evaluates artistic achievement, and places the poet in an intellectual context. The writer's relationship to changing religious, philosophical, political, and cultural patters is established. The contemporary perspective is augmented by the inclusion of an appendix which presents three important poems by other writers: Micheal Wigglesworth's "God's Controversy with New England," Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor, and Joel Barlow's "Hasty Pudding."
Eberwein goes beyond the most popular and familiar works to include those of unrecognized literary merit, presenting a thoroughly unique approach which illuminates the full range of the writers' themes, forms and poetic voices.
The New Generation Play Project was a daring experiment in American children's theatre. Begun in 1989 by a consortium that included the Seattle Children's Theatre, The Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Stage One: The Louisville Children's Theatre, and the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, the NGPP raised half a million dollars to commission major American dramatists to create new works for young people and to produce these plays over a several-year period.
This book provides the full text of the plays produced through the NGPP:
In his introduction, Coleman Jennings describes the work of the NGPP, some of the controversies surrounding its selection of playwrights who do not ordinarily write for young audiences, as well as the playwrights' reactions to the project, and the critical reception of the plays. Suzan Zeder, one of the nation's leading playwrights for family audiences, supplies the foreword.
After years of studying piano as a young woman in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson curated her music book, a common practice at the time. Now part of the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, this bound volume of 107 pieces of published sheet music includes the poet’s favorite instrumental piano music and vocal music, ranging from theme and variation sets to vernacular music, which was also enjoyed by the family’s servants.
Offering a fresh historical perspective on a poetic voice that has become canonical in American literature, this original study brings this artifact to life, documenting Dickinson’s early years of musical study through the time her music was bound in the early 1850s, which tellingly coincided with the writing of her first poems. Using Dickinson’s letters and poems alongside newspapers and other archival sources, George Boziwick explores the various composers, music sellers, and publishers behind this music and Dickinson’s attendance at performances, presenting new insights into the multiple layers of meaning that music held for her.
In a letter from 1845, the 14-year-old Emily Dickinson asked her friend Abiah Root if she had started collecting flowers and plants for a herbarium: "it would be such a treasure to you; 'most all the girls are making one." Emily's own album of more than 400 pressed flowers and plants, carefully preserved, has long been a treasure of Harvard's Houghton Library. This beautifully produced, slipcased volume now makes it available to all readers interested in the life and writings of Emily Dickinson.
The care that Emily put into her herbarium, as Richard Sewall points out, goes far beyond what one might expect of a botany student her age: "Take Emily's herbarium far enough, and you have her." The close observation of nature was a lifelong passion, and Emily used her garden flowers as emblems in her poetry and her correspondence. Each page of the album is reproduced in full color at full size, accompanied by a transcription of Dickinson's handwritten labels. Introduced by a substantial literary and biographical essay, and including a complete botanical catalog and index, this volume will delight scholars, gardeners, and all readers of Emily Dickinson's poetry.
This work reprint, annotates, and indexes virtually all mention of Emily Dickinson in the first decade of her publication, tripling the known references to the poet during the nineties. Much of this material, drawn from scrapbooks of clippings, rare journals, and crumbling newspapers, was on the verge of extinction.
Modern audiences will be struck by the impact of Dickinson’s poetry on her first readers. We learn much about the taste of the period and the relationship between publishers, reviewers, and the reading public. It demonstrates that Dickinson enjoyed a wider popular reception than had been realized: readers were astonished by her creative brilliance.
In this inventive work on Emily Dickinson’s poetry, Cristanne Miller traces the roots of Dickinson’s unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style, finding them in sources as different as the New Testament and the daily patterns of women’s speech. Dickinson writes as she does both because she is steeped in the great patriarchal texts of her culture, from the Bible and hymns to Herbert’s poetry and Emerson’s prose, and because she is conscious of writing as a woman in an age and culture that assume great and serious poets are male.
Miller observes that Dickinson’s language deviates from normal construction along definable and consistent lines; consequently it lends itself to the categorical analysis of an interpretive “grammar” such as the one she has constructed in this book. In order to facilitate the reading of Dickinson’s poems and to reveal the values and assumptions behind the poet’s manipulations of language, Miller examines in this grammar how specific elements of the poet’s style tend to function in various contexts. Because many, especially modernist, poets use some of the same techniques, the grammar throws light on the poetic syntax of other writers as well.
