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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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Tales from la Vida
A Latinx Comics Anthology
Frederick L Aldama
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In the Latinx comics community, there is much to celebrate today, with more Latinx comic book artists than ever before. The resplendent visual-verbal storyworlds of these artists reach into and radically transform so many visual and storytelling genres. Tales from la Vida celebrates this space by bringing together more than eighty contributions by extraordinary Latinx creators. Their short visual-verbal narratives spring from autobiographical experience as situated within the language, culture, and history that inform Latinx identity and life. Tales from la Vida showcases the huge variety of styles and worldviews of today’s Latinx comic book and visual creators. 

Whether it’s detailing the complexities of growing up—mono- or multilingual, bicultural, straight, queer, or feminist Latinx—or focusing on aspects of pop culture, these graphic vignettes demonstrate the expansive complexity of Latinx identities. Taken individually and together, these creators—including such legendary artists as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Roberta Gregory, and Kat Fajardo, to name a few—and their works show the world that when it comes to Latinx comics, there are no limits to matters of content and form. As we travel from one story to the next and experience the unique ways that each creator chooses to craft his or her story, our hearts and minds wake to the complex ways that Latinxs live within and actively transform the world.

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Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England
Marisa Libbon
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
People in medieval England talked, and yet we seldom talk or write about their talk. People conversed not within literary texts, but in the world in which those texts were composed and copied. The absence of such talk from our record of the medieval past is strange. Its absence from our formulation of medieval literary history is stranger still. In Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, Marisa Libbon argues that talk among medieval England’s public, especially talk about history and identity, was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature. Examining Richard I’s life as an exemplary subject of medieval England’s class-crossing talk about the past, Libbon advances a theory of how talk circulates history, identity, and cultural memory over time. By identifying sites of local talk about England's past, from law courts to palace chambers, and tracing rumors about Richard that circulated during his life and long after his death, Libbon offers a literary history of Richard that accounts for the spaces between and around extant manuscript copies of Middle English romances like Richard Coeur de Lion, insular and Continental chronicles, and chansons de geste with figures such as Charlemagne and Roland. These spaces, usually dismissed as silent, tell us about the processes of writing and reading and illuminate the intangible daily life in which textual production occurred. In revealing the pressures that talk about the past exerted on textual production, this book relocates the power of making culture and collective memory to a wider, collaborative authorship in medieval England. 
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Talking #browntv
Latinas and Latinos on the Screen
Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Like two friends sitting down in front of the television together, in Talking #browntv, Frederick Luis Aldama and William Anthony Nericcio dialogue about the representations of Latina/os in American television and film from the twentieth century to the present day. One part conversation, one part critique, one part visual cultural studies, and one part rant against the culture industry profiting off warped caricatures of Latina/o subjectivities, Aldama and Nericcio analyze the ways in which Latinx performers have been mediated—with varying degrees of complexity—on the American screen. A comprehensive review of the history of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Hispanics, Chicana/os, Latina/os, and Latinx performers in television and film, Talking #browntv boldly interrogates one of the largest paradoxes in the history of American television: Why are there so few Latina/os on television, and why, when they do appear, are they so often narcos, maids, strumpets, tarts, flakes, and losers?
 
From the subversive critiques embedded in well-loved children’s characters like Speedy Gonzalez to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in modern-era pornography, from Eva Longoria as ethnic mannequin to J-Lo flipping the sexy Latina music video on its head in “I Luh Ya Papi,” and with more than 150 full-color images, Aldama and Nericcio seek to expose the underlying causes as to why Latina/os constitute only 2 percent of mainstream cultural production when they’re the majority minority in the US. In a moment when anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant rhetoric oozes from TV sets and medias platform, Talking #browntv emerges as a bold antidote, an eloquent rejoinder, and a thoughtful meditation on Latina/os on the American screen and in America today.
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Tarpeia
Workings of a Roman Myth
Tara S. Welch
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
According to legends of Rome’s foundation, Tarpeia was a maiden who betrayed Romulus’ city to the invading Sabines. She was then crushed to death by the Sabines’ shields and her body hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, which became the place from which subsequent traitors of the city were thrown. In this volume, Tara S. Welch explores the uses and contours of Tarpeia’s myth through several centuries of Roman history and across several types of ancient sources, including Latin and Greek texts in various genres.
 
