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Winner of the American Conference on Irish Studies’ Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature

Part of James Joyce’s genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, “a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.” How might we learn to regain some of the childlike play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that come so naturally to Joyce?   
 
The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world.
 
Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.
 

The Juggler (La Jongleuse) is a "decadent" novel that was first published in 1900. Its author, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), who used the pseudonym Rachilde, was a prolific novelist (over sixty works of fiction), playwright, literary critic and reviewer, and a forceful presence in French literary society of her time.

The protagonist of the novel, Eliante Donalger, is in some sense an exaggerated double for her creator--bizarre in appearance, clothing, and interests. Instinctively grasping a medical and psychological truth that the turn-of-the-century scientific world was only beginning to understand, Eliante maintains that there is nothing "natural" about human sexual expression. She claims to be in love with an inanimate (though anthropomorphic and sexually ambiguous) object, a Greek amphora, and the novel traces the rivalry between this faithful partner and an ardent human suitor, a young medical student. It is only through juggling, both literally and metaphorically, that Eliante is able to use her seductive power to maintain desire. The surprise ending challenges the limits of such power in a controversial and surprising twist.

Although Rachilde's work has been neglected in the past, the women's movement and feminist criticism have stimulated renewed interest in her fiction. The Juggler is a major rediscovery.

Women of colors and a literature written in corporeal and spiritual scars

The corporeal and spiritual healing in literature by women of colors can be seen to redefine modern thought and printed text. Sarah Soanirina Ohmer traces the impact of colonization and enslavement on Black women and Black women’s contributions to colonial, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature in the US, Brazil, and the Caribbean.

Drawing on intersectional analysis, Ohmer focuses on portrayals of trauma and spirituality in works by Toni Morrison, Conceição Evaristo, Maryse Condé, Gloria Anzaldúa, the Quilombhoje poets, and María de los Reyes Castillo. Ohmer compares literature from different countries along four thematic pathways: ghosts, mirrors, naming, and motherhood. Her analysis unlocks the literature’s power to heal through gut-wrenching descriptions of wounds and thrilling passages of hope and liberation. Throughout, Ohmer weaves in her life story as a Black woman as she reflects on how colonialism, racism, sexism, and capitalism have impacted her work, traumas, and faith journey.

Composed in Old French between about 1220 and 1240, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is a group of five prose romances centered on the love affair between Lancelot and Guenevere. It consists of an immense central core, the Lancelot Proper, introduced by The History of the Holy Grail and The Story of Merlin and concluded by The Quest for the Holy Grail and The Death of Arthur.

This volume brings together thirteen essays by noted scholars from the first symposium ever devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Exploring the cycle's evolution across the literatures of medieval France, Italy, Spain, Catalonia, and England, the authors take a variety of approaches that highlight a broad range of cultural, social, historical, and political concerns and offer a comparative and interdisciplinary vision of this great romance.

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.

Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the forefront of world literature for decades. He has also been, in his own words, “a language warrior,” fighting for indigenous African languages to find their rightful place in the literary world. Having begun his writing career in English, Ngũgĩ shifted to writing in his native language Gikũyũ in 1977, a stance both creatively and politically significant. For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.”
 
This volume brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades. Here we find Ngũgĩ discussing translation as a conversation between cultures, proposing that dialogue among African languages is the way to unify African peoples, reflecting on the complexities of auto-translation or translating one’s own work, exploring the essential task translation performed in the history of the propagation of thought, and pleading for the hierarchy of languages to be torn down. He also shares his many experiences of writing across languages, including his story The Upright Revolution, which has been translated into more than a hundred languages around the globe and is the most widely translated text written by an African author. 

At a time when dialogues between cultures and peoples are more essential than ever, The Language of Languages makes an outspoken case for the value of literature without borders.
 

Joining the unfinished conversation between the satirist Jonathan Swift and the critic Edward Said, The Last Amateur argues for the transformative potential of literature.

What does “Swiftian” mean to you? For many, the name is synonymous with ingenious satire and an acid, clarifying mix of decorum and outrage. Jonathan Swift was, of course, the author of not only Gulliver’s Travels but also A Modest Proposal, which the columnist Gene Lyons recently called “perhaps the most penetrating anti-racist essay in the English language.” Small wonder, then, that the Anglo-Irish satirist was a lifelong inspiration to the great Palestinian American critic Edward Said, who for many years worked on an unfinished book about Swift and cultivated a Swiftian voice across his career.