In the course of her analysis, Miller draws not only on traditional historical and linguistic sources but also on current sociolinguistic studies of gender and speech and on feminist descriptions of women’s writing. Dickinson’s language, she concludes, could almost have been designed as a model for twentieth-century theories of what a women’s language might be. As a critical examination of the relationship between linguistic style and literary identity in America’s greatest woman poet, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar provides a significant addition to feminist literary studies.
Widely considered the definitive edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems, this landmark collection presents her poems here for the first time “as she preserved them,” and in the order in which she wished them to appear. It is the only edition of Dickinson’s complete poems to distinguish clearly those she took pains to copy carefully onto folded sheets in fair hand—presumably to preserve them for posterity—from the ones she kept in rougher form. It is also unique among complete editions in presenting the alternate words and phrases Dickinson chose to use on the copies of the poems she kept, so that we can peer over her shoulder and see her composing and reworking her own poems.
The world’s foremost scholar of Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller, guides us through these stunning poems with her deft and unobtrusive notes, helping us understand the poet’s quotations and allusions, and explaining how she composed, copied, and circulated her poems. Miller’s brilliant reordering of the poems transforms our experience of them.
A true delight, this award-winning collection brings us closer than we have ever been to the writing practice of one of America’s greatest poets. With its clear, uncluttered page and beautiful production values, it is a gift for students of Emily Dickinson and for anyone who loves her poems.
From the award-winning author of Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind "The Mystery of Marie Roget" comes a compelling argument for the identity of Emily Dickinson’s true love
Proud of my broken heart
Since thou didst break it,
Proud of the pain I
Did not feel till thee . . .
Those words were written by Emily Dickinson to a married man. Who was he?
For a century or more the identity of Emily Dickinson’s mysterious “Master” has been eagerly sought, especially since three letters from her to him were found and published in 1955. In Emily Dickinson in Love, John Evangelist Walsh provides the first book-length treatment of this fascinating subject, offering a solution based wholly on documented facts and the poet’s own writings.
Crafting the affair as a love story of rare appeal, and writing with exquisite attention to detail, in Part I Walsh reveals and meticulously proves the Master to be Otis Lord, a friend of the poet’s father and a man of some reputation in law and politics. Part II portrays the full dimensions of their thirty-year romance, most of it clandestine, including a series of secret meetings in Boston.
After uncovering and confirming the Master’s identity, Walsh fits that information into known events of Emily’s life to make sense of facts long known but little understood—Emily’s decision to dress always in white, for instance, or her extreme withdrawal from a normal existence when she had previously been an active, outgoing friend to many men and women.
In a lengthy section of Notes and Sources, Walsh presents his proofs in abundant detail, demonstrating that the evidence favors one man so irresistibly that there is left no room for doubt. Each reader will decide if he has truly succeeded in making the case for Otis Lord.
Emily Dickinson should stand as a major gothic author among her nineteenth-century American contemporaries, but two factors have previously prevented her inclusion in such company. Perhaps the most obvious is the problem of the genre: Dickinson writes gothic poetry, whereas gothic fiction defines the genre. In addition, her poetic personae have served over the decades to prompt critics to “protect” her; traditional critics concentrated on the sweet, romantic elements of her oeuvre. More recent readers, notably Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Jane Egerwein, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, have begun studying Dickinson's gothic traits; Emily Dickinson's Gothic explores Dickinsonian gothicism with the systematic rigor it demands and deserves.
Emily Dickinson's Gothic also addresses sociohistorical concerns, from hallowed gothic conventions dating from Horace Walpole's eighteenth century to such modernist neogothic topics as rape, the void, and disjunctive language that appear in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wardrop recognizes the full extent to which the gothic pervades Dickinson's canon and the means by which the gothic determines her aesthetic. Such full consideration of women's gothicism allows the placement of Dickinson within a literary context, both in terms of American writers and in terms of women writers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, “was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own.” His celebrated essays—the twelve published in Essays: First Series (1841) and eight in Essays: Second Series (1844)—are here presented for the first time in an authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.
The text is reproduced from the second and third volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical edition which draws on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last half century. Alfred R. Ferguson was founding editor of the edition, followed by Joseph Slater (until 1996).
Ralph Waldo Emerson is universally recognized as one of America's most influential authors and thinkers. Before achieving eminence as lecturer, essayist, and poet, though, he was a Unitaarian preacher. Emerson in His Sermons is the first major study of the sermons since the publication of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Susan Roberson examines Emerson's ministerial career from 1826 to 1832, shedding new light on those early, crucial years in Emerson's personal and intellectual development.