Welch demonstrates how ancient thinkers used Tarpeia’s myth to highlight matters of ethics, gender, ethnicity, political authority, language, conquest, and tradition. This cluster of themes reveals that Tarpeia’s myth is not primarily about what it means to be human, but rather what it means to be Roman. Thus Tarpeia’s story spans centuries, distances, genres, and modes of communication—Rome itself did. No Greek city-state could admit such continuity, and Greece was never so constant. In this way, though Tarpeia has a dozen Greek cousins whose stories are similar to hers, hers is a powerfully Roman myth, even for the Greeks who told her tale. She is token, totem, and symbol of Rome.
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Techniques for Living
Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose
Karen R. Lawrence
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
Christine Brooke-Rose is a writer, critic, and narrative theorist whose extraordinarily varied body of work tests the relationship between twentieth-century theory and fiction in unparalleled ways. As they rupture “the relics of nineteenth-century ideologies,” Brooke-Rose’s fictional experiments offer new ways to theorize life and formulate conduct in the new world orders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically addressing the loss of our ability to differentiate reality from what she calls “the unreal,” her novels mime the various “deaths” and absences described in contemporary literary theory, registering these absences technically, ontologically, and emotionally in linguistic and grammatical “constraints.” Rather than melancholy or self-enclosed exercises, however, her writing draws creative vitality out of the loss and limitation it examines. Deploying twentieth-century discourses drawn from technology, literary theory, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and popular culture, her vital, often humorous, fictions offer survival strategies for the genre of the novel. They offer new forms for telling the human story within the unreality of contemporary life.
 
In Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Karen R. Lawrence explains how Brooke-Rose’s career invites revision of contemporary literary histories and theories of postmodernism. With her highly original narrative forms, Brooke-Rose significantly contributes to the radical evolution of narrative in modernism’s wake. In its singular focus on the lively and prolific experiments of this writer/critic/theorist, Techniques for Living lays the groundwork for further challenges to our generalized versions of postmodernism, as it also provides a fascinating reading of a highly original writer.
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The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books, 2nd edition
Michael Hancher
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books are among the most popular works of English literature thanks in part to the ninety-two indelible illustrations that John Tenniel drew for them. The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books situates their outstanding success in several historical contexts, including Tenniel’s career as a leading artist for Punch magazine.
 
This new edition also pays special attention to the material circumstances that enabled and conditioned the printing of the illustrations. The original twelve chapters have been revised and updated throughout, drawing on archival and published resources made available in recent decades. Six chapters are entirely new, explaining how Tenniel’s drawings were professionally hand-engraved on wood blocks; how electrotype replicas were made from those blocks; and what problems could mar the commercial printing of such images—as notoriously happened in the first printing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which Carroll suppressed on Tenniel’s advice. Also considered for the first time here are the coloring of Tenniel’s black-and-white illustrations, by Tenniel and other artists, and the extraordinary treatment later given to Tenniel’s illustrations by the prestigious Limited Editions Club.
 
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The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
Susanne Paola Antonetta
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
At their family’s New Jersey seaside cottages, Susanne Paola Antonetta’s grandmother led seances, swam nude, and imaginatively created a spiritualist paradise on earth. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Antonetta chronicles how in that unique but tightly controlled space, she began to explore the questions posed by her family’s Christian Science beliefs, turning those questions secular: What is consciousness? Does time exist? And does the world we see reflect reality? In this book, scientific research, family story, and memoir intertwine to mimic the indefinable movements of quantum particles.
 
Antonetta reflects on a life spent wrestling with bipolar disorder, drug dependency, and the trauma of electroshock treatment—exploring these experiences alongside conversations with some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and physicists, and with psychics. The result is a meditation on the legacy of family, on thought and being, and what we humans can actually ever really know about our world.
 
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TESTED WOMAN PLOT
WOMEN'S CHOICES, MEN'S JUDGMENTS, AND TH
LOIS E. BUELER
The Ohio State University Press, 2001

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Textual Contraception
Birth Control and Modern American Fiction
Beth Widmaier Capo
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
Between the 1910s and 1940s, American women fought for and won the right to legal birth control. This battle was fought in the courts, in the media, and in the pages of American literature. Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction examines the relationship between aesthetic production and political activism in the birth control movement. It concludes that, by dramatically bringing to life the rhetorical issues, fiction played a significant role in shaping public consciousness. Concurrently, the potential for female control inherent in contraception influenced literary technique and reception, supporting new narrative possibilities for female characters beyond marriage and motherhood.

Merging cultural analysis and literary scholarship, this compelling work moves from a consideration of how cultural forces shaped literary production and political activism to a close examination of how fictional representations of contraception influenced the terms of public discourse on marriage, motherhood, economics, and eugenics.

By analyzing popular fiction such as Mother by Kathleen Norris, radical periodicals such as The Masses and Birth Control Review, and literature by authors from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen to Mary McCarthy, Beth Widmaier Capo reveals the rich cross-influence of contraceptive and literary history
 
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THEATER FIGURES
PRODUCTION OF 19TH CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL
EMILY ALLEN
The Ohio State University Press, 2003

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The Theater in the Fiction of Marcel Proust
John Gaywood Linn
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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Theatre of the Real
Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim
Gina Masucci MacKenzie
The Ohio State University Press, 2008
The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.
 
