Results by title
171 books match the query 'Books & Reading' and 7 start with e
Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
Katherine Joslin
University of New Hampshire Press, 2011
Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion places the iconic New York figure and her writing in the context of fashion history and shows how dress lies at the very center of her thinking about art and culture. The study traces American patronage of the Paris couture houses from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Chanel and places Wharton's characters in these establishments and garments to offer fresh readings of her well-known novels. Less known are Wharton's knowledge of and involvement in the craft of garment making in her tales of seamstresses, milliners, and textile workers, as well as in her creation of workshops in Paris during the First World War to employ Belgian and French seamstresses and promote the value of handmade garments in a world given to machine-driven uniformity of design and labor. Pointing the way toward further research and inquiry, Katherine Joslin has produced a truly interdisciplinary work that combines the best of literary criticism with an infectious love and appreciation of material culture.
Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing
Daneen Wardrop
University of New Hampshire Press, 2009
Engaging the Age of Jane Austen
Public Humanities in PracticeBridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt
University of Iowa Press, 2018
Humanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining to others why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are certainly no exception. To help remedy this problem, literary scholars Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field’s relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us better understand current events, from the proliferation of media to ongoing social justice battles.
The result is a book that offers a range of approaches to engaging with undergraduates, non-professionals, and broader publics into an appreciation of eighteenth-century literature. Essays draw on innovative projects ranging from a Jane Austen reading group held at the public library to students working with an archive to digitize an overlooked writer’s novel.
Reminding us that the eighteenth century was an exhilarating age of lively political culture—marked by the rise of libraries and museums, the explosion of the press, and other platforms for public intellectual debates—Draxler and Spratt provide a book that will not only be useful to eighteenth-century scholars, but can also serve as a model for other periods as well. This book will appeal to librarians, archivists, museum directors, scholars, and others interested in digital humanities in the public life.
Contributors: Gabriela Almendarez, Jessica Bybee, Nora Chatchoomsai, Gillian Dow, Bridget Draxler, Joan Gillespie, Larisa Good, Elizabeth K. Goodhue, Susan Celia Greenfield, Liz Grumbach, Kellen Hinrichsen, Ellen Jarosz, Hannah Jorgenson, John C. Keller, Naz Keynejad, Stephen Kutay, Chuck Lewis, Nicole Linton, Devoney Looser, Whitney Mannies, Ai Miller, Tiffany Ouellette, Carol Parrish, Paul Schuytema, David Spadafora, Danielle Spratt, Anne McKee Stapleton, Jessica Stewart, Colleen Tripp, Susan Twomey, Nikki JD White, Amy Weldon
English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton
Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Ever New Earths
Columns from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science FictionSallis, James
University of Iowa Press, 2026
Ever New Earths gathers twenty-five years of book columns written by legendary writer James Sallis and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to offer an exceptional overview of developments in contemporary science fiction, fully appreciating the genre’s traditions while recognizing its reach, its potential. This is a rare view of the genre from the inside, written toward outsiders with reason to learn and understand more: critics, historians, writers, editors.
Everyday Reading
Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence IndiaAakriti Mandhwani
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Finalist for the 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize
During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines—like Delhi Press’s Saritā—and the first paperbacks in Hindi—Hind Pocket Books—North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion.
Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices—particularly those of women—Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.
Experiencing the Novel
The Genre of Tender ConscienceEsther Yu
University of Chicago Press, 0
An innovative account of the novel's emergence across revolutionary England and beyond.
Esther Yu’s expansive study of the history of the novel charts the growth of the “tender conscience”—at once a new mode of subjectivity and a shared structure of ethical obligation—that gave rise to the novel’s characteristic features. At the heart of the early English novel is a strange character: a hyperconscious observer who continually transforms perception into ordered, written narrative. Against long-standing accounts that tie the novel’s subjects to the emergence of modern individualism, Experiencing the Novel traces these endlessly impressionable figures to the mid-seventeenth century and the English Revolution, when citizen-subjects made public declarations of tenderness. It is through the recovery of such “tender consciences” that a curious fact can be addressed anew. The first people in Europe to cut off the crown with the head of their king began to tell stories differently: They took to narrating through an acute, sensitive register of first-person prose.
A forceful, community-binding complex of cognition, sensation, and ethics, the tender conscience persisted well into the eighteenth century. It was a large-scale structure forged across decades, one that demands the wide-ranging literary-historical account it finally receives here. Experiencing the Novel opens among brilliantly inventive Tudor-era works—Beware the Cat (ca. 1553), the Marprelate project (1588-89), The Unfortunate Traveler (1594)—that by turns experiment with and reject sensitizing modes of conscience. Yu further takes up an extensive, first-person care of the conscience—a tenderizing process enacted by little-known practitioners that carries from John Milton’s Paradise Lost into the writings of John Locke, the novels of Daniel Defoe, the moral sentimentalism of David Hume and Adam Smith, as well as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.
Through its vision of the long seventeenth century, Experiencing the Novel reveals an improbable practice of consciousness that remade popular politics, philosophy, and the culture of sensibility from the margins.