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From Abortion to Pederasty
Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
This volume had its origins in a very specific situation: the teaching of ancient texts dealing with rape. Ensuing discussions among a group of scholars expanded outwards from this to other sensitive areas. Ancient sources raise a variety of issues—slavery, infanticide, abortion, rape, pederasty, domestic violence, death, sexuality—that may be difficult to discuss in a classroom where some students will have had experiences similar to those described in classical texts. They may therefore be reluctant to speak in class, and even the reading themselves may be painful.
 
From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy, is committed to the proposition that it is important to continue to teach texts that raise these issues, not to avoid them. In this volume, classicists and ancient historians from around the world address how to teach such topics as rape, pederasty, and slavery in the classics classroom. The contributors present the concrete ways in which they themselves have approached such issues in their course planning and in their responses to students’ needs.
 
A main objective of From Abortion to Pederasty is to combat arguments, from both the left and the right, that the classics are elitist and irrelevant. Indeed, they are so relevant, and so challenging, as to be painful at times. Another objective is to show how Greco-Roman culture and history can provide a way into a discussion that might have been difficult or even traumatic in other settings. Thus it will provide teaching tools for dealing with uncomfortable topics in the classroom, including homophobia and racism.
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BEFORE READING
NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS AND THE POLITICS O
PETER J. RABINOWITZ
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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Doris Lessing
Interrogating the Times
Debrah Raschke
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Timeswrestles with the ghosts that continue to haunt our most pressing twenty-first-century concerns: how to reconceive imprisoning conceptions of sexuality and gender, how to define terrorism, how to locate the personal, and how to write on race and colonialism in an ever-slippery postmodern world. This collection of essays clearly establishes Lessing’s importance as a unique and necessary voice in contemporary literature and life.
In tracing the evolution in Lessing’s representations of controversial subjects, this volume shows how new cultural and political contexts demand new solutions. Focusing on Lessing’s experiments with genre and on the ramifications of narrative itself, the collection asks readers to reformulate some of their most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and their relation to it.
Contributors to Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times assess Lessing’s vision of the past and its relevance for the future by revisiting texts from the beginning of her career onward while at the same time probing previous interpretations of these works. These reassessments reveal Lessing’s continued role as a gadfly who, in disrupting rigid constructions of right and wrong and of good and evil, forces her readers to move beyond “you are damned, we are saved” narratives. As rationales such as these continue to permeate global venues, Lessing’s oeuvre becomes increasingly relevant.
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Body Against Soul
Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory
Masha Raskolnikov
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
In medieval allegory, Body and Soul were often pitted against one another in debate. In Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory, Masha Raskolnikov argues that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender, and power in the Middle Ages. Neither theological nor medical in nature, works of sowlehele (“soul-heal”) described the self to itself in everyday language—moderns might call this kind of writing “self-help.” Bringing together contemporary feminist and queer theory along with medieval psychological thought, Body Against Soul examines Piers Plowman, the “Katherine Group,” and the history of psychological allegory and debate. In so doing, it rewrites the history of the Body to include its recently neglected fellow, the Soul.

The topic of this book is one that runs through all of Western history and remains of primary interest to modern theorists—how “my” body relates to “me.” In the allegorical tradition traced by this study, a male person could imagine himself as a being populated by female personifications, because Latin and Romance languages tended to gender abstract nouns as female. However, since Middle English had ceased to inflect abstract nouns as male or female, writers were free to gender abstractions like “Will” or “Reason” any way they liked. This permitted some psychological allegories to avoid the representational tension caused by placing a female soul inside a male body, instead creating surprisingly queer same-sex inner worlds. The didactic intent driving sowlehele is, it turns out, complicated by the erotics of the struggle to establish a hierarchy of the self’s inner powers.
 
 
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Afrindian Fictions
Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa
Pallavi Rastogi
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
In the first published book-length study of Indian fiction in South Africa, Pallavi Rastogi demonstrates that Indians desire South African citizenship in the fullest sense of the word, a longing for inclusion that is asserted through an “Afrindian” identity. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa examines Afrindian identity and blurs the racial binary of black and white interaction in South African studies as well as unsettles the East-West paradigm of migration dominant in South Asian diaspora studies.
 
While offering incisive analyses of the work of the most important South African Indian writers today—Ahmed Essop, Farida Karodia, Achmat Dangor, Imraan Coovadia, and Praba Moodley among others—the author also places South African Indian fiction within broader literary traditions. Rastogi’s project of recovery shines a light on the rich but neglected literature by South African Indians. The book closes with interviews conducted with six key South African Indian writers. Here the authors not only reflect on their own writing but also comment on many of the issues raised in the book itself, particularly the role of Indians in South Africa today, and the status of South African Indian writing.
 