The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.
 
 
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Theatrical Jazz
Performance, Àse, and the Power of the Present Moment
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones provides the first full-length study of an artistic form, the theatrical jazz aesthetic, that draws on the jazz principles of ensemble—the break, the bridge, and the blue note. Theatrical Jazz:  Performance, À??, and the Power of the Present Moment is a study of the use of jazz aesthetics in theatre as created by major practitioners of the form, giving particular attention to three innovative artists: Laurie Carlos, Daniel Alexander Jones, and Sharon Bridgforth.
 
Theatrical Jazz examines how artists are made and how artists make art. In charting their overlapping artistic genealogies, the book also discusses the work of veteran artists Aishah Rahman, Robbie McCauley, Sekou Sundiata, Ntozake Shange, and Erik Ehn, as well as the next generation of theatrical jazz innovators, Grisha Coleman, Walter Kitundu, Florinda Bryant, and Zell Miller III. Using autocritography as a primary methodology, the author draws on her role as performer, collaborator, audience/witness, and dramaturg in theatrical jazz, and her experiences with Yoruba spiritual traditions, to excavate the layers and nuances of this performance form.  Jones’s use of performative writing, a blend of intellectual, artistic, and sensory experiences, allows scholars and students not only to read but also to “hear” the principles of theatrical jazz on the page.
 
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A Theology of Sense
John Updike, Embodiment, and Late Twentieth-Century American Literature
Scott Dill
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Scott Dill’s A Theology of Sense: John Updike, Embodiment, and Late Twentieth-Century American Literature brings together theology, aesthetics, and the body, arguing that Updike, a central figure in post-1945 American literature, deeply embeds in his work questions of the body and the senses with questions of theology. Dill offers new understandings not only of the work of Updike—which is importantly being revisited since the author’s death in 2009—but also new understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, religion, and physical experience.

Dill explores Updike’s unique literary legacy in order to argue for a genuinely postsecular theory of aesthetic experience. Each chapter takes up one of the five senses and its relation to broader theoretical concerns: affect, subjectivity, ontology, ethics, and theology. While placing Updike’s work in relation to other late twentieth-century American writers, Dill explains their notions of embodiment and uses them to render a new account of postsecular aesthetics. No other novelist has portrayed mere sense experience as carefully, as extensively, or as theologically—repeatedly turning to the doctrine of creation as his stylistic justification. Across this examination of his many stories, novels, poems, and essays, Dill proves that Updike forces us to reconsider the power of literature to revitalize sense experience as a theological question.
 
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Theophrastus on Stones
E. R. Caley and J. C. Richards
The Ohio State University Press, 1900

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THIRD PARTIES
Victims and the Criminal Justice System
Leslie Sebba
The Ohio State University Press, 1996

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This One Will Hurt You
Paul Crenshaw
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
The powerful essays in Paul Crenshaw’s This One Will Hurt You range in subject matter from the fierce tornadoes that crop up in Tornado Alley every spring and summer to a supposedly haunted one-hundred-year-old tuberculosis sanatorium that he lived on the grounds of as a child. They ruminate on the effects of crystal meth on small southern towns, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and the ongoing struggle of being a parent in an increasingly disturbing world. They surprise, whether discovering a loved one’s secret, an opossum’s motivation, or the unexpected decision four beer-guzzling, college-aged men must make. They tell stories of family and the past, the histories of small things such as walls and weather, and the faith it takes to hold together in the face of death.
 
With eloquence, subtle humor, and an urgent poignancy, Crenshaw delivers a powerful and moving collection of nonfiction essays, tied together by place and the violence of the world in which we live.
 
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Thomas Hardy's Brains
Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy's Imagination
Suzanne Keen
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
The imagery of brains and nerves that Thomas Hardy employed in over a half century of writing amply demonstrates that he knew the psychology of his time. Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination reevaluates Hardy’s representations of minds, the will, and consciousness (and nescience) in the context of Victorian brain science and Victorian medical neurology. Susanne Keen traces his reading from his early twenties until his old age in sources such as The Literary Notebooks, collections of reading notes made by Hardy from the 1860s onward. In showing how Hardy the reader informed Hardy the novelist and poet, she gives new insight into the unusual techniques Hardy used to represent fictional consciousness in his fiction and shows how the image schemas in his poetry embody his convictions.
 
