front cover of The Edge of Meaning
The Edge of Meaning
James Boyd White
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Certain questions are basic to the human condition: how we imagine the world, and ourselves and others within it; how we confront the constraints of language and the limits of our own minds; and how we use imagination to give meaning to past experiences and to shape future ones. These are the questions James Boyd White addresses in The Edge of Meaning, exploring each through its application to great works of Western culture—Huckleberry Finn, the Odyssey, and the paintings of Vermeer among them. In doing so, White creates a deeply moving and insightful book and presents an inspiring conception of mind, language, and the essence of living.
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Elizabeth I
Translations, 1544-1589
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2008
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.

Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources.

The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule.
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Elizabeth I
Translations, 1592-1598
Elizabeth I
University of Chicago Press, 2009
England’s Virgin Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, had a reputation for proficiency in foreign languages, repeatedly demonstrated in multilingual exchanges with foreign emissaries at court and in the extemporized Latin she spoke on formal visits to Cambridge and Oxford. But the supreme proof of her mastery of other tongues is the sizable body of translations she made over the course of her lifetime. This two-volume set is the first complete collection of Elizabeth’s translations from and into Latin, French, and Italian.
            Presenting original and modernized spellings in a facing-page format, these two volumes will answer the call to make all of Elizabeth’s writings available. They include her renderings of epistles of Cicero and Seneca, religious writings of John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre, and Horace’s Ars poetica, as well as Elizabeth’s Latin Sententiae drawn from diverse sources, on the responsibilities of sovereign rule and her own perspectives on the monarchy.  Editors Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel offer introduction to each of the translated selections, describing the source text, its cultural significance, and the historical context in which Elizabeth translated it. Their annotations identify obscure meanings, biblical and classical references, and Elizabeth’s actual or apparent deviations from her sources. 
            The translations collected here trace Elizabeth’s steady progression from youthful evangelical piety to more mature reflections on morality, royal responsibility, public and private forms of grief, and the right way to rule.  Elizabeth I: Translations is the queen’s personal legacy, an example of the very best that a humanist education can bring to the conduct of sovereign rule. 
 
 
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front cover of Embodiments of Evil
Embodiments of Evil
Gog and Magog: Interdisciplinary Studies of the "Other" in Literature & Internet Texts
Edited by A. A. Seyed-Gohrab, F. Doufikar-Aerts, and S. McGlinn
Leiden University Press, 2011
One Word – Yak Kaleme was one of the first treatises in the Middle East to demonstrate that Islam is compatible with the introduction of modern western forms of government, and specifically that the principles of the sharia can be incorporated in a codified law comparable to that found in European countries. This was a daring argument in the late 19th century, when it was extremely difficult to convince the rulers and religious class that a civil code of law was needed: would it not diminish the status of the ruler, and would it not be an admission that the religious law, the sharia, was deficient? The author, Mirza Yu¯suf Kha¯n Mustashar al-Dawla (d. 1895), was a liberal-minded bureaucrat campaigning for reform of the absolutist system and the creation of one based on European principles of government. He held several posts abroad including St Petersburg (1854-62), and Paris (1867-71), as well as carrying out administrative duties in Iran itself. In One Word he argues that the principles underlying constitutional government can be found in Islamic sources, particularly in the Quran and traditions of the Prophet. Unlike some Oriental travellers to Europe at that time, he observed that European dominance was not derived from a few technological advances, but primarily from the organisation of society, on the basis of codified law. One Word was a significant text in the lead-up to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but its message is relevant today.
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Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason
The Transatlantic "Light of All Our Day"
Patrick J. Keane
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason is a comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson’s part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy. The book’s guiding theme is the concept of intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge’s distinction between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that “light of all our day” in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” Intuitive Reason became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light radiated out to illuminate Emerson’s life and work, as well as the complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely “self-reliant” and “original,” was deeply indebted to his transatlantic precursors.
            The debt is intellectual and personal. Emerson’s supposed indifference to, or triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his Idealism—a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the tragic. His “art of losing” may be better understood as a tribute to the “healing power,” the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered Wordsworth’s principal value. The second part of this book traces Emerson’s struggle—with the help of the “benignant influence” shed by that “light of all our day”—to confront and overcome personal tragedy, to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas”: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
            As a study in what has been called “the paradox of originality,” the book should appeal to those interested in the Anglo-American Romantic tradition and the innovations of the individual talent—especially in the capacity of a writer such as Emerson not only to absorb his precursors but also to use them as a stimulus to his own creative power.
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Emotion in the Tudor Court
Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling
Bradley J. Irish
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Deploying literary analysis, theories of emotion from the sciences and humanities, and an archival account of Tudor history, Emotion in the Tudor Court examines how literature both reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance court. In it, Bradley J. Irish argues that emotionality is a foundational framework through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, and thus can serve as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis.