Treating the sermons extensively as an autobiographical text, Roberson establishes that Emerson's years in the pulpit were pivotal and that his sermons are key texts in revealing the essential development of his thought. Central to Roberson's explication of the sermons is Emerson's conception of self-reliance, his invention of a new hero for a new age, and his merging of his own identity with that heroic idea.
Roberson focuses on Emerson's reaction to what was perhaps the most signifcant event in his personal life: the death of his young wife, Ellen, of tuberculosis in 1831, after only sixteen months of marriage. Roberson's correlation of the sermons written during that time with the complexity of Emerson's emotional and intellectual response to the tragedy of Ellen's illness and death is the most detailed and sophisticated treatment of that material to date.
Roberson understands Emerson's emergence from the ministry as his rejection of ready-made institutions and sytems of thought. Through her careful readings of the sermons, Roberson finds that Emerson's objective was less the translation of his life into writing than the translation of his life through writing. By considering the sermons in this way, Roberson is able to enrich our understanding of the private and passionte impulses of this seminal thinker.
Emerson in His Sermons offers the first real look at how the sermons fit into Emerson's own development and will have a far-reaching impact on Emerson scholarship. Anyone concerned with the cultural and religious history of America will find this book invaluable.
This long-awaited volume offers the general reader the heart of Emerson’s journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for more than fifty years, beginning with the “luckless ragamuffin ideas” of his college days.
Emerson as revealed in his journals is more spontaneous, more complex, more human and appealing than he appears in the published works. This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical (“I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly”), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.
Drawing from Harvard’s sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals—but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read—Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.
"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote--and in this book, the leading scholar of New England literary culture looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson's 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."
Born into the age of inspired amateurism that emerged from the ruins of pre-revolutionary political, religious, and cultural institutions, Emerson took up the challenge of thinking about the role of the United States alone and in the world. With characteristic authority and grace, Buell conveys both the style and substance of Emerson's accomplishment--in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world, and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher. Here we see clearly the paradoxical key to his success, the fierce insistence on independence that acted so magnetically upon all around him. Steeped in Emerson's writings, and in the life and lore of the America of his day, Buell's book is as individual--and as compelling--as its subject. At a time when Americans and non-Americans alike are struggling to understand what this country is, and what it is about, Emerson gives us an answer in the figure of this representative American, an American for all, and for all times.
A radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition
Emancipating Pragmatism is a radical rereading of Emerson that posits African- American culture, literature, and jazz as the embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. It traces Emerson's philosophical legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse.
Emerson’s pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic thought that aspires toward democracy cannot ignore and must reckon with its racial roots. Magee looks at the ties between pragmatism and African-American culture as they manifest themselves in key texts and movements, such as William Carlos Williams’s poetry; Ralph Ellison’s discourse in Invisible Man and Juneteenth and his essays on jazz; the poetic works of Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O'Hara; as well as the “new jazz” being forged at clubs like The Five Spot in New York.
Ultimately, Magee calls into question traditional maps of pragmatist lineage and ties pragmatism to the avant-garde American tradition.
Everyone knows that Emerson was a moralist, but what does that really mean? In an attempt to answer that question, Gustaaf Van Cromphout provides in Emerson's Ethics a detailed and philosophically grounded discussion of Emerson's moral thought. In this first comprehensive study of Emerson's ethics in the broader context of ethical theory, Van Cromphout explores Emerson's answers to what he considered the basic question facing any thinking human being: "How should I live?"
Van Cromphout begins by examining Emerson's college essays on ethics—essays that reflect his response to the moral thought prevailing in his intellectual environment. He then discusses the mature Emerson's attempt to establish ethics on a surer foundation than the religion inherited from his forebears, showing that Emerson was influenced significantly by Kant's moral thought.
He goes on to examine Emerson's search for a morally competent self in an age when the very notion of "self" was under serious threat. The ethical dimension of Emerson's politics and his theories of friendship and love, as well as the quest for a life worth living in the modern world, are also addressed. The last chapters are devoted to nature and literature. Van Cromphout explores Emerson's understanding of nature as a focus of ethical responsibility, and he examines the corruptibility of language, the ethics of self- expression, and the moral responsibilities of writers toward their audiences. Emerson believed that ethics permeated every aspect of human life. By examining Emerson's understanding of ethics and his contribution to ethical thought, Emerson's Ethics shows one of the truly great minds in American culture confronting issues of fundamental relevance to all human beings. Filling an important gap in Emerson studies, this book will appeal not only to readers interested in Emerson and his significance in American thought and literature but also to readers concerned with ethics and, more generally, with the interrelations of literature and philosophy.