This study reveals how Hardy made sense of diverse sources of an affective human psychology, a discipline that expanded significantly during Hardy’s working life. From the 1870s to the turn of the twentieth century, the tools and techniques for studying the structures and function of the nervous system developed rapidly. Simultaneously, Hardy moved steadily toward realizing a more physiologically accurate rendering of brains and nerves.
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THOMAS WORTHINGTON
FATHER OF OHIO STATEHOOD
ALFRED BYRON SEARS
The Ohio State University Press, 1998

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A THOUSAND WORDS
PORTRAITURE, STYLE, AND QUEER MODERNISM
JAIME HOVEY
The Ohio State University Press, 2006
A Thousand Words argues that there is such a thing as queer modernism, and that the (mostly) literary portrait—one of the more prominent forms of experimentalism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writing—functions as one of its most important erotically dynamic aesthetic mechanisms, one modeled on visual portraiture’s relationships of looking between the artists, sitters, and spectators of paintings. Jaime Hovey looks at how the dynamic structure of visual portraiture was appropriated by modernist writers—including Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Colette, among others, who used the self-conscious literary portrait.

Portraiture speaks to the complex relationship between identity, sexuality, and art, and the presence of so many portraits in this era suggests that sexual, gender, and racial aspects of character, personality, and personal identity were of major concern to most modernist writers. Yet it took most of the twentieth century for critical work to appear that meaningfully explored these themes, and very little has been said about the queerness of literary portraiture. This book demonstrates that literary portraiture is enamored of its own self-consciousness, with the pleasures of looking at itself seeing itself, and that its texts circulate this pleasure between writers, narrators and other characters, and readers as a perverse aesthetics
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Through a Long Absence
Words from My Father's Wars
Joy Passanante
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
A 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver Winner for Biography

Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante’s touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families. Told through her father’s eyes—drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings—Passanante masterfully recreates his wartime journey and physically retraces his steps more than sixty years later in an attempt to understand a time in her parents’ lives that they’d spoken about very little.
 
More than just a World War II story, Through a Long Absence delves into one man’s past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind. The narrative propels readers to surprising places—from a freight train through North Africa to an underground St. Louis distillery during Prohibition, from a young couple’s forbidden courtship to the chaos of surgical tents under fire in Normandy, from an underground trove of priceless artwork hidden by the Nazis to Jewish New Year services in Paris a week after its liberation. Through a Long Absence is a love story, an honest look into one man’s life, and a daughter’s moving quest to rediscover her father years later through his own words.
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Through Fences
Written by Frederick Luis Aldama and Illustrated by Oscar Garza
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
Through Fences follows the ups and downs of Latino kids and young adults in the US–Mexico borderlands: San Ysidro, Calexico, McAllen, and back and forth across the border. A young girl’s journey north goes wrong, and now she is in a forbidding new place, away from her parents and brother, where she doesn’t understand what the adults in green are saying even as she tries to obey their rules. Rocky, one of the few white kids in town, stands by and watches as Miguel is jumped by two of his friends. Maggie and her parents are separated at the border in a tragic accident. Alberto’s son doesn’t understand his Mexican father’s hatred for “illegals” or his work as a border patrol agent. Alicia is a TikTok influencer who doesn’t want to grow up to be a hospital cleaning lady like her mother, but COVID complicates things. Whatever their challenges, the kids, teens, tweens, and adults in these pages are just trying to survive their everyday lives. Vibrantly illustrated by Oscar Garza, each of these short stories brings a different perspective on the perils of living on the border while brown.
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Thunderbolt
An American Tale, Vol. 1
Wilfred Santiago
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Hero. Terrorist. Martyr. Madman. Thunderbolt: An American Tale tells the true story of Old John Brown: abolitionist, insurrectionist, and American legend.

As a young boy in nineteenth-century America, Captain John Brown swore to dedicate his life to the struggle against slavery. Years later, he and his sons have joined the fight in Kansas, the epicenter of the national debate over slavery. As the territory nears statehood, abolitionists and proslavery border ruffians clash in increasingly violent conflict across the territory. But John Brown has more in mind than border skirmishes. He aims to eliminate slavery from US soil once and for all—even if that means raiding a government armory in order to arm a national slave revolt. From the Pottawatomie Massacre to the Battle of Black Jack and the Battle of Osawatomie, this first installment in the story of the legendary John Brown traces the rise of the insurrection in stunning detail.

Gritty, gripping, and masterfully illustrated, Wilfred Santiago’s telling of John Brown’s tale pulls no punches as it unflinchingly recounts the epic struggle across pre–Civil War America. And while John Brown’s methods may be questionable, his story is unforgettable. After all, dying is part of the plan.
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Thurberville
Bob Hunter
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
James Thurber’s Columbus was not today’s Columbus—or even yesterday’s. It was a Columbus he both knew and created, a place perched on the fringe of reality and the fringe of his imagination. It is the place Bob Hunter revisits in Thurberville, a book where the author separates truth from fiction and identifies what parts of the famous humorist’s hometown of 180,000 exist in the burgeoning metro area of more than two million today.
Thurber’s Columbus was a wild and crazy place, a city full of fascinating and sometimes peculiar characters, many in his own family. Because of the widespread popularity of his stories, that was also the Columbus that many of his readers around the world came to know.
Thurberville chronicles those characters and explores that world. But it also examines the real city where Thurber struggled and then blossomed as a college student, worked as a newspaper reporter and a press agent, and achieved international fame as a humorist and cartoonist after he left town, in part by writing about the subjects he left behind.
Much of Thurber’s best work was cultivated by experiences Thurber had in Columbus and in his dealings with family, friends, teachers, and acquaintances there. They are worth a revisit and, in some cases, an introduction.
 
