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Viewed as both unhealthy and unattractive, fat people are widely represented in popular culture and in interpersonal interactions as revolting—as agents of abhorrence and disgust. Yet if we think about “revolting” in a different way, Kathleen LeBesco argues, we can recognize fatness as not simply an aesthetic state or a medical condition, but a political one. If we think of revolting in terms of overthrowing authority, rebelling, protesting, and rejecting, then corpulence carries a whole new weight as a subversive cultural practice that calls into question received notions about health, beauty, and nature. 

Revolting Bodies examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. The book is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness. It explains how the redefinition of fat identities has been undertaken by people who challenge conventional understandings of nature, health, and beauty and, in so doing, alter their individual and collective relationships to power. 

LeBesco explores how the bearer of a fat body is marked as a failed citizen, inasmuch as her powers as a worker, shopper, and sexually “desirable” subject are called into question. At the same time, she highlights fat fashion, relations among fat, queer, and disability politics and activism, and online communities as opportunities for transforming these pejorative stereotypes of fatness. Her discussion of the long-term ramifications of denying bodily agency—in effect, letting biological determinism run rampant—has implications not only for our understanding of fatness but also for future political practice.

The history of the Revolution in Maine is the story of a people who did not really want a revolution—at least at first.

Since the middle of the seventeenth century, the powerful Massachusetts Bay Colony had exercised an increasing hegemony over the settlements downeast—a hegemony legalized in the Massachusetts royal charter of 1691. From then until 1820, when it became a state, Maine remained an integral part of Massachusetts. Geographically isolated from the Bay Colony by the province of New Hampshire, and dependent on Massachusetts for its very existence, Maine was indeed a colony, in every sense of the word. 

The larger Massachusetts context has tended to obscure Maine as a legitimate object of study, nowhere more than in the period of the American Revolution. Even historians in Maine have slighted the period of the American Revolution. Where appropriate, town historians devote a chapter or so to the event, but only in the context of a particular community. 

In his book, Leamon aims to meet that deficiency by drawing together town and general histories, specialized studies, and primary sources, both published and unpublished. He examines why and how Maine fought the Revolution and the changes that occurred in Maine during and after the war.

How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry

Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.

Established in 1935, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) sent over 6,500 unemployed historians, teachers, writers, and librarians out to document America’s past and present in the midst of the Great Depression. The English poet W. H. Auden referred to this New Deal program as “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state.”

Featuring original work by scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides fresh insights into how this extraordinary program helped transform American culture. In addition to examining some of the major twentieth-century writers whose careers the FWP helped to launch—including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker—Rewriting America presents new perspectives on the role of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and women on the project. Essays also address how the project’s goals continue to resonate with contemporary realities in the midst of major economic and cultural upheaval.

Along with the volume editor, contributors include Adam Arenson, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Racheal Harris, Jerrold Hirsch, Kathi King, Maiko Mine, Deborah Mutnick, Diane Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, Robert Singer, James Sun, and David A. Taylor.

In the eighteenth century, “technology” didn’t name a particular device or a process. It referred instead to written accounts of the mechanical arts, a now-obsolete category encompassing the wide range of work done by hand, from baking bread to building ships. Rewriting the Mechanic examines how these written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real—as what we now call technological. Reversing the familiar story in which literature simply reflects technological change, West draws on the work of Robert Hooke, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen to demonstrate the influence of literary techniques on ideas about masculinity, power, and the body, and how these texts helped to bring the very idea of technological modernity into being.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Innovative poetry, philosophy, theology and new sciences converge in the project of rewriting the word “God”

In Rewriting the Word “God,” Romana Huk examines the substantive connections between innovative poetry of the last century and contemporary theology and philosophy. Along the way, we encounter ten poets who have, without abandoning their inherited or chosen faith traditions, radically rethought conceptualizations of divinity, human ontology, and the real.

From the startlingly proto-phenomenological encounters with nature by Gerard Manley Hopkins to the post-deconstructive pursuit of “oracular” speech in Fanny Howe, these poets have found inspiration in a wide range of sources, from ancient religious texts to modern philosophical movements. But what unites them is their willingness to continually change, experiment and challenge the status quo, both in their religious beliefs and their poetic practice.

Huk shows how these poets have used their work to explore ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose, and the relationship between humans and materiality, humans and other humans, which for these poets sheds light on humanity’s relationship with the divine. She also highlights the ways in which they have engaged with social and political issues in their poetry to speak out against injustice and oppression.

Rewriting the Word “God” is a thought-provoking and inspiring work that will challenge current perceptions of both religion and poetry from new positions at the intersection of faith, art, philosophy, science, literary theory, and culture.

Despite its global popularity, rap has received little scholarly attention in terms of its poetic features. Rhymes in the Flow systematically analyzes the poetics (rap beats, rhythms, rhymes, verse and song structures) of many notable rap songs to provide new insights on rap artistry and performance. Defining and describing the features of what rappers commonly call flow, the authors establish a theory of the rap line as they trace rap’s deepest roots and stylistic evolution—from Anglo-Saxon poetry to Lil Wayne—and contextualize its complex poetics. Rhymes in the Flow helps explain rap’s wide appeal by focusing primarily on its rhythmic and thematic power, while also claiming its historical, cultural, musical, and poetic importance.

Richard III will always be central to English disability history as both man and myth—a disabled medieval king made into a monster by his nation’s most important artist.

In Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity, Jeffrey Wilson tracks disability over 500 years, from Richard’s own manuscripts, early Tudor propaganda, and x-rays of sixteenth-century paintings through Shakespeare’s soliloquies, into Samuel Johnson’s editorial notes, the first play produced by an African American Theater company, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the rise of disability theater. For Wilson, the changing meanings of disability created through shifting perspectives in Shakespeare’s plays prefigure a series of modern attempts to understand Richard’s body in different disciplinary contexts—from history and philosophy to sociology and medicine.

While theorizing a role for Shakespeare in the field of disability history, Wilson reveals how Richard III has become an index for some of modernity’s central concerns—the tension between appearance and reality, the conflict between individual will and external forces of nature and culture, the possibility of upward social mobility, and social interaction between self and other, including questions of discrimination, prejudice, hatred, oppression, power, and justice.

A study of the deep history of the Wagnerian environmental imagination.
 
Richard Wagner’s operas are bursting with environmental imagery, from tittering birds to flowing rivers to towering trees. In Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology, Kirsten S. Paige asks where Wagner’s environmental imagination came from, how it was received by audience members and reconceived by stage directors, and how it refracts his politics. By tracing the ecological dimensions of the composer’s essays and dramas, Paige reveals how Wagner’s environmental imagination was inextricable from broader political concerns of his time.

The book begins by examining the way Wagner’s political ecology shape-shifted across its rhetorical, musical, scenographic, and technological permutations. Although Wagner’s essays and dramas invite a range of interpretations, for Paige, they point to an all-encompassing image of opera-as-climate. The book then turns to the ways Wagnerian drama—and opera more generally—at once participates in the industrial-technological lineage of climate change and helps spectators grapple with the challenges of living in a warming world. In providing the first close examination of Wagner’s artistic thought, practice, and reception in relation to nineteenth-century climate theory and the early history of environmentalism, Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology considers what it might mean to reimagine opera around ethical mandates of sustainability.

In a long and extraordinary career as captain, courier, privateer, real-estate agent, author, and informer, Barnaby Rich's principal achievement was the present volume—a collection of Elizabethan short stories despite its military title.

Unquestionably best sellers in Rich's own time, these tales continue to delight scholars, critics, and even casual readers today. One twentieth-century critic pronounces the Farewell "a landmark in Elizabethan short-story writing" and cites Rich's "romantic charm, gaiety and lightness of touch, good vivid dialogue, directness and ease." According to Henry Seidel Canby, Rich's "humor is of the gayest. . . . There is a suggestion of Chaucer about him, and not a little of the poet's merry humor." Yet the "stories themselves are diverse."

Certainly their charm and humor fetched Rich's contemporaries, who read out of existence all but one copy of the first edition and all but five of the subsequent three editions. Eight dramatists—including Shakespeare, Middleton, Shirley, and Marmion—immortalized several of the stories, however, by turning them into plays.

The present edition affords an opportunity to read Rich's tales in the form in which Elizabethans knew them. The text reproduced is that of the unique copy of the first edition, which appeared in 1581. The editor's scholarly, illuminating introduction and commentary display much of the liveliness, charm, and humor for which his subject was praised and in addition tell a great deal about the life and literature of that most fascinating of periods, the Age of Elizabeth I. Scholars will be especially interested in Cranfill's revelations of how an Elizabethan story maker operated, in the complex, checkered bibliographical history of the Farewell, and above all in the considerable use Shakespeare seems to have made of Rich's tales.

This is the final volume in a trilogy of works that examine the impact of writing and reading about traumatic subjects. Diaries to an English Professor (1994) explores the ways in which undergraduate students use psychoanalytic diaries to probe conflicted issues in their lives. Surviving Literary Suicide (1999) investigates how graduate students respond to suicidal literature—novels and poems that portray and sometimes glorify self-inflicted death. 

In Risky Writing, Jeffrey Berman builds on those earlier studies, describing ways teachers can encourage college students to write safely on a wide range of subjects often deemed too personal or too dangerous for the classroom: grieving the loss of a beloved relative or friend, falling into depression, coping with the breakup of one's family, confronting sexual abuse, depicting a drug or alcohol problem, encountering racial prejudice. Berman points out that nearly everyone has difficulty talking or writing about such issues because they arouse shame and tend to be enshrouded in secrecy and silence. This is especially true for college students, who are just emerging from adolescence and find themselves at institutions that rarely promote self-disclosure.

Recognizing the controversial nature of his subject, Berman confronts academic opposition to personal writing head on. He also discusses the similarities between the “writing cure” and the “talking cure,” the role of the teacher and audience in the self-disclosing classroom, and the pedagogical strategies necessary to minimize risk, including the importance of empathy and other befriending skills.

The manuscript for Rivall Friendship was first acquired by the Newberry Library in 1937. At the time of the acquisition, the author of this seventeenth-century romance was anonymous. Scholar Jean R. Brink now suggests, based on dating of the manuscript and her analysis of its feminist themes, that the author was a woman. Specifically, Brink attributes the text to Bridget Manningham, who was the older sister of Thomas Manningham, a Jacobean and Caroline bishop, and the granddaughter of John Manningham, a diarist who recorded performances of Shakespeare’s plays. 

Rivall Friendship is a post–English Civil War romance that examines proto-feminist issues, such as patriarchal dominance in the family and marriage. Manningham is scrupulous about maintaining verisimilitude, and unlike more fantastical romances of the period that feature monsters, giants, and magic, this text aspires to a level of probability in its historical and geographical details. The text of Rivall Friendship is accessible to most modern readers, particularly to students and scholars accustomed to working with seventeenth-century texts.