front cover of How to Live/What to Do
How to Live/What to Do
H.D.'s Cultural Poetics
Adalaide Morris
University of Illinois Press, 2002
The writing of H.D. is so linguistically rich and multilayered in structure that it has had almost as many interpretations as it has interpreters, from Freudians to feminists, from classicists to postmodernists. In How to Live/What to Do, however, Adalaide Morris removes the work of this iconic poet, dramatist, and novelist from compartments into which it has historically been placed. As she examines the "ongoingness" of H.D.'s writing, Morris makes an eloquent and compelling case for a consideration of poems--all poems--as forms of cultural mediation, instructive historical documents that engage the reader in wide-ranging contemporary debates and use their acoustical richness to generate tangible cultural effects.

Ever since the publication of her first H.D. essay in 1985 (included here in an expanded version), Morris has eschewed prevailing literary trends in favor of new approaches that both challenge and overpass dominant critical constructs. As she argues in this volume, the writing and, crucially, the reading of poetry is a process in which meaning is produced by the interplay of words on a page and in the ear of the reader. This quality of being not heard but overheard, composed within the body, is crucial to an appreciation of H.D.

Morris shows H.D. to be a playful linguistic innovator whose writings bear on debates in science, technology, and cinema as well as on poetry. Foremost, however, H.D. was a profound reshaper of the boundaries and possibilities of poetry, a generative form that, as this book shows, can indeed serve the cultural work of survival and resistance against the violence of modern culture.

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Lewd and Notorious
Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century
Katharine Kittredge, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Accounts of women's transgressive behavior in eighteenth-century literature and social documents have much to teach us about constructions of femininity during the period often identified as having formed our society's gender norms. Lewd and Notorious explores the eighteenth century's shadows, inhabited by marginal women of many kinds and degrees of contrariness. The reader meets Laetitia Pilkington, whose sexual indiscretions caused her to fall from social and literary grace to become an articulate memoirist of personal scandal, and Elizabeth Brownrigg, who tortured and starved her young servants, propelling herself to an infamy comparable to Susan Smith's or Myra Hindley's. More awful women wait between these covers to teach us about society's reception (and construction) of their debauchery and dangerousness.
 
The authors draw upon a rich range of contemporary texts to illuminate the lives of these women. Astute analysis of literary, legal, evangelical, epistolary, and political documents provides an understanding of 1700s womanhood. From lusty old maids to murderous mistresses, the characters who exemplify this period's vision of women on the edge are essential acquaintances for anyone wishing to understand the development and ramifications of conceptions of femininity.
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Practice of Everyday Life
Volume 2: Living and Cooking
Michel De Certeau
University of Minnesota Press, 1998
To remain unconsumed by consumer society—this was the goal, pursued through a world of subtle and practical means, that beckoned throughout the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life. The second volume of the work delves even deeper than did the first into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol develop a social history of “making do” based on microhistories that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). A series of interviews—mostly with women—allows us to follow the subjects’ individual routines, composed of the habits, constraints, and inventive strategies by which the speakers negotiate daily life. Through these accounts the speakers, “ordinary” people all, are revealed to be anything but passive consumers. Amid these experiences and voices, the ephemeral inventions of the “obscure heroes” of the everyday, we watch the art of making do become the art of living.This long-awaited second volume of de Certeau’s masterwork, updated and revised in this first English edition, completes the picture begun in volume 1, drawing to the last detail the collective practices that define the texture, substance, and importance of the everyday.Michel de Certeau (1925-1986) wrote numerous books that have been translated into English, including Heterologies (1986), The Capture of Speech (1998), and Culture in the Plural (1998), all published by Minnesota. Luce Giard is senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and is affiliated with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She is visiting professor of history and history of science at the University of California, San Diego. Pierre Mayol is a researcher in the French Ministry of Culture in Paris.Timothy J. Tomasik is a freelance translator pursuing a Ph.D. in French literature at Harvard University.
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The View From On the Road
The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
Omar Swartz
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Through careful analysis of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Omar Swartz argues that Kerouac’s influence on American society is largely rhetorical. Kerouac’s significance as a cultural icon can be best understood, Swartz asserts, in terms of traditional rhetorical practices and principles.

To Swartz, Kerouac is a rhetor who symbolically reconstructs his world and offers arguments and encouragements for others to follow. Swartz proposes that On the Road constitutes a “rhetorical vision,” a reality-defining discourse suggesting alternative possibilities for growth and change. Swartz asserts that the reader of Kerouac’s On theRoadbecomes capable of responding to the larger, confusing culture in a strategic manner. Kerouac's rhetorical vision of an alternative social and cultural reality contributes to the identity of localized cultures within the United States. 

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Virtuous Necessity
Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England
Jessica C. Murphy
University of Michigan Press, 2015
While many scholars find the early modern triad of virtues for women—silence, chastity, and obedience—to be straightforward and nonnegotiable, Jessica C. Murphy demonstrates that these virtues were by no means as direct and inflexible as they might seem. Drawing on the literature of the period—from the plays of Shakespeare to a conduct manual written for a princess to letters from a wife to her husband—as well as contemporary gender theory and philosophy, she uncovers the multiple meanings of behavioral expectations for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Through her renegotiation of cultural ideals as presented in both literary and nonliterary texts of early modern England, Murphy presents models for “acceptable” women’s conduct that lie outside of the rigid prescriptions of the time.

Virtuous Necessity will appeal to readers interested in early modern English literature, including canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as their female contemporaries such as Amelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary. It will also appeal to scholars of conduct literature; of early modern drama, popular literature, poetry, and prose; of women’s history; and of gender theory.
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