In this provocative study, Christopher Windolph analyzes Emersonian naturalism from the standpoint of nonlinearity, offering new ways of reading and thinking about Emerson’s stance toward naturalism and the influence of science on his thought. Drawing on ideas in perspective theory, architecture, and nonlinear dynamics to argue that Emerson’s natural philosophy follows from his analysis of the development of organic forms, Windolph breaks new ground in Emerson studies by exploring how considerations of shape and the act of seeing underpin all of Emerson’s theories about nature.
Bringing to his study a focused attention to the history of Western science and philosophy, Windolph reexamines Emerson’s understanding of how the act of seeing occurs and of the eye’s ability to see through appearances to organizing principles, showing how Emerson’s naturalism extends beyond the narrow confines of traditional linear science. Through extensive readings of Emerson’s journals, essays, and lectures, Windolph shows that Emerson was an empirical idealist who integrated a scientific approach to nature with an exploration of nonlinear principles, revealing him to be more prescient in his writings about certain recent developments in scientific thought than has been realized.
This work makes a major contribution to the ongoing study of Emerson and science, expanding Emerson’s role as a major American philosopher while rebutting those who see him primarily as a rhetorician or poetic propagandist. Emerson’s Nonlinear Nature opens new ways of thinking about Emerson’s work in its nineteenth-century contexts, reassesses his reception in twentieth-century criticism, and makes a strong case for his continuing relevance in the century ahead.
In 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to a critical pass. He had lost his wife and was on the brink of leaving his career as a minister. In this reduced state he traveled to New Hampshire, where he made his famous decision to pursue wholeness--in his life and in his writing. This book reveals how Emerson went about achieving this purpose--and how he conceived a uniquely American literary practice.
Central to this project were the aims and methods of natural science, which Emerson discovered in spectacular form at the Museum of Natural History (Jardin des Plantes) in Paris exactly a year after his momentous decision. Lee Rust Brown describes Emerson's use of these scientific techniques to integrate a disparate, constantly enlarging field of subject matter--ultimately, to reconceive himself as an institution of private research and public presentation not unlike the museum itself, methodically gathering specimens from the exotic frontiers of experience and setting them out, in their manifold affinities, on common ground.
The Emerson Museum shows how this undertaking transformed the legacy of European romanticism into a writing project answerable to American urgencies. The natural science of the time was itself informed by romantic demands for wholeness of prospect, and its methods offered Emerson a way to confront an American reality in which any manifestation of unity--literary, political, philosophical, psychological--had to embrace an expanding and fragmenting field of objective elements. In the experimental format of Emerson's essays, Brown identifies the evolution of this new approach and the emergence of wholeness as a national literary project.
"Literary and feminist scholars will want to take a look." —Publishers Weekly
The last decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, now considered among the most important thinkers in US history. She is best known for fiction—such as the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892)—and nonfiction, including her manifesto Women and Economics (1898), a work of intersectional sociology avant la lettre. Nevertheless, as a young writer, Gilman made her living delivering lectures. One cannot know Gilman without some knowledge of this body of lectures; this book fills that critical gap in Gilman scholarship.
Since the recovery of Charlotte Perkins Gilman began in the late 1960s and continued with the republication of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” in the 1970s, her image in cultural memory has been increasingly celebrated. Andrew J. Ball presents here fifty previously unpublished texts. They trace the development of Gilman’s thoughts on diverse subjects like gender, education, labor, science, theology, and politics—forming an intellectual diary of her growth.
These lectures are not just a testament to Gilman’s personal evolution, but also a crucial contribution to the foundations of American sociology and philosophy. The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890–1894 marks a historic moment, unveiling the hidden genius of Gilman's oratory legacy.
An annotated selection of unpublished letters by Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister.
Retrieved from seven different libraries, this corpus of letters was preserved by the Manning family chiefly for their value as records of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work; but they ironically also illuminate the life and mind of a fascinating correspondent and citizen of New England with incisive views and commentaries on her contemporaries, her role as a woman writer, Boston and Salem literary culture, and family life in mid-19th-century America.