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Time and Change
150 Years of The Ohio State University
Tamar Chute
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
This photographic retrospective of The Ohio State University showcases its rich history and decades of growth, from its earliest years as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College to the prominent land-grant institution it is today. The book includes more than three hundred rarely seen photographs from the collections of the University Archives and contemporary university photographers.
 
Gain a visually stunning new perspective on iconic landmarks such as Mirror Lake, the Oval, Ohio Stadium, and the neighborhoods surrounding the Columbus and regional campuses. From beloved teams, symbols, and traditions to scenes from academic and campus life, reflect on time and change and rediscover the extraordinary connection that unites generations of Buckeyes.
 
 
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TITO
YUGOSLAVIA'S GREAT DICTATOR, A REASSESSM
STEVAN K. PAVLOWITCH
The Ohio State University Press, 1992

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Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction
Narratives of Cultural Remission
Leona Toker
The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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Toys and Tools in Pink
Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology
Carol Colatrella
The Ohio State University Press, 2011
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs work collaboratively to connect education and research at the institutional, national, and global levels. But what role do women play in STEM? In this very timely book, Carol Colatrella responds to the under-representation of women in STEM by considering how gender inflects literary and media representations. In her analysis of fictional and cinematic texts that reference STEM, she investigates cultural tensions concerning sex roles—tensions that continue to be influential in today’s world.
 
Toys and Tools in Pinkanalyzes female character types that recur in fictional narratives in print, on television, and in the cinema: female criminals and detectives, mothers who practice medicine, and “babe scientists,” among others. It also investigates how narrative settings and plots both subsume and influence cultural stereotypes of gender in prescribing salient professional and personal codes of conduct in the STEM fields.
 
Literary and historical case studies in Toys and Tools in Pinkexamine issues of women’s abilities in, access to, and management of science and technology. These issues appear in debates among university faculty, politicians, and public policy analysts concerned about women’s participation in STEM fields. Current analyses of diverse fictions and films demonstrate a continuing interest in women’s place in science and technology and also create new, evolving understandings of femininity and masculinity that revise earlier stereotypes.
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Trafficking Rhetoric
Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery
Annie Hill
The Ohio State University Press, 2024

Human trafficking has generated intense global concern, with stories of sex slavery and images of women forced into prostitution so persuasive that states have raced to respond ahead of empirical data and clear definitions of the crime. In Trafficking Rhetoric, Annie Hill analyzes the entanglement of state veneration and state violence by tracking how the United Kingdom points to the alleged crimes of others in order to celebrate itself and conceal its own aggression. Hill compares the UK’s acclaimed rescue approach to human trafficking with its hostile approach to migration, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin—one that relies on rhetorical constructions of “trafficked women” and “illegal migrants” to materialize the UK as an Anglo-white space.

Drawing from official estimates, policy papers, NGO reports, news stories, and awareness campaigns and situating them in the broader EU context, Hill accounts for why the UK’s antitrafficking agenda emerged with such rhetorical force in the early twenty-first century. Trafficking Rhetoric reframes controversies over labor, citizenship, and migration while challenging the continued traction of race-baiting and gender bias in determining who has the right to live, work, and belong in the nation.

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Tragic Effects
Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation
Therese Augst
The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Tragic Effects: Ethics and Tragedy in the Age of Translation confronts the peculiar fascination with Greek tragedy as it shapes the German intellectual tradition, with particular focus on the often controversial practice of translating the Greeks. Whereas the tradition of emulating classical ideals in German intellectual life has generally emerged from the impulse to identify with models, the challenge of translating the Greeks underscores the linguistic and historical discontinuities inherent in the recourse to ancient material and inscribes that experience of disruption as fundamental to modernity.

Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations are a case in point. Regarded in his own time as the work of a madman, his renditions of Sophoclean tragedy intensify dramatic effect with the unsettling experience of familiar language slipping its moorings. His attention to marking the distances between ancient source text and modern translation has granted his Oedipus and Antigone a distinct longevity as objects of discussion, adaptation, and even retranslation. Cited by Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Bertolt Brecht, and others, Hölderlin’s Sophocles project follows a path both marked by various contexts and tinged by persistent quandaries of untranslatability.