Afrindian Fictions is a valuable introduction to South African Indian literature as well as a major interrogation of some of the foundational notions of post-colonial literary studies.
 
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COME BACK IRISH
WENDY RAWLINGS
The Ohio State University Press, 2001
Nine inhabitants of a sleepy Irish seaside town tell what they know about a visitor from out of town who is rumored to be both attractive and dangerous. A young mother in an affluent Long Island community finds herself strangely drawn to the woman she has hired as her housekeeper. After her small business venture fails, a woman is forced to move back in with her parents and discovers they aren't the couple she thought they were at all. In fourteen expertly crafted stories, Wendy Rawlings chronicles with comic sympathy what happens when American women and Irish men, parents and children, employers and employees, hurtle toward each other and crash headlong into cultural or generational roadblocks. Like the American in the title story, who can imagine only a "litter of claddagh rings and Erin go bragh, the high-stepping of Riverdance on videocassette" until she gets on a plane and goes to Ireland, Rawlings's fiction entreats us to toss out the picture-perfect images we have of American consumer culture, Irish tourist towns, and the institution of marriage and enter the world of her fictions—more contradictory, troubling, and true.
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Love and Abolition
The Social Life of Black Queer Performance
Alison Rose Reed
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
In Love and Abolition, Alison Rose Reed traces how the social life of Black queer performance from the 1960s to the present animates the unfinished work of abolition. She grounds social justice–oriented reading and activist practices specifically in the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex, with far-reaching implications for how we understand affective response as a mobilizing force for revolutionary change.

Reed identifies abolition literature as an emergent field of inquiry that emphasizes social relationships in the ongoing struggle to dismantle systems of coercion, criminalization, and control. Focusing on love as an affective modality and organizing tool rooted in the Black radical tradition’s insistence on collective sociality amidst unrelenting state violence, Reed provides fresh readings of visionaries such as James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Bridgforth, and vanessa german. Both abolitionist manifesto and examination of how Black queer performance offers affective modulations of tough and tender love, Love and Abolition ultimately calls for a critical reconsideration of the genre of prison literature—and the role of the humanities—during an age of mass incarceration.
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Dickens's Hyperrealism
John R. Reed
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
In Dickens’s Hyperrealism, John R. Reed examines certain features of Dickens’s style to demonstrate that the Inimitable consciously resisted what came to be known as realism in the genre of the novel. Dickens used some techniques associated with realism, such as description and metonymy, to subvert the purposes usually associated with it. Reed argues that Dickens used such devices as personification and present-tense narration, which are anathema to the realist approach. He asserts that Dickens preferred a heightened reality, not realism. And, unlike the realism which seeks to mask authorial control of how readers read his novels, Dickens wanted to demonstrate, first openly, and later in his career more subtly, his command over his narratives.
 
This book opens a new avenue for investigating Dickens’s mastery of his art and his awareness of its literary context. In addition, it reopens the whole issue of realism as a definition and examines the variety of genres that coexisted in the Victorian period.
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Writing Maternity
Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre
Dara Rossman Regaignon
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851) and Catharine Tait (1819–1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety—which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling.
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DETECTING THE NATION
FICTIONS OF DETECTION AND THE IMPERIAL VENTURE
CAROLINE REITZ
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
In Detecting the Nation, Reitz argues that detective fiction was essential both to public acceptance of the newly organized police force in early Victorian Britain and to acclimating the population to the larger venture of the British Empire. In doing so, Reitz challenges literary-historical assumptions that detective fiction is a minor domestic genre that reinforces a distinction between metropolitan center and imperial periphery. Rather, Reitz argues, nineteenth-century detective fiction helped transform the concept of an island kingdom to that of a sprawling empire; detective fiction placed imperialism at the center of English identity by recasting what had been the suspiciously un-English figure of the turn-of-the-century detective as the very embodiment of both English principles and imperial authority. She supports this claim through reading such masters of the genre as Godwin, Dickens, Collins, and Doyle in relation to narratives of crime and empire such as James Mill's History of British India, narratives about Thuggee, and selected writings of Kipling and Buchan. Detective fiction and writings more specifically related to the imperial project, such as political tracts and adventure stories, were inextricably interrelated during this time.
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Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England
Ellen K. Rentz
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Collective worship and the ritual life of the local parish mattered deeply to late medieval laypeople, and both loom large in contemporary visual and vernacular culture. The parish offered an important framework for Christians as they negotiated the relationship between individual, community, and God. And as a place where past, present, and future came together, the parish promised an ongoing relationship between the living and the dead, positioning the here and now of the local parish in the long trajectory of eschatological time. 
 
Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England explores the ways in which Middle English literature engages the idea of lay spiritual community and the ideal of parochial worship. Ellen K. Rentz pairs nuanced readings of works such as Piers Plowman,Handlyng Synne, and the Prick of Conscience with careful analysis of contemporary sermons, spiritual handbooks, and liturgical texts as well as a wide range of visual sources, including wall paintings and stained glass. This new study examines how these texts and images locate the process of achieving salvation in the parish and in the work that parishioners undertook there together.
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The Lion and the Cross
Early Christianity in Victorian Novels
Royal W. Rhodes
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Awful Archives
Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence
Jenny Rice
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
How does evidence happen? And when evidence happens badly, how can we find a fitting response to those making extraordinary claims? These are the questions driving Jenny Rice’s groundbreaking study into the life of evidence as she seeks to uncover why traditional modes of argument often fail in the face of claims that rely on bad evidence. The chapters make a deep dive into the nature and character of evidence itself by examining literal archives, though some quite unorthodox, as well as more popular archives that exist within public memory. Rice looks to examples that lie at the fringes of public discourse—pseudo-science, the paranormal, conspiracy theories about 9/11, the moon landing, UFO sightings, and Obama’s birth record. Such fringe examples, Rice argues, bring to light other questions about evidence that force us to reassess and move beyond traditional forms of ethics and debate.
After sketching a broader framework for understanding what evidence is, Awful Archives then asks how we can practice more ethical and productive forms of debate, especially when we’re faced with arguments that feel like a dead end. Thorough, engaging, and deeply insightful, Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence introduces an entirely new perspective on evidence—one that will impact the field for years to come.
 
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Distancing English
A Chapter in the History of the Inexpressible
Page Richards
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
How did fears of cultural inadequacy play out in the English language after American independence and the War of 1812? Like many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, essayist Walter Channing suggests that the country’s perceived deficiency in literature is due to a crucial overlap with England, that is, having “the same language with a nation, totally unlike it in almost every relation.” In Distancing English, Page Richards shows how these concerns of language are historically interwoven with the inexpressible.
 
Often overlooked, the topos of the inexpressible redirects the ventriloquism of the English language. From its beginning, this topos combines the hyperbole of high expectations with the failure of inadequate words. In Charles Brockden Brown or George Tucker, it can register deficiency of “character” on and off the page, establishing important strategies of decenteredness also associated with modernism.
 
In writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, and John Berryman, the inexpressible seizes advantage from disadvantage. It runs through literary framing strategies and flexible shaggy dog humor. An opening to the 1855 Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman’s Preface remaps the topos andemerges as a distinguished moment in the articulation of the inexpressible.  

 
 
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NARRATIVE DYNAMICS
ESSAYS ON TIME, PLOT, CLOSURE, AND FRAME
BRIAN RICHARDSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2002

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A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century
Theorizing Unruly Narratives
BRIAN RICHARDSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new model for evaluating literature—returning to the basis of narrative theory to illuminate how authors play with and help clarify the boundaries of narrative theory. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter.

By exploring fundamental questions about narrative, Richardson provides a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive theory that includes neglected categories of storytelling and significantly enhances our treatment of traditional areas of analysis. Ultimately, this book promises to transform and expand the study of story and plot. 
 
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Unnatural Narrative
Theory, History, and Practice
BRIAN RICHARDSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice provides the first extended account of the concepts and history of unnatural narrative. In this book, Brian Richardson, founder of unnatural narrative studies, offers a theoretical model that can encompass antirealist and antimimetic works from Aristophanes to postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative begins with a sustained critique of contemporary narratology, diagnosing its mimetic bias and establishing the need for a more comprehensive account. This new approach results in original theoretical insights into the basic elements of story, such as beginnings, sequencing, temporality, endings, and narrative itself.
 
Applying these theoretical insights, Richardson also provides a compelling alternative view of the history of narrative. He traces a genealogy of unnatural narratives from ancient Greek and Sanskrit works through medieval and renaissance fiction to eighteenth-century and romantic fiction. The study continues through the twentieth century, discussing the unnatural elements of Ulysses and other early twentieth-century texts, and engages with contemporary fiction by offering an alternative account of postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative makes an essential intervention in narrative theory and an important contribution to the history of the novel.
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UNNATURAL VOICES
EXTREME NARRATION IN MODERN AND CONTEMPO
BRIAN RICHARDSON
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

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The Queer Limit of Black Memory
Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution
Matt Richardson
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women’s literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices.
 
Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.
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The Progress of Romance
Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel
DAVID H. RICHTER
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Allegories of One’s Own Mind
Melancholy in Victorian Poetry
DAVID G RIEDE
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Sparks Flew
WOSU's Century on the Air
Thomas M Rieland
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Wireless Morse code began a new age of communications, magically sending invisible waves through the ether received at some distant place. Among the first universities to experiment in this unknown world was The Ohio State University, which became one of the first educational broadcast stations and a think tank for the future of public service radio—pioneering radio audience research and serving as an innovative school of the air.
Sparks Flew is a rich story of creative, tenacious men and women working in a new medium that commercial enterprises soon dominated. At any moment in time, educational broadcasting could have failed if not for a few land-grant institutions like The Ohio State University and prominent stations like WOSU that supported the medium. Sparks Flew is the untold story, a century in the making, of one institution and one educational station that represent the roots of today’s public broadcasting system.
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A Glance Beyond Doubt
Narration, Representation, Subjectivity
SHLOMITH RIMMON-KENAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture
Douglas Robinson
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is Douglas Robinson’s study of postcolonial affect—specifically, of the breakdown of the normative (regulatory) circulation of affect in the refugee experience and the colonial encounter, the restructuring of that regulatory circulation in colonization, and the persistence of that restructuring in decolonization and intergenerational trauma. Robinson defines “somatics” as a cultural construction of “reality” and “identity” through the regulatory circulation of evaluative affect.
This book is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma. Each essay contains a review of empirical studies of its main topic, a study of literary representations of that topic, and a study of postcolonial theoretical spins. The literary representations in the refugee essay are a novel and short story by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat; in the colonization essay a short film by Javier Fesser and a novella by Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); and in the intergenerational trauma essay novels by James Welch and Toni Morrison and a short story by Percival Everett. The first essay’s theoretical spins include Deleuze and Guattari on nomad thought and Iain Chambers on migrancy; the second’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and theories of postcolonial affect in Bhabha and Spivak; the third’s, work on historical trauma by Cathy Caruth and Dominic LaCapra.
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The United States of Ohio
One American State and Its Impact on the Other Forty-Nine
David E. Rohr
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Electoral significance has always distinguished the small northern state sandwiched between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Only twice since the beginning of the twentieth century has Ohio failed to pick the candidate who ultimately won the presidential election. But presidential elections are only part of the Ohio story. That’s because the state has always been an innovator, an incubator, and a bellwether for the American experience. In a unique look at Ohio, David E. Rohr chronicles key stories that come from the Buckeye State and the remarkable effect Ohio’s development has had on the larger country.
 
The United States of Ohio covers little-known facts about Ohio, such as how the state was the birthplace of both the National Football League and Major League Baseball and how it was Ohioans who led efforts toward racial integration in both sports. Readers will learn what makes the state a manufacturing and agricultural powerhouse—with both the largest tire company, Akron’s Goodyear, and the largest consumer products company, Cincinnati’s Proctor & Gamble, based there. The state grows, processes, and builds on a level that far outpaces the size of its population or expanse of its borders. And it is the birthplace of many prominent US figures—from Thomas Edison to John Glenn to Neil Armstrong. From sports to a century’s worth of entertainment superstars to aviation and space exploration, Ohio’s best have made for America’s greatest stories—all captured here in a look at the Buckeye State and its impact on the other forty-nine.
  


 
 
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The Ethics of Persuasion
Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies
Brooke Rollins
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
In The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida’s Rhetorical Legacies, Brooke Rollins argues that some of the most forceful and utilitarian examples of persuasion involve significant ethical dimensions. Using the work of Jacques Derrida, she draws this ethical imperative out from a series of canonical rhetorical texts that have traditionally been understood as insistent or even guileful instances of persuasion. Her reconsideration of highly determined pieces by Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato encourages readers to inherit the rhetorical tradition differently, and it pinpoints the important rhetorical dimensions of Derrida’s own work.
 
Drawing on Derrida’s (non)definition of ethics and his pointed accounts of performativity, Rollins argues that this vital ethical component of many ancient theories, practices, and pedagogies of persuasion has been undertheorized for more than two millennia. Through deconstructive readings of some of these texts, she shows us that we are not simply sovereign beings who both wield and guard against linguistic techniques of rule. Our persuasive endeavors, rather, are made possible by an ethics—an always prior encounter with otherness that interrupts self-presence.
 