This book illuminates Elizabeth's early life; the trauma caused for sister and brother by the death of their father; her and her brother's education; and the tensions the two children experienced when they moved in with their mother's family, the welthier Mannings, instead of the poorer though socially more venerable Hawthornes, following their father's death. The letters portray Elizabeth's constrained relationship with Nathaniel's wife Sofia Peabody and counter Sophia's portrayal of her sister-in-law as a recluse, oddity, and "queer scribbler."
These 118 letters also reveal Elizabeth Hawthorne's tremendous gifts as a thinker, correspondent, and essayist, her interest in astronomy, a lifelong drive toward self-edification in many fields, and her extraordinary relationship with Nathaniel. As a sibling and a fellow author, they were sometimes lovingly codependent and sometimes competitive. Finally, her writing reveals the larger worlds of politics, war, the literary landscape, class, family life, and the freedoms and constraints of a woman's role, all by a heretofore understudied figure.
The leading feminist intellectual of her day, Margaret Fuller has been remembered for her groundbreaking work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which recharted the gender roles of nineteenth-century men and women. In this new collection, the full range of her literary career is represented from her earliest poetry to her final dispatch from revolutionary Italy. For the first time, the complete texts of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes are printed together, along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous "Autobiographical Romance" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian culture, mythology, and the Bible
Jeffrey Steele's introduction provides an important revision of Fuller's biography and literary career, tracing the growth of her feminism and her development into one of America's preeminent social critics. No other writer of Fuller's day could match the range of her experience. Growing up in the world of Boston intellectuals, she was the close friend of the Alcotts, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau. But she also traveled adventurously to the western frontier, canoed down rapids with Chippewa Indians, visited the outcast and the poor in New York's institutions and prisons, and experienced the rigors of war during the bombardment of Rome. As a whole, this anthology provides the material to understand one of the most fascinating nineteenth-century American women writers.
With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature.
The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.
Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a journalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before.
One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel’s later discovery were plot notes Whitman had made in one of his private notebooks.
Whitman’s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inaccessible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks’ wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman’s beautiful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman’s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.
Now, nearly forty years after its original translation into English, Roger Asselineau's complete and magisterial biography of Walt Whitman will remind readers of the complex weave of traditions in Whitman scholarship. It is startling to recognize how much of our current understanding of Whitman was already articulated by Asselineau nearly half a century ago. Throughout its eight hundred pages, The Evolution of Walt Whitman speaks with authority on a vast range of topics that define both Whitman the man and Whitman the mythical personage. Remarkably, most of these discussions remain fresh and relevant, and that is in part because they have been so influential.
In particular, The Evolution of Walt Whitman inaugurated the study of Leaves of Grass as a lifelong work in progress, and it marked the end of the habit of talking about Leaves as if it were a single unified book. Asselineau saw Whitman's poetry “not as a body of static data but as a constantly changing continuum whose evolution must be carefully observed.” Throughout Evolution, Asselineau placed himself in the role of the observer, analyzing Whitman's development with a kind of scientific detachment. But behind this objective persona burned the soul of a risk taker who was willing to rewrite Whitman studies by bravely proposing what was then a controversial biographical source for Whitman's art—his homosexual desires.
The Evolution of Walt Whitman is a reminder that extraordinary works of criticism never exist in and of themselves. In this expanded edition, Roger Asselineau has provided a new essay summarizing his own continuing journey with Whitman. A foreword by Ed Folsom, editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly, regards Evolution as the genesis of contemporary Whitman studies.
In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies.
Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.
Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era—among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences.
In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider—a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.
For many years Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow has been regarded as a classic American regional novelist. But Glasgow is far more than a Southern writer, as Linda Wagner demonstrates in this fascinating reassessment of her work.
A Virginia lady, Glasgow began to write at a time when the highest praise for a literary woman was to be mistaken for a male writer. In her early fiction, published at the turn of the century, all attention is focused on male protagonists; the strong female characters who do appear early in these novels gradually fade into the background.
But Ellen Glasgow grew to become a woman who, born to be protected from the very life she wanted to chronicle, moved “beyond convention” to live her life on her own terms. And as her own self-image changed, the perspective of her novels became more feminine, the female characters moved to center stage, and their philosophies became central to her themes. Glasgow’s best novels, then—Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, and the romantic trilogy that includes The Sheltered Life—came late in her life, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists.
Glasgow’s increased self-assurance as writer and woman led to a far greater awareness of craft. Her style became more highly imaged, more suggestive, as though she wished to widen the range of resources available to move her readers. She became a writer both popular and respected. Her novels appeared as selections of the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one became a best seller. At the same time she was chosen as one of the few female members of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1942 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life.
Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy is the first extensive examination of the relationship of Hemingway to his hometown, Oak Park, Illinois, and the influence its people, places, and underlying values had on his early work. In this volume, 11 leading Hemingway scholars explore various aspects of these issues, from the migration of the Hemingway family from Connecticut to Illinois in the 1850s, to Hemingway's high-school stories and the dramatic breakthrough of In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises. With these books, Hemingway suddenly became one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The essays in this collection explore the social and family background that provided the material and sensibility for these literary masterpieces.
In these essays, James Nagel provides the first account ever published of the move of the Hemingway family from Connecticut to Illinois. Writing his account after the discovery of a lost diary by one of Hemingway's ancestors, Nagel explores dates and places, the motivation for the move to the Midwest, and the tragedies that awaited the family there, including the death of two young men in the Civil War. Michael Reynolds, the premiere biographer of Ernest Hemingway, describes the culture of the village of Oak Park at the turn of the century, and Larry E. Grimes presents an important new assessment of the religious training the Hemingway children received. David Marut discusses the short stories Hemingway published while still a highschool student, and Carlos Azevedo, Mary Anne O'Neal, Abby H. P. Werlock, and George Monteiro examine the early stories about Nick Adams. In an insightful afterword, Morris Buske, the Historian of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, reflects on the differing values of Ernest Hemingway's parents, the artistic, cultured Hall family as opposed to the scientific, more practical Hemingways, charting the influence the two traditions had on the young Ernest.
In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works.
Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright’s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O’Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to Diggins, O’Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, O’Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom.
Melding a penetrating assessment of O’Neill’s works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene O’Neill’s America offers a striking new view of America’s greatest playwright—and a new picture of American democracy itself.
Making use of invaluable archival material, Feinberg's biographical account is followed by a study of Tabori's experimental theatre work. As did prominent avant-gardists such as Grotowski or Chaikin, Tabori sought to open up new vistas in an otherwise mainstream theatre system. Feinberg pays special attention to Tabori's theatrical innovations, most movingly found in his Holocaust plays. There Feinberg shows the ways in which Tabori's theatre becomes a locus of remembrance (Gedächtnisort) and of unique, engaging memory-work (Erinnerungsarbeit).
Edith Wharton (1862–1937), who lived nearly half of her life during the cinema age when she published many of her well-known works, acknowledged that she disliked the movies, characterizing them as an enemy of the imagination. Yet her fiction often referenced film and popular Hollywood culture, and she even sold the rights to several of her novels to Hollywood studios.
Edith Wharton on Film explores these seeming contradictions and examines the relationships among Wharton’s writings, the popular culture in which she published them, and the subsequent film adaptations of her work (three from the 1930s and four from the 1990s). Author Parley Ann Boswell examines the texts in which Wharton referenced film and Hollywood culture and evaluates the extant films adapted from Wharton’s fiction.
The volume introduces Wharton’s use of cinema culture in her fiction through the 1917 novella Summer, written during the nation’s first wave of feminism, in which the heroine Charity Royall is moviegoer and new American woman, consumer and consumable. Boswell considers the source of this conformity and entrapment, especially for women. She discloses how Wharton struggled to write popular stories and then how she revealed her antipathy toward popular movie culture in two late novels.
Boswell describes Wharton’s financial dependence on the American movie industry, which fueled her antagonism toward Hollywood culture, her well-documented disdain for popular culture, and her struggles to publish in women’s magazines.
This first full-length study that examines the film adaptations of Wharton’s fiction covers seven films adapted from Wharton’s works between 1930 and 2000 and the fifty-year gap in Wharton film adaptations. The study also analyzes Sophy Viner in The Reef as pre-Hollywood ingénue, characters in Twilight Sleep and The Children and the real Hollywood figures who might have inspired them, and The Sheik and racial stereotypes.
Boswell traces the complicated relationship of fiction and narrative film, the adaptations and cinematic metaphors of Wharton’s work in the 1990s, and Wharton’s persona as an outsider. Wharton’s fiction on film corresponds in striking ways to American noir cinema, says Boswell, because contemporary filmmakers recognize and celebrate the subversive qualities of Wharton’s work.
Edith Wharton on Film, which includes eleven illustrations, enhances Wharton’s stature as a major American author and provides persuasive evidence that her fiction should be read as American noir literature.