Helen Deutsch’s highly personal book explores what Said’s love of Swift—and hers of both—tells us about not only these authors but also the powers of criticism itself. The Last Amateur is about how one comes to love one writer through another. Deutsch scrutinizes Said in relationship to Swift to raise questions of her own about the profession of literary studies. At a time when many in the field have lost faith in critique, Deutsch shows how passion and a refusal of professional propriety—the hallmarks of the amateur—can enliven critique again.  

What, then, does it mean to be a Swiftian? The Swiftian hears Swift’s animus and uses it as an incentive for their own freedom of thought. Said was a Swiftian because the experience of reading Swift freed him to speak out, to have something serious to say. Deutsch’s revelatory book is an exercise in hearing Swift’s voice and speaking in her own.

Oral histories of many of the last generation of Lowell, MA, textile mill workers preceded by two introductory sections. The first presents the historic setting of economic development and subsequent decline of the textile industry in Lowell. The second is a brief explanation of the production process wherein the last generation of mill workers expended so many of their skills and so much of their energy.

The high level of interest in Latin America paradoxically led the U.S. government to restrict these authors' physical presence in the United States through the McCarranWalter Act's immigration blacklist, even as cultural organizations cultivated the exchange of ideas with writers and sought to market translations of their work for the U.S. market.

The Law of Ancient Athens contains the principal literary and epigraphical sources, in English, for Athenian law in the Archaic and Classical periods, from the first known historical trial (late seventh century) to the fall of the democracy in 322 BCE.

This accessible and important volume is designed for teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ancient Greek world, the history of law, and the history of democracy, an Athenian invention during this period. Offering a comprehensive treatment of Athenian law, it assumes no prior knowledge of the subject and is organized in user-friendly fashion, progressing from the person to the family to property and obligations to the gods and to the state. David D. Phillips has translated all sources into English, and he has added significant introductory and explanatory material.

Topics covered in the book include homicide and wounding; theft; marriage, children, and inheritance; citizenship; contracts and commerce; impiety; treason and other offenses against the state; and sexual offenses including rape and prostitution. The volume’s unique feature is its presentation of the actual primary sources for Athenian laws, with many key or disputed terms rendered in transliterated Greek. The translated sources, together with the topical introductions, notes, and references, will facilitate both research in the field and the teaching of increasingly popular courses on Athenian law and law in the ancient world.

The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism.

The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality.

In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.

Bartosik-Velez seeks to explain the meaning of Christopher Columbus throughout the so-called New World, first in the British American colonies and the United States, as well as in Spanish America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She argues that, during the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, New World societies commonly imagined themselves as legitimate and powerful independent political entities by comparing themselves to the classical empires of Greece and Rome. Columbus, who had been construed as a figure of empire for centuries, fit perfectly into that framework. By adopting him as a national symbol, New World nationalists appeal to Old World notions of empire.

 Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace was at the height of his creative powers when he committed suicide in 2008. In a sweeping portrait of Wallace’s writing and thought and as a measure of his importance in literary history, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace gathers cutting-edge, field-defining scholarship by critics alongside remembrances by many of his writer friends, who include some of the world’s most influential authors.

Electroshock. Hysterectomy. Lobotomy. These are only three of the many “cures” to which lesbians have been subjected in this century. How does a society develop such a profound aversion to a particular minority? In what ways do images in the popular media perpetuate cultural stereotypes about lesbians, and to what extent have lesbians been able to subvert and revise those images? This book addresses these and other questions by examining how lesbianism has been represented in American popular culture in the twentieth century and how conflicting ideologies have shaped lesbian experiences and identity.

In the first section, “Inventing the Lesbian,” Sherrie A. Inness explores depictions of lesbians in popular texts aimed primarily at heterosexual consumers. She moves from novels of the 1920s to books about life at women's colleges and boarding schools, to such contemporary women's magazines as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue.

In the next section, “Forms of Resistance,” Inness probes the ways in which lesbians have refashioned texts intended for a heterosexual audience or created their own narratives. One chapter shows how lesbian readers have reinterpreted the Nancy Drew mysteries, looking at them from a distinctly “queer” perspective. Another chapter addresses the changing portrayal of lesbians in children's books over the past two decades.

The last section, “Writing in the Margins,” scrutinizes the extent to which lesbians, themselves a marginalized group, have created a society that relegates some of its own members to the outskirts. Topics include the geographic politics of lesbianism, the complex issue of "passing," and the meaning of butch identity in twentieth-century lesbian culture.

Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, The Libertine’s Friend uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing particularly on overlooked works of pornographic fiction, Giovanni Vitiello offers a frank exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China.

Vitiello’s story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, he identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and sheds light on a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. Drawing on this trove of material, Vitiello presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China, revealing the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.