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SOCIAL CONTROL IN EUROPE V1
1500-1800
HERMAN ROODENBURG
The Ohio State University Press, 2004
This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting—and thus molding—the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective.
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Summers with Juliet
BILL ROORBACH
The Ohio State University Press, 2000
They met in a bar on Martha’s Vineyard. Bill was instantly smitten—her cool beauty, her insouciance, her sassy youth—but Juliet was unimpressed. Even so, a courtship began, and for the next eight summers, in sublime settings across North America, Bill Roorbach and Juliet Karelsen made circuitous progress toward a lasting love, and  finally, marriage. In charming fashion, Summers with Juliet tells this tale, but it also chronicles a second awakening, as Juliet rekindles in Bill his childhood enchantment with nature. Now marvelous creatures abound: giant ocean sunfish and wild turkeys, bellicose hummingbirds and canny trout, all of them images and explications of the many facets of Juliet. Landscapes hold new mysteries, too, and the author vividly describes his exuberant road trips with Juliet around the country, from the River of Promise in Montana, to the Gulf Coast of Florida. And at last, they come to a wooded lake in New Hampshire and the singular June day when “love’s all there, sweeter than the cake.”
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Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature
Literary and Cultural Essays
Jesús Rosales
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In their comprehensive study Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature: Literary and Cultural Essays, editors Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca provide a fresh set of perspectives on the field of Chicano literary and cultural studies. Composed of essays by scholars who live and work in the United States in addition to those who work primarily in Spain, the book examines how Spanish literary critics view and study Chicano literature. In general, these critics demonstrate a deep interest in Chicano culture in relation to its American, Mexican, and Spanish identities, or multiple cultural mestizajes.
 
 
For Chicanos this interest is intriguing, for they see Spain’s vision of the Chicano both with inviting enthusiasm and justifiable reservation—enthusiasm because this interest shows a humanistic concern in understanding their social issues (national identity, bilingualism, immigration, feminism, and so on) in relation to Spain’s own, and reservation because there still prevails an “open wound” from their historical connection with that country. In other words, a lingering Spanish colonial presence still exists in the Chicano psyche. These Spanish perspectives are important to consider as Chicano literature reflects on its place in twenty-first-century America and its transnational and global aspirations.
 
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COURTS AND COMMERCE
GENDER, LAW, AND THE MARKET ECONOMY IN COLONIAL NEW YORK
DEBORAH ROSEN
The Ohio State University Press, 1997

In Courts and Commerce, Deborah A. Rosen intertwines economic history, legal history, and the history of gender. Relying on extensive analysis of probate inventories, tax lists, court records, letter books, petitions to the governor, and other documents from the eighteenth century—some never before studied—Rosen describes the expansion of the market economy in colonial New York and the way in which the law provided opportunities for eighteenth-century men to expand their economic networks while at the same time constraining women's opportunities to engage in market relationships. The book is unusual in its range of interests: it pays special attention to a comparison of urban and rural regions, it examines the role of law in fostering economic development, and it contrasts the different experiences of men and women as the economy changed.

Courts and Commerce challenges the idealized image of colonial America that has dominated historiography on the colonial period. In contrast to scholars who have portrayed the colonial period as a golden age for communal values and who have described nineteenth-century developments as if they had no eighteenth-century precedents, Rosen demonstrates that the traditionally described communal model of eighteenth-century America is a myth, and that in many ways the two eras are marked more by continuity than by change.

Deborah Rosen demonstrates that a market economy based on arm’s-length relationships did not suddenly emerge in the nineteenth century but already existed during the eighteenth century; that women became marginalized from the economy well before industrialization sent their husbands off to factories; and that the law shaped economic development a century or more before judges began to redefine the substance of the law to protect manufacturers and railway owners against expensive lawsuits by injured employees, neighbors, and consumers.

This bold and thought-provoking work will find a welcome audience among scholars of colonial American history, economic, social, and legal history, and women's studies.

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Every Species of Hope
Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems
Michael J. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
In his first book of poetry in twenty years, Michael J. Rosen captures life in the foothills of the Appalachians. Every Species of Hope: Georgics, Haiku, and Other Poems uses a variety of poetic forms, as well as Rosen’s own pen-and-ink drawings, to give voice to the predicaments of living among other creatures who share a plot of land we think we claim as home. The poems are an attempt at homeostasis: that balancing act every creature works at every hour of every day—a way of living peacefully, expending the right energy in the most productive ways, avoiding or deflecting trouble, gravitating toward sources of fulfillment and contentment.
 
At the center of this book is a suite of poems inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, or “poems of pastoral instruction.” In Rosen’s case, he is more the student than the teacher. Likewise, five short sections of haiku continue his meditation on—or mediation of—art and nature. As he has written, “Haiku provides a brief and mirror-like calm in the choppy waters—in the undertow—of current events: a stillness in time where more than our singular lives can be reflected.”
 
 
Illustrated with two dozen pages from the author’s own journal, Every Species of Hope is the consummation of decades of observation, humility, and awe. 
 
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A Mile and a Half of Lines
The Art of James Thurber
Michael J. Rosen
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Humorist, cartoonist, writer, playwright. James Thurber was to the twentieth century what Mark Twain was to the nineteenth. At one point, his books were the most read of any American in the world. His work could be found anywhere—from the pages of the New Yorker to the pages of children’s books, from illustrated advertisements to tea towels and dresses. Now, in celebration of the 125th anniversary of Thurber’s birth, A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber is a long overdue introduction and reintroduction to James Thurber and the artwork that fundamentally changed American cartoons. 
 