When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis.
Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. She also relates the group to other literary circles, such as the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein's salon.
An insightful look at representations of women’s bodies and female authority.
This work explores Edith Wharton's career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression. Wharton repeatedly invoked the visual arts--especially painting—as a medium for revealing the ways that women's bodies have been represented (as passive, sexualized, infantalized, sickly, dead). Well-versed in the Italian masters, Wharton made special use of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly its penchant for producing not portraits of individual women but instead icons onto whose bodies male desire is superimposed.
Emily Orlando contends that while Wharton's early work presents women enshrined by men through art, the middle and later fiction shifts the seat of power to women. From Lily Bart in The House of Mirth to Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country and Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, women evolve from victims to vital agents, securing for themselves a more empowering and satisfying relationship to art and to their own identities.
Orlando also studies the lesser-known short stories and novels, revealing Wharton’s re-workings of texts by Browning, Poe, Balzac, George Eliot, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, most significantly, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts is the first extended study to examine the presence in Wharton's fiction of the Pre-Raphaelite poetry and painting of Rossetti and his muses, notably Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Morris. Wharton emerges as one of American literature's most gifted inter-textual realists, providing a vivid lens through which to view issues of power, resistance, and social change as they surface in American literature and culture.
Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and James—how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton’s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially for The Age of Innocence.
Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton’s work. Wharton’s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton’s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti’s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home in The Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton’s use of Tiepolo’s fresco in the church of Scalzi.
Tintner concludes by considering Wharton’s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton’s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.
Edward Albee was a giant in American theater, in the same pantheon with Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Tennessee Williams. His prolific career included three Pulitzer Prizes and the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
Albee continued producing major works for the theater into his eighties, including a prequel to The Zoo Story, which shocked the country when it first appeared in 1958—and his plays have seen major revivals on and off Broadway in recent years. Yet even with this resurgence of popularity, no up-to-date treatment of his plays is currently in print.
With engaging discussions of his most famous plays, such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Three Tall Women, as well as his lesser known works, this essential guide reveals the heart of Albee’s drama, highlighting the themes of sex, death, loneliness, and time that have occupied the playwright during his more than fifty years in the theater.
Toby Zinman is the theater critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has written for numerous publications, including Variety,American Theater, and Theatre Journal. She is Professor of English at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia.
From Eudora Welty's memoir of childhood to May Sarton's reflections on her seventieth year, writers' journals offer an irresistible opportunity to join a creative thinker in musing on the events—whether in daily life or on a global scale—that shape our lives. In An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, best-selling mystery novelist Susan Wittig Albert invites us to revisit one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, 2008, through the lens of 365 ordinary days in which her reading, writing, and thinking about issues in the wider world—from wars and economic recession to climate change—caused her to reconsider and reshape daily practices in her personal life.
Albert's journal provides an engaging account of how the business of being a successful working writer blends with her rural life in the Texas Hill Country and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. As her eclectic daily reading ranges across topics from economics, food production, and oil and energy policy to poetry, place, and the writing life, Albert becomes increasingly concerned about the natural world and the threats facing it, especially climate change and resource depletion. Asking herself, "What does it mean? And what ought I do about it?", she determines practical steps to take, such as growing more food in her garden, and also helps us as readers make sense of these issues and consider what our own responses might be.
In 1994 the worst episode of genocide since the Holocaust of the Second World War ravaged the Central African country of Rwanda. Derick Burleson lived there and taught at the National University during the two years leading up to the genocide. The poems in this collection explore the cataclysm in a variety of forms and voices through the culture, myths, and customs he absorbed during this time. Ejo, meaning "yesterday and tomorrow" in Kinyarwandan, celebrates in language both lyrical and austere the lives of the friends Burleson made in Rwanda, those who survived to tell their own stories, and those whose voices were silenced.
In late summer 1953, as he returned to Mexico City after a seven-month expedition through the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, William Burroughs began a notebook of final reflections on his four years in Latin America. His first novel, Junkie, had just been published and he would soon be back in New York to meet Allen Ginsberg and together complete the manuscripts of what became The Yage Letters and Queer. Yet this notebook, the sole survivor from that period, reveals Burroughs not as a writer on the verge of success, but as a man staring down personal catastrophe and visions of looming cultural disaster.
