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A study of the signifying potential of paper, the foundational material for literary texts in the modern era.

For ease of reading, the paper of a printed page must recede far enough into the background to make ink legible. Yet paper—the primary substrate for literary texts—has its own signifying potential, its own poetics. Craig Dworkin shows that looking at the page, rather than through its illusory withdrawal, can unlock interpretive insights that readers would otherwise miss. What often seems incidental can prove to be as semantically important as the words of the text themselves.

Substrate argues that the material affordances of paper in general—its pliability, fibrous weave, and capacity to fold, tear, crumple, and shuffle—variously inform the poetics of William Blake, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jen Bervin, and Susan Howe. For all four of these poets, the qualities of paper serve as models for structuring the language of their poems in innovative ways. Dworkin further shows how each poet in turn engages paper at another level by incorporating it within the thematic ambit of key poems. The full meaning of these poems is thus inextricable from their printing. Substrate is a brilliant inquiry in poetics and the logic of media more generally.

A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present

 

Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?

In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?

A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?

Mediation, monarchy, and Louis XIV's attempts to legitimize his reign

In order to assert his divine right, Louis XIV missed no opportunity to identify himself as God’s representative on earth. However, in Sunspots and the Sun King Ellen McClure explores the contradictions inherent in attempting to reconcile the logical and mystical aspects of divine right monarchy. McClure analyzes texts devoted to definitions of sovereignty, presents a meticulous reading of Louis XIV’s memoirs to the crown prince, and offers a novel analysis of diplomats and ambassadors as the mediators who preserved and transmitted the king’s authority. McClure asserts that these discussions, ranging from treatises to theater, expose incommensurable models of authority and representation permeating almost every aspect of seventeenth-century French culture.

Winner, American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 2012

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented. Adilifu Nama sees the value—and finds new avenues for exploring racial identity—in black superheroes who are often dismissed as sidekicks, imitators of established white heroes, or are accused of having no role outside of blaxploitation film contexts.

Nama examines seminal black comic book superheroes such as Black Panther, Black Lightning, Storm, Luke Cage, Blade, the Falcon, Nubia, and others, some of whom also appear on the small and large screens, as well as how the imaginary black superhero has come to life in the image of President Barack Obama. Super Black explores how black superheroes are a powerful source of racial meaning, narrative, and imagination in American society that express a myriad of racial assumptions, political perspectives, and fantastic (re)imaginings of black identity. The book also demonstrates how these figures overtly represent or implicitly signify social discourse and accepted wisdom concerning notions of racial reciprocity, equality, forgiveness, and ultimately, racial justice.

Finalist — San Diego Comic-Con International 2024 Eisner Award in Best Academic/Scholarly Work
2024 MPCA/ACA Best Book for Use in the Classroom, Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association (MPCA/ACA)

An examination of the art in superhero comics and how style influences comic narratives.

For many, the idea of comic book art implies simplistic four-color renderings of stiff characters slugging it out. In fact, modern superhero comic books showcase a range of complex artistic styles, with diverse connotations. Leading comics scholar Jeffrey A. Brown assesses six distinct approaches to superhero illustration—idealism, realism, cute, retro, grotesque, and noir—examining how each visually represents the superhero as a symbolic construct freighted with meaning.

Whereas comic book studies tend to focus on text and narrative, Super Bodies gives overdue credit to the artwork, which is not only a principal source of the appeal of comic books but also central to the values these works embody. Brown argues that superheroes are to be taken not as representations of people but as iconic types, and the art conveys this. Even the most realistic comic illustrations are designed to suggest not persons but ideas—ideas about bodies and societies. Thus the appearance of superheroes both directly and indirectly influences the story being told as well as the opinions readers form concerning justice, authority, gender, puberty, sexuality, ethnicity, violence, and other concepts central to political and cultural life.

For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original.

In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. 

Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Greek writers and artists adopted surrealism both as an avant-garde means of overturning the stifling traditions of their classical heritage and also as a way of responding to the extremely unstable political situation in their country. Despite producing much first-rate work throughout the rest of the twentieth century, Greek surrealists have not been widely read outside of Greece. This volume seeks to remedy that omission by offering authoritative translations of the major works of the most important Greek surrealist writers.

