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Unlocking the rich symbolic world of Chaucer through the lens of medieval culture and meaning.

Innovative and thorough, Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry presents nine essays that reexamine the literary iconography of Middle English. Chaucer’s work is the most well-known, and possibly the most significant, remnant of the Middle Ages; investigations into his writing and meanings are fruitful even today. The essays collected by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr. invite scholars to consider new interpretations of old symbols while acknowledging the intricacies of historical context.

Each highly distinguished scholar responds to D. W. Robertson’s seminal, if controversial, approach to Chaucer’s work. Robertson’s scholarship, which also provides the opening essay of the collection, uses a historicist approach to contextualize Chaucer’s imagery within the literary and cultural conventions of the Middle Ages. Sources for such contextualization include etymology, topology, the classics, pictorial art, the Bible, and the developing sciences of the time. Robertson, as well as his contemporary Bernard F. Huppé, provided a fascinating new direction for modern Chaucer studies that focused on daily life.

Each essay uses this approach to draw attention to various examples of Chaucer’s iconography. The texts span several of Chaucer’s works and a plethora of subjects, including music, disappointed expectations, repeated or conflicting signs, and more. This volume provides insight into Chaucer’s work as well as the Middle Ages as a whole, examining conventions and expectations of society at that time. Scholars, instructors, and lovers of Chaucer will all find value in this finely edited collection.

Scholars have long noted the deeply rooted veneration of the power of the word—both the expressive and communicative capacities of language—in Russian literature and culture. In her ambitious book Silence and the Rest, Sofya Khagi illuminates a consistent counternarrative, showing how, throughout its entire history, Russian poetry can be read as an argument for what she calls “verbal skepticism.” Although she deals with many poets from a two-century tradition, Khagi gives special emphasis to Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, and Timur Kibirov, offering readings that add new layers of meaning to their work. She posits a long-running dialogue between the poets and the philosophers and theorists who have also been central to the antiverbal strain of Russian culture. Unlike its Western counterpart, the Russian philosophical and theological doubt of the efficacy of the word still grants the author, and literature itself, an ethical force—the inadequacies of language notwithstanding.

A provocative overview of avant-garde American poetry of the past 25 years that raises important questions about the practice of criticism.

Simulcast offers long overdue, highly opinionated, and penetrating examinations of a flourishing movement in American letters by one of its most perceptive practitioners. The four “experiments” in literary criticism gathered in this volume vary in style and point of view. Taken together, they reassess the fundamental relationship between poetry and criticism.

“The Anti-Hegemony Project” is a satire, employing the rhetoric of journalism and the colloquial exchanges of online fan groups to analyze one of the earliest appearances of a poetry community on the World Wide Web: the “Poetics List” maintained at the State University of New York, Buffalo. “Poe’s Poetics and Selected Essays” is a collection of polemical essays on subjects ranging from modernism to language poetry. The third experiment, “The Literati of San Francisco,” is a detailed portrait of the figures and ideas at the heart of an important literary scene a decade after language poetry’s inception. The final essay, “A Short History of Language Poetry,” provides a less polemical, more sober and even-handed analysis of that movement from its origins to the present and its prospects for the future.

These critical interventions and essays are important studies of an evolving poetic field, but they also represent an evolution in criticism itself. Friedlander’s unorthodox methodology is to create a critical text by rewriting prior examples of criticism, among them Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism and Edgar Allan Poe’s "Literati of New York City." The resulting critiques are themselves a kind of poetry. They explore the issues of style versus substance, artifice versus authenticity, and plausibility versus truth, while the shifts in perspective call into question the authority of any one critical account.
 

This book focuses on the integral, interdisciplinary, and intermedial "compositions"—verbal, visual, musical, theatrical, and cinematic—of the avant-gardes in the period following World War II. It also considers the artistic politics of these postwar avant-gardes and their works. The book’s geographical span is primarily the United States, although in its more extended reach, it comprehends an international context of American postwar cultural hegemony throughout what was once referred to as "the free world."