Losses that will not let go of him haunt Burroughs throughout the notebook: “Bits of it keep floating back to me like memories of a daytime nightmare.” However, out of these dark reflections we see emerge vivid fragments of Burroughs’ fiction and, even more tellingly, unique, primary evidence for the remarkable ways in which his early manuscripts evolved. Assembled in facsimile and transcribed by Geoffrey D. Smith, John M. Bennett, and Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, the notebook forces us to change the way we see both Burroughs and his writing at a turning point in his literary biography.
Janet Burroway followed in the footsteps of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, she was an earlyMademoiselle guest editor in New York, an Ivy League and Cambridge student, an aspiring poet-playwright-novelist in the period before feminism existed, a woman who struggled with her generation's conflicting demands of work and love. Unlike Plath, Janet Burroway survived.
In sixteen essays of wit, rage, and reconciliation, Embalming Mom chronicles loss and renaissance in a life that reaches from Florida to Arizona across to England and home again. Burroway brilliantly weaves her way through the dangers of daily life—divorcing her first husband, raising two boys, establishing a new life, scattering her mother's ashes and sorting the meager possessions of her father. Each new danger and challenge highlight the tenacious will of the body and spirit to heal.
“Ordinary life is more dangerous than war because nobody survives,” Burroway contemplates in the essay “Danger and Domesticity,” yet each of her meditations reminds us that it's our daily rituals and trials that truly keep us alive.
The fifteen stories of George Garrett’s Empty Bed Blues (his eighth book-length collection) are vintage Garrett—no two alike—with each moving, one way and another, in new and daring directions. His stories are deeply concerned with the old verities of love and death and filled with the joys and woes of characters who come to life and command our attention.
Diversity is the key word for Garrett’s short fiction. He works in every known form and invents a few himself. In “A Story Goes with It,” Garrett fondly remembers an old friend while retelling a story the man once told him. Most of it is probably not accurate, as Garrett is quick to admit, but the mixture of fact with fiction makes for an entertaining read. His stories turn like the sharp curves of a mountain road, abruptly changing from a fond trip down memory lane to a sleazy reporter’s quest along the backroads for the ultimate crime story in “Pornographers.”He tops off his collection with “A Short History of the Civil War,” a series of poems written by two participants: one a Confederate, the other a Yankee.
In the marriage of fact and fiction, of comedy and pathos, and the music of many voices, the stories of Empty Bed Blues reconfirm the judgment of novelist and story writer Richard Bausch, who said in 1998: “There is no writer on the American scene with a more versatile, more eclectic, or more restless talent than George Garrett.”
History—natural history, human history, and personal history—and place are the cornerstones of The Eye of the Mammoth. Stephen Harrigan's career has taken him from the Alaska Highway to the Chihuahuan Desert, from the casinos of Monaco to his ancestors' village in the Czech Republic. And now, in this new edition, he movingly recounts in "Off Course" a quest to learn all he can about his father, who died in a plane crash six months before he was born.
Harrigan's deceptively straightforward voice belies an intense curiosity about things that, by his own admission, may be "unknowable." Certainly, we are limited in what we can know about the inner life of George Washington, the last days of Davy Crockett, the motives of a caged tiger, or a father we never met, but Harrigan's gift—a gift that has also made him an award-winning novelist—is to bring readers closer to such things, to make them less remote, just as a cave painting in the title essay eerily transmits the living stare of a long-extinct mammoth.
The year is 1915, and Benjamin Corvet, founder of the ship-owning firm Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman, suddenly disappears, sparking events and questions that baffle even those who are close to him.
Constance Sherrill, an attractive, sheltered young woman, feels strangely responsible for what may have happened to him---her father's best friend and coworker. Alan Conrad arrives in Chicago searching for his identity and an unknown benefactor and is swept into a maelstrom of mystery and intrigue that tests his intelligence and athleticism to the fullest. Henry Spearman, the firm's junior partner, is the most eligible bachelor along Chicago's Lake Shore Drive as a result of his catapult from ships' ranks to successful owner.
When a ship sinks off the coast of Beaver Island in Michigan, the intertwining lives of these characters unlock the mystery of the disappearance of another ship twenty years earlier, in a riveting whodunit set on the stormy waters of the Great Lakes.
Donald A. Johnston was born and raised in Detroit, served in World War II as a U.S. Navy Reserve officer, and was decorated for service in the Philippines and in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His career includes forty years in the insurance business. An ardent sailing enthusiast, he has cruised the Great Lakes extensively and has sailed winners in class boats and in offshore competition.
Jacket photograph © Yuriz / iStockphoto.com
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