Spanning the sixteenth century, Emotion in the Tudor Court explores Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Henrician satire; Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and elegy; Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry; and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and factional literature. It demonstrates how the dynamics of disgust,envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court.

By combining Renaissance concepts of emotion with modern research in the social and natural sciences, Emotion in the Tudor Court takes a transdisciplinary approach to yield fascinating and robust ways to illuminate both literary studies and cultural history. 
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front cover of The Emperor’s New Clothes
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style
Kathryn T. Flannery
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
Since the Renaissance, what has been considered the “best” style of writing has always been connected with the dominant cultural agenda of the time. In this book, Kathryn Flannery offers a demystifying perspective on theorists who have argued for an essential distinction between “content” and “style,” and focuses on the importance of understanding written prose style as a cultural asset. She addresses the development of prose criticism, the evolution of English teaching, the history of Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker's writing, and a modern discourse on stylistics.
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front cover of Empire and The Literature of Sensation
Empire and The Literature of Sensation
An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction
Alemán, Jesse
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Mid-nineteenth-century American literature teems with the energy and excitement characteristic of the nation's era of expansion. It also reveals the intense anxiety and conflict of a country struggling with what it will mean, socially and culturally, to incorporate previously held Spanish territories. Empire and the Literature of Sensation is a critical anthology of some of the most popular and sensational writings published before the Civil War. It is a collection of transvestite adventures, forbidden love, class conflict, and terrifying encounters with racial "others."

Most of the accounts, although widely distributed in nineteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets, or dime store novels, have long been out of print. Reprinted here for the first time are novelettes by two superstars of the cheap fiction industry, Ned Buntline and George Lippard. Also included are selections from one of the first dime novels as well as the narratives of Leonora Siddons and Sophia Delaplain, both who claim in their autobiographical pamphlets to have cross-dressed as men and participated in the Texas rebellion and Cuban filibustering.

Originally written for entertainment and enormously popular in their day, these sensational thrillers reveal for today's audiences how the rhetoric of empire was circulated for mass consumption and how imperialism generated domestic and cultural instability during the period of the American literary renaissance.
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Empire Burlesque
The Fate of Critical Culture in Global America
Daniel T. O Hara
Duke University Press, 2003
Empire Burlesque traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. Daniel T. O’Hara argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. By highlighting the spectacle of its own self-parody, O’Hara aims to shock U.S. cultural criticism back into a sense of ethical responsibility.

Empire Burlesque presents several interrelated analyses through readings of a range of writers and cultural figures including Henry James, Freud, Said, De Man, Derrida, and Cordwainer Smith (an academic, spy, and classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction writer). It describes the debilitating effects of globalization on the university in general and the field of literary studies in particular, it critiques literary studies’ embrace of globalization theory in the name of a blind and vacant modernization, and it meditates on the ways critical reading and writing can facilitate an imaginative alternative to institutionalized practices of modernization. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it diagnoses contemporary American Studies as typically driven by the mindless abjection and transference of professional identities.

A provocative commentary on contemporary cultural criticism, Empire Burlesque will inform debates on the American university across the humanities, particularly among those in literary criticism, cultural studies, and American studies.