The works and the artists Miller takes up are those of the so-called "neo–avant-garde" with its inherent contradiction: an avant-garde whose newness is defined by its seeming reiteration of an earlier historical formation. Concentrating on the rhetorical, contextual, and performative characteristic of neo–avant-garde practice, including its relation to politics, Miller emphasizes the centrality of the example in this practice. John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Gilbert Sorrentino, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, and Samuel Beckett are among the artists whose exemplary works feature in Singular Examples. Miller’s key readings of these major artists of the period open up some of the most difficult texts of the neo–avant-garde even as they contribute to an eloquent argument for "artistic politics." Underlining the relation between material particulars and their thematic implications, between particular works and larger theoretical claims, between avant-garde aesthetics and formalist analysis, Singular Examples is exemplary in its own right, revealing the ultimate shape and direction of a postwar avant-garde contending with the historical predicaments of radical modernism.

Shortlisted for the 2024 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Book

What do The Family Circus, Ziggy, and The Far Side have in common? They are all single-panel comics, a seemingly simple form that cartoonists have used in vastly different ways. 
 
Singular Sensations is the first book-length critical study to examine this important but long-neglected mode of cartoon art. Michelle Ann Abate provides an overview of how the American single-panel comic evolved, starting with Thomas Nast’s political cartoons and R.F. Outcault’s groundbreaking Yellow Kid series in the nineteenth century. In subsequent chapters, she explores everything from wry New Yorker cartoons to zany twenty-first-century comics like Bizarro. Offering an important corrective to the canonical definition of comics as “sequential art,” Abate reveals the complexity, artistry, and influence of the single-panel art form. 
 
Engaging with a wide range of historical time periods, sociopolitical subjects, and aesthetic styles, Singular Sensations demonstrates how comics as we know and love them would not be the same without single-panel titles. Abate’s book brings the single-panel comic out of the margins and into the foreground.  

This book is the first anthology of the autobiographical writings of Peter Randolph, a prominent nineteenth-century former slave who became a black abolitionist, pastor, and community leader.

Randolph’s story is unique because he was freed and relocated from Virginia to Boston, along with his entire plantation cohort. A lawsuit launched by Randolph against his former master’s estate left legal documents that corroborate his autobiographies.

Randolph's writings give us a window into a different experience of slavery and freedom than other narratives currently available and will be of interest to students and scholars of African American literature, history, and religious studies, as well as those with an interest in Virginia history and mid-Atlantic slavery. 

William Solomon charts the origins and evolution of what he calls slapstick modernism--a merging of artistic experimentation with the socially disruptive lunacy made by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Romping through texts, films, and theory, Solomon embarks on an intellectual odyssey from the high modernism of Dos Passos and Williams to the late modernism of the Beats and Burroughs before a head-on crash into the raw power of punk rock. Throughout, he shows the links between the experimental writers and silent screen performers of the early century, and explores the potent cultural undertaking that drew inspiration from anarchical comedy after World War II.

Using the methods of ethnicity theory, black studies, regional studies, literary studies, and popular culture, Robert M. Dowling reveals the way in which "outsider" authors helped alleviate New York's mounting social anxieties by popularizing "insider" voices from neighborhoods as distinctive as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black Bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and mythic Harlem.

Synthesizing emerging theories of aesthetic action in relation to literary and art criticism

Drawing attention to what critical theorist Heather Love identifies as “the micro,” contemporary artists use small materials and cross‑media methods to elicit interpretation and foster critical engagement, immersing audiences in the entangled relations engendered with near and distant others through artistic experience. Small Aesthetics analyzes this insurgent tradition in twentieth- and twenty‑first-century poetry and art to show how it confronts the challenges of creating mutually sustaining lives. Feminist and feminist‑of‑color theorists have long argued that acts of care take on critical force when they foreground collective well-being and solidarity across power, class, and cultural differences. Guided by their insights, Nate Mickelson proposes that literary and visual artworks elicit acts of caring attention that engage audiences in their responsibilities to tend to the collective structures through which their lives unfold. Through his close readings, he extends the “post‑critical turn” in literary and art criticism and demonstrates the urgent vitality of feminist, Black, Latine, queer, and trans lives in increasingly hostile social contexts.