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Ever present in the work of contemporary Barbadian novelist George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, The Emigrants, and The Pleasures of Exile, are the subjects of history and revolution. In Caliban's Curse, Supriya M. Nair traces these themes and situates Lamming's work within the ongoing discourses of nationalism and identity. Retracing the history of colonial intervention in the anglophone Caribbean and seeking connections among Africa, the Caribbean, and England, Caliban's Curse moves beyond the popular perception of the archipelago as an ahistorical tourist paradise and presents the islands as a space populated by the tragic and triumphant cultures of the black diaspora.
Caliban's Curse draws upon a range of theories--postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist--to contextualize the black diaspora of the modern Caribbean through one of its primary anglophone novelists. Putting George Lamming in conversation with such contemporaries as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Harris, Nair argues that Lamming's works expand the protest of Shakespeare's Caliban to articulate a reinvention of Caribbean cultures. Both cursed by and cursing the weight of colonial history, Lamming works against the paralysis induced by such an encounter; his work serves to rewrite canonical icons and to reimagine popular cultures.
"Supriya Nair writes about the problems of history and social revolution with passion and clarity and an amazing range of critical and cultural reference. . . . She brings to existing studies of Lamming a wide and sustained knowledge of the forces that have shaped the West Indian novel, and the wider postcolonial debates in which these novels are read and discussed." --Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan
Supriya Nair is Associate Professor of English, Tulane University.

“Skinner’s Catullus in Verona . . . gives a dazzling demonstration of how even the seemingly over-familiar can yield fresh insights. Subtly interweaving old biographical platitudes and new literary theory, persona and person, she offers us a Catullus (sorry, construct of Catullus) faced with a public and private crisis of late Republican values—political, social, and literary—that forced him to abandon his neoteric models, to rethink all his relationships; plus a Lesbia, the ‘written woman,’ who here generates more semantic flux than heartbreak. Skinner’s readers, too, will end by rethinking a group of poems they thought they knew. This is no small achievement.” —Peter Green, The Times Literary Supplement

“This book is an important contribution to the study of Catullus, and more broadly to the study of Latin poetry. As an example of erudite scholarship and sensitive, supple criticism, I believe it will be of interest as well to a wider audience, including scholars and students working in other disciplines in the humanities.” —David Wray, assistant professor of classics, University of Chicago

Gaius Valerius Catullus is one of Rome’s greatest surviving poets and also one of the most popular Latin authors. Comprehensive treatments of his work have been hindered, however, by the problems posed by the Catullan collection as it has come down to us. Although many scholars now believe that Catullus did publish his verse in one or more small volumes (libelli), the theory that these books were rearranged after his death means that individual pieces continue to be read and analyzed separately, without reference to their placement within the collection. Skinner challenges this theory of posthumous editorship by offering a unified reading of Catullus’ elegiac poetry (poems 65–116 in our collection) and arguing that it constitutes what was once a separately circulated libellus whose authorial arrangement has been preserved intact. Purportedly issued from the poet’s native city, Verona, to his Roman readership, the volume presents itself as a valedictory.

This reading of the elegiac collection represents a major departure in Catullan studies. The methodological contention that Catullus’ elegiac poems are better approached as a single cohesive poetic statement makes this book a valuable new contribution to Catullan scholarship.

Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s.  Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed.  Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community.  
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.

 

Renowned scholar of medieval literature, Lee Patterson,  presents a compelling vision of the shape and direction of Geoffrey Chaucer’s entire career in Chaucer and the Subject of History.
    Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern.  At the same time he was profoundly aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society—by history.  This tension between the subject and history is Patterson's topic.  He begins by showing how Chaucer’s understanding of history as a subject for poetry—a world to be represented and a cultural force affecting human action—began to take shape in his poems on classical themes, especially in Troilus and Criseyde.  Patterson's extended analysis of this profound yet deeply conflicted exploration of the relationship between "history" and "the subject" provides the basis for understanding Chaucer's shift to his contemporary world in the Canterbury Tales.  There, in the shrewdest and most wide-ranging analysis of late medieval society we possess, Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career.
    Patterson's chapters on individual tales clarify and confirm his provocative arguments.   He shows, for example, how the Knight's Tale represents the contemporary crisis of governance in terms of a crisis in chivalric identity itself; how the Miller’s Tale reflects the social pressures and rhetoric of peasant movements generally and the Rising of 1381 in particular; and how the tales of the Merchant and Shipman register the paradoxical placement of a bourgeois class lacking class identity.  And Patterson's brilliant readings of the Wife of Bath’s Tale—"the triumph of the subject"—and the Pardoner’s Tale —"the subject of confession"—reveal how Chaucer reworked traditional materials to accomplish stunning innovations that make visible unmistakably social meanings.  Chaucer and the Subject of History is a landmark book, one that will shape the way that Chaucer is read for years to come.

In his latest book, Warren Ginsberg explores what he calls Chaucer's "Italian tradition," a discourse that emerges by viewing the social institutions and artistic modes that shaped Chaucer's reception of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. While offering a fresh look at one of England's great literary figures, this book addresses important questions about the dynamics of cross-cultural translation and the formation of tradition.
Because divergent political, municipal, and literary histories would have made the Italian cities--Genoa, Florence, and Milan--unfamiliar to an English poet from medieval London, Ginsberg argues that we must consider what Chaucer overlooked and mistook from his Italian models alongside the material he did appropriate. To make sense of premises in texts like Dante's Comedy that were peculiarly Italian, Chaucer would look to Boccaccio as a gloss; by reading these authors in conjunction with one another, Chaucer generates an "Italian tradition" that translates into the terms of his English experience works already mediated by a prior stage of transposition.
Ginsberg explores Chaucer's relationship to Italian poets not in terms of the interaction of individual talents with accredited authorities (Chaucer and Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, etc.). Rather, he focuses on the shifts in tension that occur when the civic engagements and disengagements of Florence's poets are brought into contact with Chaucer's growing metropolitanism and increasing reluctance to make London the locus of his poetic art.
Beyond its appeal to medievalists and those who study the Renaissance, Chaucer's Italian Tradition will be welcomed by readers interested in theoretical questions about translation and the development of tradition, including individuals who study history, literature, and the nature of the humanities.
Warren Ginsberg is Professor of English, University of Oregon.

Chekhov and Russian Religious Culture is an innovative study of the Virgin Mary and the "saintly harlots"–Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene–as a cultural paradigm encoded in Chekhov's prose. De Sherbinin establishes the authority of the Marian paradigm in nineteenth-century Russian culture with a comprehensive overview of salient religious and literary texts, then offers critical readings of more than fifteen Chekhov stories, including key works such as "Peasants," "Peasant Women," and "My Life." De Sherbinin argues that Chekhov inverts and displaces the Christian meanings of Marian texts in order to reveal a vast array of problematized relationships to the canonized figures. This illuminating semiotic reading of Chekhov explores questions of female identity as it probes the mindset of Russian Orthodox popular culture.

Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France's national epic, The Song of Roland. Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal-the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean.

In Creole Medievalism, Michelle Warren demonstrates that Bédier's relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. Warren shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the "colonial novel," adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies. Probing the work of a once famous but little understood cultural figure, Creole Medievalism illustrates how postcolonial France and Réunion continue to grapple with histories too varied to meet expectations of national unity.