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English after the Fall
From Literature to Textuality
Robert Scholes
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to providing concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline.
With the self-assurance of a master essayist, Scholes explores the reasons for the fallen status of English and suggests a way forward. Arguing that the fall of English as a field of study is due, at least in part, to the narrow view of “literature” that prevails in English departments, Scholes charts how the historical rise of English as a field of study during the early twentieth century led to the domination of modernist notions of verbal art, ultimately restricting English studies to a narrow cannon of approved texts.
After tracing the various meanings attached to the word “literature” since the Renaissance, Scholes argues that the concept of it that currently shapes the work of English departments excludes both powerful sacred documents (from the Declaration of Independence to the Bible) and pleasurable, profane works that involve the performance of roles like those of clown and teacher in many media (including popular musicals, opera, and film)—and that both sorts of works should be studied in English courses. English after the Fall is a bold manifesto for the replacement of literature with what Scholes calls textuality—an expansive and ecumenical notion of what we read and write—as the primary object of English instruction. This concise and persuasive work is destined to become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the humanities.
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Engraven Desire
Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century
Philip Stewart
Duke University Press, 1992
How do literary illustrations affect the way we read—or more subtly, what we read? Through a critical investigation of the role of engraving played in eighteenth-century French literature, Philip Stewart grapples with this question. In both its approach and its conclusions, his project marks a provocative departure from the tradition of viewing illustrations as merely pictures, rather than as texts to be interpreted themselves.
Focusing on the objectification of women by the “male gaze,” Stewart analyzes the varous ways in which this masculine power is simultaneously represented and veiled: the fascination with women playing “male” roles, such as soldiers; the preponderance of voyeuristic images of the naked female body; the transformation of male power into hostile forces of nature that render women helpless. Further, Stewart shows how “indecent” engravings that purported to test the limits of eighteenth-century morality often merely reinforced prevailing images of women.
Addressing critical concerns about the societal enforcement of gender roles in literature along with essential questions about the function of illustration, Engraven Desire provides surprising insight into the culturally conditioned act of reading. Stewart’s work, itself richly illustrated with hundreds of arresting reproductions, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the interplay of art, literature, and society.
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Entertaining History
The Civil War in Literature, Film, and Song
Edited by Chris Mackowski
Southern Illinois University Press, 2020
Popular media can spark the national consciousness in a way that captures people’s attention, interests them in history, and inspires them to visit battlefields, museums, and historic sites. This lively collection of essays and feature stories celebrates the novels, popular histories, magazines, movies, television shows, photography, and songs that have enticed Americans to learn more about our most dramatic historical era.

From Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, from Roots to Ken Burns’s The Civil War, from “Dixie” to “Ashokan Farewell,” and from Civil War photography to the Gettysburg Cyclorama, trendy and well-loved depictions of the Civil War are the subjects of twenty contributors who tell how they and the general public have been influenced by them. Sarah Kay Bierle examines the eternal appeal of Gone with the Wind and asks how it is that a protagonist who so opposed the war has become such a figurehead for it. H. R. Gordon talks with New York Times–bestselling novelist Jeff Shaara to discuss the power of storytelling. Paul Ashdown explores ColdMountain’s value as a portrait of the war as national upheaval, and Kevin Pawlak traces a shift in cinema’s depiction of slavery epitomized by 12 Years a Slave. Tony Horwitz revisits his iconic Confederates in the Attic twenty years later.

The contributors’ fresh analysis articulates a shared passion for history’s representation in the popular media. The variety of voices and topics in this collection coalesces into a fascinating discussion of some of the most popular texts in the genres. In keeping with the innovative nature of this series, web-exclusive material extends the conversation beyond the book.

 
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Entre Guadalupe y Malinche
Tejanas in Literature and Art
Edited by Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú
University of Texas Press, 2016

Mexican and Mexican American women have written about Texas and their lives in the state since colonial times. Edited by fellow Tejanas Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú, Entre Guadalupe y Malinche gathers, for the first time, a representative body of work about the lives and experiences of women who identify as Tejanas in both the literary and visual arts.