Including some 260 drawings, this collection is the first comprehensive focus on his work as an artist, a cartoonist, and an illustrator. With commentary from a host of preeminent cartoonists and writers, including Ian Frazier, Seymour Chwast, and Michael Maslin, A Mile and a Half of Lines celebrates the significance of Thurber’s spontaneous, unstudied, and novel drawing style that not only altered the nature of American cartooning but also expanded the very possibilities of an illustrated line. Coinciding with the first major retrospective of Thurber’s art presented by the Columbus Museum of Art in 2019, A Mile and a Half of Lines showcases both classic Thurber as well as visual material never before seen in print.
 
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REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS
REFORMERS & THE POLITICS OF MATERNAL WELFARE, 1917–1940
ROBYN L. ROSEN
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

In the early twentieth century, shifting attitudes and new public health standards brought an unprecedented interest in and effort to regulate issues affecting reproduction and maternity. Maternal and infant health, nutrition, and medical care came under scrutiny, as did the issue of birth control. While the prior gained public support, the latter remained controversial. Though some reformers saw birth control as an important part of maternal welfare, others sought to separate it from more popular reforms. The careers of the four prominent but usually neglected reformers (Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, Ethel Sturges Dummer, Mary Ware Dennett, and Blanche Ames) examined in this book embody the struggle to define and resolve these tensions.

The study of these reformers offers a new perspective on more recognized leaders in the arena of reproductive health and rights, especially the U.S. Children's Bureau and Margaret Sanger. Putnam's elitism contextualizes the class politics of the Bureau, underscoring its sensitivity to the vulnerable and its innovative approach to public health. Dummer reminds us of roads not taken by policy makers in the Bureau, accentuating the differences between a child-centered and a woman-centered agenda. Dennett highlights the obstacles to women reformers in the formal political sphere, while Ames's penchant toward maternalism and compromise also led to difficulties. Together, they illustrate the complexities of formulating an effective approach to securing reproductive rights and health.

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Other Mothers
Beyond the Maternal Ideal
Ellen Rosenman
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
Other Mothers, edited by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Claudia C. Klaver, offers a range of essays that open a conversation about Victorian motherhood as a wide-ranging, distinctive experience and idea. In spite of its importance, however, it is one of the least-studied aspects of the Victorian era, subsumed under discussions of femininity and domesticity.

This collection addresses this void, revealing the extraordinary diversity of Victorian motherhood. Exploring diaries, novels, and court cases, with contexts ranging from London to Egypt to Australia, these varied accounts take the collection “beyond the maternal ideal” to consider the multiple, unpredictable ways in which motherhood was experienced and imagined in this formative historical period.

Other Mothers joins revisionist approaches to femininity that now characterize Victorian studies. Its contents trace intersections among gender, race, and class; question the power of separate spheres ideology; and insist on the context-specific nature of social roles. The fifteen essays in this volume contribute to the fields of literary criticism, history, cultural studies, and history.
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NATIONALIST FERMENT
ORIGINS OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, 1789-1812
MARIE-JEANNE ROSSIGNOL
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

This book was published in June 1994 by a French publisher and became the winner of the Organization of American Historians foreign language book prize.

The Nationalist Ferment contributes significantly to the renewal of early U.S. diplomatic history. Since the 1980s, a number of diplomatic historians have turned aside from traditional diplomatic issues and sources. They have instead focused on gender, ethnic relationships, culture, and the connections between foreign and domestic policy.

Rossignol argues that in the years 1789–1812 the new nation needed to assert its independence and autonomous character in the face of an unconvinced world. After overcoming initial divisions caused by foreign policy, Americans met this challenge by defining common foreign policy objectives and attitudes, which both legitimized the United States abroad and reinforced national unity at home. This book establishes the constant connections between domestic and international issues during the early national period.

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The Religion of Empire
Political Theology in Blake's Prophetic Symbolism
G. A. Rosso
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism is the first full-length study devoted to interpreting Blake’s three long poems, showing the ways in which the Bible, myth, and politics merge in his prophetic symbolism. In this book, G. A. Rosso examines the themes of empire and religion through the lens of one of Blake’s most distinctive and puzzling images, Rahab, a figure that anchors an account of the development of Blake’s political theology in the latter half of his career. Through the Rahab figure, Rosso argues, Blake interweaves the histories of religion and empire in a wide-ranging attack on the conceptual bases of British globalism in the long eighteenth century. This approach reveals the vast potential that the question of religion offers to a reconsideration of Blake’s attitude to empire.

