Results by title

This new study explores how evangelicalism played a vital role in the development of the Victorian novel. In contrast to those who see the evangelical movement as trivial to our histories of the novel and part of the losing side in religion’s battle with secularity, Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel examines fiction by major writers of the nineteenth century—Thackeray, Dickens, Wood, MacDonald, Collins, and Butler—and reveals the extent to which the novel was shaped by evangelical thought and practice.
Rather than getting lost in historical and theological rabbit holes, Good Words invites readers to think about why evangelicalism still matters for the stories we tell about fiction in the Victorian period. The result has major implications for our understanding of the Victorian novel, our conception of the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and religion, the way in which we think about evangelical culture in the modern world, and our ideas about the practices and protocols of scholarly reading.

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories, Janet Lewis’s only collection of short fiction, was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death. A mother’s encounters with her deceased son, an aging woman sitting with the new knowledge of her troubled older sister’s death, and a teenager disillusioned by her own mortality are among the characters, mostly women and girls, whom Lewis delivers. Her understated style and knack for unadorned observation embed us with them as they reckon with the disquieting forces—incomprehensible and destructive to some, enlightening to others—that move us from birth, through life, to death. In the process, Lewis has crafted a paean to the living.

With Gracie Allen as their uninhibited Muse, Lloyd Schwartz's poems strike an unusual balance between comedy and pathos. His exuberant interest in the social world is qualified by a poignant sense of time and mortality, and of the interior, inaccessible zones of life.

"Like a latter-day Whitman, an addict of contraries or its victim, Schwartz sets out to understand that network in as many ways as his imagination allows. Once you get the hang of what Schwartz is tuning into, you can't stop tuning into it yourself. . . .A master of timing."—Robyn Selman, Voice Literary Supplement

"[Schwartz's] poems seem to think in musical structures; he hears those evanescent snatches of conversation that compose our emotional lives, recognizes their fluid importance, and organizes them for us."—Stephen Tapscott, Boston Phoenix

This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.

By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic?

The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality.

Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies.

I love all the dead,
both at the moment they unwed 

themselves of shame
and before that.
—Excerpt from “Grace Engine”

The first critical evaluation of Greene's novels since his death in 1991, Graham Greene's Fictions: The Virtues of Extremity is a reconsideration of the author's major literary achievements, as well as a recasting of his overall worldview. Hitherto, most criticism of Greene's fiction has forced him into the constricting category of the "Catholic novelist," consequently flattening the peaks and valleys of his uncompromising vision of life. Graham Greene's Fictions is Cates Baldridge's response to this critical disservice—an exploration that ignores the conventional preconceptions about Greene's fiction and reveals him to be one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century.

More than a general assessment, Graham Greene's Fictions offers a fresh interpretation of familiar texts and attempts to discover within Greene's work a structure of thought that has not yet been seen with sufficient clarity. Each chapter focuses on a major aspect of Greene's vision as expressed through his novels. Greene's caustic attitude toward middle-class orthodoxies and his critiques of the three reigning ideologies of his time--Christianity, Marxism, and liberalism—are just two of the areas that Baldridge explores. Although five of Greene's novels are singled out for extensive evaluation—Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The Comedians, and The Honorary Consul—what Baldridge attempts is nothing less than a comprehensive re-imagination of "Greeneland's" fictional topography.

Written for both the scholar and the general audience, this innovative study successfully captures the attention of all readers whether it is the first or the fifty-first work of Greene criticism one has read.

From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster’s award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words. “This is how time sounds,” Webster writes; this is the hum and click of bodies “desirous of believing we’re all vehicle, every wet atom of us,” even as the saved seeds root in the fallen brickwork and the artifacts pile up: wisdom teeth, hummingbird skulls, plumb bobs, icons, antlers, incandescent bulbs.

Grand & Arsenal begins “Bless me I am not myself,” but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book’s defining struggle, enacted by a multitude of voices which move from rush to stumble and back again—meanwhile using all the tools we as a culture use to hold fear at arm’s length.

We hear a familiar irony, as in “On a trip West, porn in the hotel room. I can take or leave it. The climax that puts me in the seats? World’s end.” We hear humor, as in “I believed in . . . / . . . a certain apocalypse not so much foretold as crafted / by large-brained monkeys.” We hear understatement, as in “knowing it does not matter / in the grand—she would say scheme, I would say / mishap—.” Most importantly, though, these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.

Shelley spends her days running a soup kitchen in the Bronx, her sense of purpose inseparable from her religious faith, though both have begun to waver. Emma, a college dropout looking for direction, arrives at the kitchen hoping to find it there. She brings a needed jolt to the place, helping a long-time client toward a new job, but her energy also proves unsettling. Even as her behavior grows steadily more erratic, Shelley still wants to believe in her, despite the mounting evidence that she shouldn’t. Shelley must finally ask herself how well she really knows the people she sees everyday, how much she can trust them, and what she can and cannot forgive.

A lavishly illustrated overview of the life and work of realist painter Dale Kennington, featuring more than eighty-five of her most renowned works.