The writings of more than fifty authors and the artwork of eight artists manifest the nuanced complexity of what it means to be Tejana and how this identity offers alternative perspectives to contemporary notions of Chicana identity, community, and culture. Considering Texas-Mexican women and their identity formations, subjectivities, and location on the longest border between Mexico and any of the southwestern states acknowledges the profound influence that land and history have on a people and a community, and how Tejana creative traditions have been shaped by historical, geographical, cultural, linguistic, social, and political forces. This representation of Tejana arts and letters brings together the work of rising stars along with well-known figures such as writers Gloria Anzaldúa, Emma Pérez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carmen Tafolla, and Pat Mora, and artists such as Carmen Lomas Garza, Kathy Vargas, Santa Barraza, and more. The collection attests to the rooted presence of the original indigenous peoples of the land now known as Tejas, as well as a strong Chicana/Mexicana feminism that has its precursors in Tejana history itself.

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Epic Revisionism
Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda
Edited by Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Focusing on a number of historical and literary personalities who were regarded with disdain in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution—figures such as Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Lermontov—Epic Revisionism tells the fascinating story of these individuals’ return to canonical status during the darkest days of the Stalin era. 

    An inherently interdisciplinary project, Epic Revisionism features pieces on literary and cultural history, film, opera, and theater. This volume pairs scholarly essays with selections drawn from Stalin-era primary sources—newspaper articles, unpublished archival documents, short stories—to provide students and specialists with the richest possible understanding of this understudied phenomenon in modern Russian history.

“These scholars shed a great deal of light not only on Stalinist culture but on the politics of cultural production under the Soviet system.”—David L. Hoffmann, Slavic Review
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front cover of The Essential Wayne Booth
The Essential Wayne Booth
Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers re-create texts. 

While Booth’s work was formative to the study of literature, his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. Selected by Walter Jost in collaboration with Booth himself, the texts anthologized here present a picture of this indispensable critic’s contributions to literary and rhetorical studies. The selections range from memorable readings of Macbeth, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James to engagements with Booth’s intellectual heroes, such as Richard McKeon and Mikhail Bakhtin. But rhetoric, Booth’s abiding concern as a critic and thinker, provides the organizing principle of the anthology. The Essential Wayne Booth illuminates the scope of Booth’s rhetorical inquiry: the entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another. Whether about metaphors for our friendship with books or the two cultures of science and religion, the texts collected here always return to the techniques and ethics of our ways of communicating with each other—that is, to rhetoric.

The Essential Wayne Booth is a capstone to Booth's long career and an eloquent reminder of the ways in which criticism can make us alive to the arts of writing, talking, and listening.
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front cover of Etymologies and Genealogies
Etymologies and Genealogies
A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages
R. Howard Bloch
University of Chicago Press, 1983
"Mr. Bloch has attempted to establish what he calls a 'literary anthropology.' The project is important and ambitious. It seems to me that Mr. Bloch has completely achieved this ambition." –Michel Foucault

"Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light.

Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins. This model is articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and language, and is consequently reflected in historical and theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns. . . .

It is an ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore." –Nicholas Mann, Times Literary Supplement
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Everyone’s Theater
Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914
Michael Meeuwis
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.

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Ezra Pound among the Poets
Edited by George Bornstein
University of Chicago Press, 1985
"Be influenced by as many great writers as you can," said Ezra Pound. Pound was an "assimilative poet" par excellence, as George Bornstein calls him, a writer who more often "adhered to a . . . classical conception of influence as benign and strengthening" than to an anxiety model of influence. To study Pound means to study also his precursors—Homer, Ovid, Li Po, Dante, Whitman, Browning—as well as his contemporaries—Yeats, Williams, and Eliot. These poets, discussed here by ten distinguished critics, stimulated Pound's most important poetic encounters with the literature of Greece, Rome, China, Tuscany, England, and the United States. Fully half of these essays draw on previously unpublished manuscripts.
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