Tragedy has long functioned as a cornerstone for questions about ethical life. By placing emphasis on processes of translation and adaptation, however, Tragic Effects approaches the question of ethics from a perspective informed by recent discourse in translation studies. Reconstructing an ancient text in this context requires negotiating the difficult tension between comprehending the distant past and preserving its radical singularity.

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Transatlantic Correspondence
Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992
José Luis Venegas
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992 by José Luis Venegas explores how influential Spanish and Spanish American writers used letters in their literary works to formulate distinctive visions of modernity. Bringing into the discussion authors such as Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Carmen Martín Gaite, and Gabriel García Márquez, Venegas reveals unsuspected connections between the authors’ literary use of epistolary writing and their opinions about the place of Hispanic culture and civilization within a global context. Transatlantic Correspondence contributes to broader debates on literary transnationalism and the contradictory nature of modernity.
 
Each chapter frames literary works by authors from both sides of the Atlantic within key historical events spanning the loss of Spain’s overseas possessions in 1898 to the commemoration of Columbus’s quincentennial in 1992. This broad range of historical reference is counterpointed by the nuanced examination of a single formal feature in a wide variety of canonical and non-canonical texts. Drawing on insights from postcolonial studies, the book addresses the link between historical transformations that traverse decades and continents and specific stylistic choices in order to foster an understanding of Hispanic literary and cultural studies that is not limited by categories such as “movement,” “generation,” and “national literature.”
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Translation Effects
Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England
Mary Kate Hurley
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
In Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, Mary Kate Hurley reinterprets a well-recognized and central feature of medieval textual production: translation. Medieval texts often leave conspicuous evidence of the translation process. These translation effects are observable traces that show how medieval writers reimagined the nature of the political, cultural, and linguistic communities within which their texts were consumed. Examining translation effects closely, Hurley argues, provides a means of better understanding not only how medieval translations imagine community but also how they help create communities.
 
Through fresh readings of texts such as the Old English Orosius, Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, Ælfric’s Homilies, Chaucer, Trevet, Gower, and Beowulf, Translation Effects adds a new dimension to medieval literary history, connecting translation to community in a careful and rigorous way and tracing the lingering outcomes of translation effects through the whole of the medieval period.
 
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The Translator's Daughter
A Memoir
Grace Loh Prasad
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
A Taiwanese American writer unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, language, and loss to tell a unique story about reclaiming one’s heritage while living in a diaspora.

Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.
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Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
How did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein give rise to the iconic green monster everyone knows today? In 1823, only five years after publication, Shelley herself saw the Creature come to life on stage, and this performance shaped the story’s future. Suddenly, thousands of people who had never read Shelley’s novel were participating in its cultural animation. Similarly, early adaptations magnified the reception and renown of all manner of nineteenth-century literary creations, from Byron and Keats to Dickens and Tennyson and beyond. Yet, until now, adaptation has been seen as a largely modern phenomenon.
 
In Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, Lissette Lopez Szwydky convincingly historicizes the practice of adaptation, drawing on multiple disciplines to illustrate narrative mobility across time, culture, and geography. Case studies from stage plays, literature, painting, illustration, chapbooks, and toy theaters position adaptation as a central force in literary history that ensures continued cultural relevance, accessibility, and survival. The history of these forms helps to inform and put into context our contemporary obsessions with popular media. Finally, in upending a traditional understanding of canon by arguing that adaptation creates canon and not the other way around, Szwydky provides crucial bridges between nineteenth-century literary scholarship, adaptation studies, and media studies, thus identifying new stakes for all.
 