The Religion of Empire also reevaluates Blake’s relationship with Milton, whose influence Blake both affirms and contests in a unique appropriation of Milton’s prophetic legacy. In this context, Rosso challenges recent views of Blake as complicit with the nationalism and sexism of his time, expanding the religion-empire nexus to include Blake’s esoteric understanding of gender. Foregrounding the role of female characters in the longer prophecies, Rosso discloses the variegated and progressive nature of Blake’s apocalyptic humanism.
 
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CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS
VICTORIAN CRIMES, SOCIAL PANIC, & MORAL
JUDITH ROWBOTHAM
The Ohio State University Press, 2005

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Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood
Allison L. Rowland
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
Winner, 2021 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine Book Award
Honorable Mention, 2021 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award 
Honorable Mention, 2021 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Outstanding Published Scholarship in Public Address


The way we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. Consider the pro-life strategy of calling a fetus a child, thereby effectively promoting the value of fetal life. In the opposite direction, calling a Pakistani child killed by a US drone strike collateral damage can implicitly demote the value of that child’s life. Allison L. Rowland’s Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood looks at such discursive practices—providing the first systematic account of how transvaluations like these operate in public discourse and lurk at the edges of all language.
 
Building on the necropolitical concept that we are constantly parsing populations into worthy lives, subhuman lives, and lives sentenced to death, Rowland’s study focuses specifically at zoetropes—the rhetorical devices and figures that result in such transvaluations. Through a series of case studies, including microbial life (at the American Gut Project), fetal life (at the National Memorial for the Unborn), and vital human life (at two of the nation’s premier fitness centers)—and in conversation with cutting-edge theories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability—this book brings to light the discursive practices that set the terms for inclusion into humanhood and make us who we are.
 
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The Politics of Reproduction
Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism
Modhumita Roy
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uniquely brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives—are attentive to neoliberalism’s reshaping of economies and intimacies to better understand the politics of reproduction. By looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina Mississippi, among other sites), The Politics of Reproduction focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction? Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic motivations behind the “choice” to surrender a baby for adoption or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive politics, The Politics of Reproduction makes a distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities, politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.
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Baseball as Mediated Latinidad
Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity
Jennifer Domino Rudolph
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity, Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture.
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Iron Valley
The Transformation of the Iron Industry in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, 1802–1913
Clayton J. Ruminski
The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Youngstown, Ohio, and the surrounding Mahoning Valley supplied the iron that helped transform the United States into an industrial powerhouse in the nineteenth century. The story of the Mahoning Valley’s unorthodox rise from mid-scale iron producer to twentieth-century “Steel Valley” is a tale of innovation, stagnation, and, above all, extreme change. Located halfway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, the Mahoning Valley became a major supplier of pig iron to America’s biggest industrial regions. For much of the nineteenth century, outside consumers relied on the Valley’s pig iron, but this reliance nurtured a reluctance on the part of Youngstown iron companies to diversify or expand their production.

In Iron Valley: The Transformation of the Iron Industry in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, 1802–1913, Clayton J. Ruminski argues that Youngstown-area iron manufacturers were content to let others in the industry innovate, and only modernized when market conditions forced them to do so. Desperate to find new markets, some Youngstown iron manufacturers eventually looked toward steel and endured a rapid, but successful, industrial transformation that temporarily kept their old enterprises afloat in a rapidly evolving industry. Richly illustrated with rare photographs of Mahoning Valley ironmasters, mills, furnaces, and workers, Iron Valley sheds light on a previously underrepresented and vital region that built industrial America.

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Intratextual Baudelaire
The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris
Randolph Paul Runyon
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Intratextual Baudelaire: The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris by Randolph Paul Runyon provides a new and provocative answer to the question that has intrigued readers for years: did the poet arrange the Fleurs du mal in a meaningful order? Runyon believes so, but not in the way most have conceived the question.
 
Barbey d’Aurevilly’s claim that there was a “secret architecture” hidden in the Fleurs has long misled scholars by leading them to look for some overarching hierarchical organization, when they should have been looking for how the poems actually fit together, each to each, in the sequential fabric of the text. This is what Runyon has done, in a meticulous reading of every poem and its place in the sequence. Intratextual Baudelaire provides the most thorough analysis available of the textual changes Baudelaire made between the first and second editions and shows why he made them: so that the sequential structure would be preserved despite the addition of new poems and the deletion of those judged obscene.
 