Grandeur of the Everyday is the first full-length volume dedicated to the life and work of Dale Kennington—an accomplished master of contemporary American realism. Kennington’s works often hold a strange familiarity, even for those coming to her work for the first time. Her paintings are at once familiar and yet defy specificity of place, clear and lucid while also dense in content. These effects derive from her unique ability to capture the essence of everyday living, the ordinary “in between” moments we often overlook in our day-to-day habits and transactions.

Kennington referred to her paintings as “merged memories.” Combining elements of photography, memory, and imagination, Kennington’s art is an entrancing blend of contemporary and magical realism, with themes ranging from loneliness to community and culture, from class and race relations to the juxtaposition of private and public life. Rather than study the spectacular, she concentrated on commonplace moments of human interaction, inviting observers of her paintings to ponder their significance and to complete their implicit narratives. Often relying on local subjects for her paintings—barbershops, bars, restaurants, gospel concerts, motel rooms, nursing homes—she presented a diversity of local experience.

Grandeur of the Everyday is a treasure trove of her most accomplished creations and includes more than eighty-five examples of both Kennington’s easel paintings on canvas and her freestanding wooden folding screens. The volume also offers an original interview with the artist conducted by Kristen Miller Zohn, an introduction by art historian Daniel White, and a critical essay by the director of the Wiregrass Museum of Art, Rebecca Brantley.

Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography “Return from Bohemia” for the first time ever, Sue Taylor integrates the artist’s own recollections into interpretations of his art. As Wood dressed in overalls and boasted about his beloved Midwest, he consciously engaged in regionalist strategies, performing a farmer masquerade of sorts. In doing so, he also posed as conventionally masculine, hiding his homosexuality from his rural community. Thus, he came to experience himself as a double man. This book conveys the very real threats under which Wood lived and pays tribute to his resourceful responses, which were often duplicitous and have baffled art historians who typically take them at face value.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Gravel and Hawk dwells on the physical and cultural landscapes of the Texarkana border region, an area of stark natural beauty and even starker manifestations of its human habitation: oil derricks and pump jacks, logging trucks, chicken houses, come-to-Jesus billboards, and greasy catfish joints, a patchwork of dying farm towns and ragtag municipalities laced together by county roads, state highways, and that treacherous, rust-hued slurry known as the Red River. Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.

    "A stunning piece of
        work. If Fitzgerald could have wished for one reader of The Great Gatsby,
        it would have been Ronald Berman. Berman's criticism creates an ideal
        companion piece to the novel--as brilliantly illuminating about America
        as it is about fiction, and composed with as much thought and style."
       
        -- Roger Rosenblatt
      "An impressive study
        that brilliantly highlights the oneness of Fitzgerald's art with the overall
        context of modernism." -- Milton R. Stern, author of The Golden
        Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
      "Citing films, dates,
        places, schedules, Broadway newsstands, and the spoils of manufacture,
        the author, never lapsing into critical jargon, locates the characters
        in 'the moving present.' Gatsby, the first of the great novels
        to emerge from B movies, uses the language of commodities, advertisements,
        photography, cinematography, and Horatio Alger to present models of identity
        for characters absorbed in and by what is communicated. . . . Berman concludes
        that Gatsby 'reassembled' rather than 'invented' himself."
        -- A. Hirsh, Choice
 

This work covers important and neglected ground—environmental language theory. Gilcrest poses two overarching questions: To what extent does contemporary nature poetry represent a recapitulation of familiar poetics? And, to what extent does contemporary nature poetry engage a poetics that stakes out new territory? He addresses these questions with important thinkers, especially Kenneth Burke, and considers such poets as Frost, Kunitz, Heaney, Ammons, Cardenal, and Rich.

Dorn's high-spirited, crazy-quilt, complex anti-epic is a masterful critique of late twentieth-century capitalism and is one of the great comic poems of American literature. Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, who travel the Southwest in search of Howard Hughes, has become a minor classic.

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition

"Gunslinger is a fundamental American masterpiece."---Thomas McGuane

This fiftieth anniversary edition commemorates Edward Dorn’s masterpiece, Gunslinger, a comic, anti-epic critique of American capitalism that still resonates today. Set in the American West, the Gunslinger, his talking horse Claude Lévi-Strauss, a saloon madam named Lil, and the narrator called “I” set out in search of the billionaire Howard Hughes. As they travel along the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and finally on to Colorado, they are joined by a whole host of colorful characters: Dr. Jean Flamboyant, Kool Everything, and Taco Desoxin and his partner Tonto Pronto. During their adventures and hijinks, as captured in Dorn’s multilayered, absurd, and postmodern voice, they joke and smoke their way through debates about the meaning of existence. Put simply, Gunslinger is an American classic.

In a new foreword Marjorie Perloff discusses Gunslinger's continued relevance to contemporary politics. This new edition also includes a critical essay by Michael Davidson and Charles Olson’s idiosyncratic “Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn,” which he wrote to provide guidance for Dorn's study of, and writing about, the American West.

Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.