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Traveling Economies
American Women's Travel Writing
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
The black and white women travel writers whom Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman investigates in Traveling Economies astonish modern readers with their daring, stamina, and courage. That these women traveled at all is surprising: Nancy Prince spent nearly a decade as an African American member of the Russian Imperial Court; Amy Morris Bradley went to Costa Rica as a governess in hopes of saving her health and finances after years as an impoverished teacher in Maine; and Julia Archibald Holmes carried the banner of dress reform to the heights of Pikes Peak and to the pages of a feminist periodical. Developing the concept of the “ragged edge,” Steadman highlights these women’s shared experiences of penury, work, and independence. Genteel poverty, black skin, outspoken feminism, or sometimes all three impacted the material conditions of their ragged-edge travel (early muckraking journalist Anne Royall walked until her feet were a bloody mass of blisters). Being on the ragged edge also affected the way they represented themselves and their travels (Mary Ann Shadd Cary presented her outspoken advocacy of black emigration to Canada as appropriately feminine). Frances Wright used her travel writing to imagine the new nation as a potential utopia for women citizens; she paid a high price for daring to try to change the social terrain she crossed. Steadman’s interdisciplinary work with archives, newspapers, memoirs, and letters and her thoughtful close readings of the resulting evidence recover these important women’s travels and writing and invite us to rethink where and how women went and what they wrote in antebellum America.
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The Treacherous Imagination
Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction
Robert McGill
The Ohio State University Press, 2013
Many authors have been accused of betraying their loved ones by turning them into fictional characters. In The Treacherous Imagination, Robert McGill examines the ethics of writing such stories. He argues that while fiction has long appealed to readers with its narratives of private life, contemporary autobiographical fiction channels a widespread ambivalence about the value of telling all in a confessional age—an age in which fiction has an unprecedented power to leave people feeling libeled or exposed when they recognize themselves in it.
Observing that the interests of authors and their loved ones in such cases are often less divergent than they appear, McGill assess strategies by which both parties might use fiction not to hurt each other but to revise and revitalize intimacy. Discussing authors such as Philip Roth, Alice Munro, A. S. Byatt, and Hanif Kureishi, McGill questions whether people should always require exclusivity of each other with regard to the stories they tell about private life. Instead, authors and their intimates might jointly embrace fiction’s playful, transgressive qualities, even while reexamining the significance of that fiction’s intimations.
In treating autobiographical fiction as both a willful public indiscretion and a mediator of intimate relations, The Treacherous Imagination provides a comprehensive account of the various potentials that fiction holds to harm and to help those who write it, those who read it, and those who see themselves in it.
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Trespassing Natures
Species Migration and the Right to Space
Donnie Johnson Sackey
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
As old worlds become hostile and new spaces become hospitable, many species are shifting their ranges to live in locations where they have never previously existed. Biological and sociocultural realms collide and boundaries blur, making it increasingly difficult to mark definitively who belongs and who is a trespasser. In Trespassing Natures, Donnie Johnson Sackey troubles the idea of biological “invasion,” turning our attention away from scientific considerations and toward the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of this term—offering a new paradigm that recasts this issue as a question of what it means to live in multi-species communities. Presenting case studies on bed bugs, bighead carp, feral cats, and mackerel, Sackey argues that the identification of a species as an invader is not merely a scientific act, but a cultural and political one. By questioning issues around space, identity, and the institutions that make human participation apparent, Sackey redirects focus away from the belief that a single species threatens space. Ultimately, Trespassing Natures asks us to expand our idea of community and question who has the right to space.
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TRIAL OF EBENEZER SCROOGE
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
The Ohio State University Press, 2001

What happened to Ebenezer Scrooge after the night he was visited by the three spirits?

When we left Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, he appeared to be a man transformed. But did he sincerely repent and earn admission to heaven? The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge, written in Dickensian style and with tongue firmly lodged in cheek, follows Scrooge through the Court of Heavenly Justice, where his soul’s fate is to be determined. In this courtroom drama, using frequent flashbacks, the author uncovers startling evidence, much of it directly from Dickens’s classic, that reveals Scrooge to have lived a saintly life before being confronted by three Christmas ghosts. Evidence mounts that Mr. Scrooge struck a Faustian bargain with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, a deal to extend his own mortality in exchange for yielding his soul as a tool for the forces of darkness to infiltrate heaven. Readers will enjoy the remaking of some of Dickens’s best-known characters. Tiny Tim emerges as a villain, while little Eppie, borrowed from George Eliot’s Silas Marner, is Scrooge’s protector and source of salvation. This new novel provides the much-needed redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge’s reputation and offers a welcome departure from the standard saccharine fare at Christmastime. Dickens buffs will have a merry time trying to find where Dickens’s voice ends and the author’s begins. All readers will puzzle over how we could have so misjudged Ebenezer Scrooge, or whether we judged Scrooge aright from the start.
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The Trouble with Men
Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
David Shields
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint. While unashamedly intellectual, it’s also irresistibly readable and extremely moving. Over five increasingly intimate chapters, Shields probes the contours of his own psyche and marriage, marshalling a chorus of other voices that leaven, deepen, and universalize his experience; his goal is nothing less than a deconstruction of eros and conventional masculinity. Masterfully woven throughout is an unmistakable and surprisingly tender cri de coeur to his wife. The risk and vulnerability on display are in the service of radical candor, acerbic wit, real emotion, and profound insight—exactly what we’ve come to expect from Shields, who, in an open invitation to the reader, leaves everything on the page.
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Troubled Lovers in History
A Sequence of Poems
Albert Goldbarth
The Ohio State University Press, 1999

Troubled Lovers in History demonstrates an exhilarating range: from the briefest of lyrics to rich and multipartite narrative adventures in exotic realms; from a comic monologue spoken in immigrant “Yinglish” to a soulful elegy set in San Antonio’s Pearl Beer brewery plant; from Martian invaders, through polar explorers, to all of us busy inflicting “words with edges” on those we love.