Nikos Stabakis groups the Greek surrealists into three generations: the founders (such as Andreas Embirikos, Nikos Engonopoulos, and Nicolas Calas), the second generation, and the Pali Group, which formed around the magazine Pali. For each generation, he provides a very helpful introduction to the themes and concerns that animate their work, as well as concise biographies of each writer. Stabakis anthologizes translations of all the key surrealist works of each generation—poetry, prose, letters, and other documents—as well as a selection of rarer texts. His introduction to the volume places Greek surrealism within the context of the international movement, showing how Greek writers and artists used surrealism to express their own cultural and political realities.

Beginning in Paris in the 1920s, women poets, essayists, painters, and artists in other media have actively collaborated in defining and refining surrealism's basic project—achieving a higher, open, and dynamic consciousness, from which no aspect of the real or the imaginary is rejected. Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants—perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown.

This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

An exploration of the relationship between literature and life, this study examines the effect on readers of “suicidal literature”—novels and poems that depict, and sometimes glorify, the act of suicide. Beginning with a discussion of the growing incidence of suicide in American culture, Jeffrey Berman investigates the portrayal of suicide in the works of four authors who later took their own lives—Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton— and two who did not—Kate Chopin and William Styron. In each case Berman discusses the writer's shifting attitude toward suicide, the tendency of critics to romanticize fictional suicide, and the impact of writing about suicide on the artist's own life. At the same time, Berman draws on his experiences as a teacher of these writings, analyzing student reactions to “literary suicide” as recorded in class diaries—responses ranging from grief and confusion to anger and guilt. By looking at the connection between real and imagined suicide, Berman seeks to shed fresh light on a subject long enshrouded in silence, fear, and mystery.

The career of Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), the American playwright and novelist, follows closely the trajectory of other "reclaimed" American women writers of the century such as Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was well known in her time, effaced from canonical consideration after her death, and rediscovered years later through the surfacing of one work around which critical attention has focused. Glaspell was a respected international playwright and novelist who amassed some of the most impressive credentials in American theater history, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Over the past fifteen years, she has been rediscovered through the work of leading feminist scholars; and her one-act play Trifles and its short story form, "A Jury of Her Peers," have become classics. This book is the first collection devoted to the study of the body of Glaspell's work. Essays by leading playwrights and scholars provide an array of perspectives on the writer and her work. The book features the first complete Glaspell bibliography, including original reviews of her plays and fiction and recent critical studies of her writing.

Native American legends, shipping tales, folklore, and myths spanning the last 150 years are gathered together for the first time in this collection. The presence of Native American culture, the unpredictable climate, the dangerous closeness of the shoreline, and the bloody history of shipping on the Lakes contribute greatly to the uniqueness of maritime literature on the Lakes.

Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits will appeal to those interested in both Native American literature and history and Great Lakes maritime history, and to those who simply enjoy a good maritime tale. The collection is a seabag of different kinds of stories, myths, and tales that together create a picture of life as it has been lived on the Great Lakes.

Few Elizabethans left the image of their personalities cut so deeply into the Renaissance imagination as did Sir Philip Sidney. Widely admired in his own time, Sidney must seem to the modern reader almost universally accomplished. His talents as courtier, diplomat, soldier, scholar, novelist, and poet are history.

Almost immediately after Sidney's death in battle against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, the process of legend began, and the legend has survived, sometimes obscuring the facts. The versatile "Renaissance man" has become, in the eyes of some critics, the romantic lover whose frustrations and despair found release in the "confessional" form of the sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, and in other poems. To show these poems to be consciously constructed works of art, not simply passionate outbursts of romantic emotion, is one aim of this study.

The author examines Sidney as poet and critic, concentrating his study on rhetorical technique and poetic rhythm and form. He shows Sidney experimenting with the symmetrical possibilities of rhythm and phrase; practicing the ornateness current and acceptable in his day. He examines Sidney's comment on such a style in The Defense of Poesy and the ways in which the poet's own work agreed with or departed from his expressed opinions. He also balances Sidney's poetry against the powerful tradition of Petrarchan love literature and the equally powerful Renaissance impulse to subject passion to the rule of reason. Finally, in an extended analysis of Astrophel and Stella, he shows Sidney as the master of a plainer, wittier, more subtly fashioned style and a complex, more dramatically immediate form. What emerges from the study is not the personality of the poet, but the principles of his art and the value of his achievement in the mainstream of English Renaissance verse.