BiblioVault - Books by Clark, David

Children’s Literature and Old Norse Medievalism

David Clark

Arc Humanities Press, 2023

This book explores the ways in which contemporary authors respond to and rework key aspects of Old Norse history and viking culture for young twenty-first-century audiences. Why are contemporary authors and audiences so manifestly attracted to the viking past? In what ways do writers respond to Norse sources? How do the narratives they tell reflect our beliefs about and desires for the past, our constructions of childhood and adolescence, our anxieties around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity? How do these texts engage with a future occluded by apocalyptic ecological threat? David Clark explores these questions through readings of a rich body of diverse material which retells, updates, and transforms Norse culture. The volume contextualizes Norse medievalism and explores how thematic foci on gender, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity relate to contemporary concerns around these topics, and the construction of childhood.

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Conceptualisms

The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art

Edited by Steve Tomasula

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators

A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.

Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.

Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.

The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

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Measuring the Cosmos

How Scientists Discovered the Dimensions of the Universe

David H. Clark and Matthew D.H. Clark

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Humans have always viewed the heavens with wonder and awe. The skies have inspired reflection on the vastness of space, the wonder of creation, and humankind’s role in the universe. In just over one hundred years, science has moved from almost total ignorance about the actual distances to the stars and earth’s place in the galaxy to our present knowledge about the enormous size, mass, and age of the universe. We are reaching the limits of observation, and therefore the limits of human understanding. Beyond lies only our imagination, seeded by the theories of physics. In Measuring the Cosmos, science writers David and Matthew Clark tell the stories of both the well-known and the unsung heroes who played key roles in these discoveries. These true accounts reveal ambitions, conflicts, failures, as well as successes, as the astonishing scale and age of the universe were finally established. Few areas of scientific research have witnessed such drama in the form of ego clashes, priority claims, or failed (or even falsified) theories as that resulting from attempts to measure the universe. Besides giving credit where long overdue, Measuring the Cosmos explains the science behind these achievements in accessible language sure to appeal to astronomers, science buffs, and historians.

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