Goldbarth sets his unflinching study of individual hope and grief against the backdrop of history: the travels of Marco Polo; Bertha and Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of X-rays; an 1800 battle “twixt Dragon Sam, the great Exhaler of Gouts of Amazing Flame . . . and Liquid Dan, the Living Geyser.”

From the night stars to the little starring parts we all play every day, Troubled Lovers in History takes us into the text of our dreams and despairs, as witnessed by the writer whom Joyce Carol Oates called “a poet of remarkable gifts—a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart.”

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The Troubled Union
Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels
John Morán González
The Ohio State University Press, 2010
In The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels, John Morán González traces the imperialist imaginings behind literary efforts to reunite the United States after the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This innovative study explores how the U.S. historical romance attempted to rebuild a national identity by renovating Manifest Destiny for the twentieth-century imperialist future through courtship and marriage plots. Yet even as these literary romances promised expansive national futures, the racial and gender contradictions of U.S. democracy threatened to result in troubled unions at home and fractious ventures abroad. Canonical authors such as Henry James, popular authors such as Helen Hunt Jackson, and rediscovered authors such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton provide the dramatic narratives examined in this book.
 
Employing theoretical perspectives drawn from American Studies and Latin American Studies, González highlights the importance of the “domestic”—understood as both the domestic boundaries of the nation and of the home—as a key site within civil society that maintained and renewed imperialist national subjectivities. The Troubled Union combines the formal analysis of literary genre with interdisciplinary cultural studies to elucidate just how the imperial national allegory deeply structured the U.S. cultural imagination of the late nineteenth century.
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Truth and Tales
Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media
Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
In the medieval period, as in the media culture of the present, learned and popular forms of talk were intermingled everywhere. They were also highly mobile, circulating in speech, writing, and symbol, as performances as well as in material objects. The communication through and between different media we all negotiate in daily life did not develop from a previous separation of orality and writing, but from a communications network not unlike our own, if slower, and similarly shaped by disparities of access. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, develops a variety of approaches to the labor of imaginatively reconstructing this network from its extant artifacts.
 
Truth and Tales includes fourteen essays by medieval literary scholars and historians. Some essays focus on written artifacts that convey high or popular learning in unexpected ways. Others address a social problem of concern to all, demonstrating the genres and media through which it was negotiated. Still others are centered on one or more texts, detailing their investments in popular as well as learned knowledge, in performance as well as writing. This collective archaeology of medieval media provides fresh insight for medieval scholars and media theorists alike.
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Twenty Square Feet of Skin
Megan Baxter
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
“A pensive inquiry, often breathtakingly beautiful and relatable, into how and where and with whom we fit.” —Kirkus

The essays in Twenty Square Feet of Skin tell their stories through the body—encased as it is in “that greatest of organs, that membrane that protects the individual from the universe”—as Megan Baxter’s entrée to and home within the larger world that surrounds her. What does a tattoo mean? How can plastic surgery transform? What is the history of pedicures? Where does the mind wander on a long run? Through every example, Baxter writes toward a greater understanding of how self-knowledge is forged through physical experiences.
 
With the input of Prince, Walt Whitman, Don Johnson, Andrew Wyeth, Meriwether Lewis, and others, Baxter reflects on love, identity, and belonging by looking closely at her skin, toenails, and DNA. Playful, wandering, and deeply felt, Twenty Square Feet of Skin weaves a strange, rich tapestry of flesh and bones, art and body, skin and scar. In embracing the beauty and peril of physicality in crystalline detail, Baxter asks us all to ponder what makes us human within these frail, flawed, powerful, and wonderful bodies of ours.
 
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Twisted Words
Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain
Katherine Judith Anderson
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain examines torture across the fiction, periodicals, and government documents of the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Placing acts of torture and words about torture in relation to changing definitions of citizenship and human rights, Katherine Judith Anderson argues that torture—as a technique of state terrorism—evolved in relation to nineteenth-century liberalism, combining the traditional definition of exceptional acts of cruelty with systemic, banal, or everyday violence. Analyzing canonical novels by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith alongside an impressive array of lesser-known fiction through the lenses of critical terrorism studies and political, legal, and phenomenological theory, Anderson rethinks torture as a mode of reclaiming an embodied citizenship and demonstrates how the Victorians ushered in our modern definition of torture. Furthermore, she argues that torture is foundational to Western modernity, since liberalism was, and continues to be, dependent on state-sanctioned––and at times state-sponsored—torture, establishing parallels between Victorian liberal thought and contemporary (neo)imperialism and global politics.
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Typical Girls
The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips
Susan E. Kirtley
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Winner, 2022 Charles Hatfield Award from the Comics Studies Society

In the years following 1975, a group of female-created comic strips came to national attention in a traditionally male-dominated medium. Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips.
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