Extending his analysis to the Spleen de Paris with the same attention to detail and awareness of textual changes, Runyon shows that Baudelaire’s prose-poem collection displays the same rigorous sequential structure. Both collections are revealed as marvels of self-referential intratextuality. Whether one agrees with Runyon or not, Intratextual Baudelaire will certainly generate discussion among French studies scholars.
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Order in Disorder
Intratextual Symmetry in Montaigne's “Essais”
Randolph Paul Runyon
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Montaigne’s Essays are treasured for their philosophical and moral insights and the fascinating portrait they give us of the man who wrote them, but another of their undoubted delights is that they tantalize the reader, offering beneath an apparent disorder some hints of a hidden plan. After all, though the essayist kept adding new pages, except when he added the third and final book he never added a new chapter, but worked within the structure already in place.
 
Order in Disorder: Intratextual Symmetry in Montaigne’s “Essais,” by Randolph Paul Runyon, offers a new answer to the question of how ordered the Essays may be. Following up on Montaigne’s likening them to a painter’s “grotesques” surrounding a central image, and seeing in this an allusion to the ancient Roman decorative style, rediscovered in the Renaissance, of symmetrical motifs on either side of a central image, Runyon uncovers an extensive network of symmetrical verbal echoes linking every chapter with another. Often two chapters of greatly different length and apparent importance (one on thumbs, for instance, balanced against one on the limits of human understanding) will in this way be brought together—not without, Runyon finds, an intended irony. The Essays emerge as even more self-reflexive than we thought, an amazingly intratextual work.
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The Taciturn Text
The Fiction of Robert Penn Warren
Randolph Paul Runyon
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales
Paul Russell
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales provides the first complete edition and discussion of the earliest surviving fragment of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, or The Art of Love, which derives from ninth-century Wales; the manuscript, which is preserved in Oxford, is heavily glossed mainly in Latin but also in Old Welsh. This study, by Classical and Celtic scholar Paul Russell, discusses the significance of the manuscript for classical studies and how it was absorbed into the classical Ovidian tradition. This volume’s main focus, however, is on the glossing and commentary and what these can teach us about the pedagogical approaches to Ovid’s text in medieval Europe and Britain and, more specifically, in Wales.
 
Russell argues that this annotated version of the Ars amatoria arose out of the teaching traditions of the Carolingian world and that the annotation, as we have it, was the product of a cumulative process of glossing and commenting on the text. He then surveys other glossed Ovid manuscripts to demonstrate how that accumulation was built up. Russell also explores the fascinating issue of why Ovid’s love poetry should be used to teach Latin verse in monastic contexts. Finally, he discusses the connection between this manuscript and the numerous references to Ovid in later Welsh poetry, suggesting that the Ovidian references should perhaps be taken to refer to love poetry more generically.
 
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NOVEL PROFESSIONS
INTERESTED DISINTEREST AND THE MAKING OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
JENNIFER RUTH
The Ohio State University Press, 2006

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A New Anatomy of Storyworlds
What Is, What If, As If
Marie-Laure Ryan
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
The question of how narratives actually do the work of world-building transcends disciplines: from cosmology to philosophy, digital culture, popular culture, and literary theory. In A New Anatomy of Storyworlds, Marie-Laure Ryan investigates the narratological importance of the concept of world in its various manifestations. She uses a wide array of works—from Sokal’s hoax to Maus, from Saussure to Barthes, from Kafka to virtual reality—to interrogate key narratological concepts. By revisiting and redefining concepts such as narrator, plot, character, fictionality, mimesis, and diegesis, Ryan reexamines the major controversies that have enlivened narratology: Does narrative necessarily involve a narrator? Is the notion of implied author useful? Do texts that challenge our experience of the real world require a different narratology? Is the distinction between fictional and factual narratives gradual or binary? Ultimately, Ryan grounds narratology in the concept of world to propose an alternative to the rhetorical, feminist, unnatural, and cognitive approaches that currently dominate the field, thus broadening the frame through which we view story and world-building.
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Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative
Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet
Marie-Laure Ryan
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding how space works in narrative and narrative theory and how narratives work in real space. Thus far, space has traditionally been viewed by narratologists as a backdrop to plot. This study argues that space serves important but under-explored narrative roles: It can be a focus of attention, a bearer of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of strategic planning, a principle of organization, and a supporting medium.
Space intersects with narrative in two principal ways: ‘‘Narrating space’’ considers space as an object of representation, while ‘‘spatializing narrative’’ approaches space as the environment in which narrative is physically deployed. The inscription of narrative in real space is illustrated by such forms as technology-supported locative narratives, street names, and historical/heritage site and museum displays. While narratologists are best equipped to deal with the narration of space, geographers can make significant contributions to narratology by drawing attention to the spatialization of narrative. By bringing these two approaches together—and thereby building a bridge between narratology and geography—Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative yields both a deepened understanding of human spatial experience and greater insight into narrative theory and poetic forms.
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