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Bringing together fifty years of exciting modernisms, The New Anthology of American Poetry, Volume 2 includes over 600 poems by sixty-five American poets writing in the period between 1900 and 1950. The most recognized poets of the era, such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes are represented, along with many other Harlem Renaissance poets, women poets, immigrant and working-class poets, imagists, and objectivists. It is also the first modernist anthology to include poems and songs from popular culture.

Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas Travisano continue the standard of excellence set in Volumes I and II of this extraordinary anthology. Volume III provides the most compelling and wide-ranging selection available of American poetry from 1950 to the present. Its contents are just as diverse and multifaceted as America itself and invite readers to explore the world of poetry in the larger historical context of American culture.

Nearly three hundred poems allow readers to explore canonical works by such poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath, as well as song lyrics from such popular musicians as Bob Dylan and Queen Latifah. Because contemporary American culture transcends the borders of the continental United States, the anthology also includes numerous transnational poets, from Julia de Burgos to Derek Walcott. Whether they are the works of oblique avant-gardists like John Ashbery or direct, populist poets like Allen Ginsberg, all of the selections are accompanied by extensive introductions and footnotes, making the great poetry of the period fully accessible to readers for the first time.

Volume I begins with a generous selection of Native American materials, then spans the years from the establishment of the American colonies to about 1900, a world on the brink of World War I and the modern era. Part One focuses on poetry from the very beginnings through the end of the eighteenth century. The expansion and development of a newly forged nation engendered new kinds of poetry. Part Two includes works from the early nineteenth century through the time of the Civil War. The poems in Part Three reflect the many issues affecting a nation undergoing tumultuous change: the Civil War, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and cultural diversification.

Such well-recognized names as Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Stephen Crane appear in this anthology alongside such less frequently anthologized poets as George Horton, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elizabeth Oakes-Smith, Frances Harper, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson, Adah Menken, Sarah Piatt, Ina Coolbrith, Emma Lazarus, Albery Whitman, Owl Woman (Juana Manwell) Sadakichi Hartmann, Ernest Fenollosa, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and—virtually unknown as a poet—Abraham Lincoln. It also includes poems and songs reflecting the experiences of a variety of racial and ethnic groups.

The New Apologists for Poetry was first published in 1956. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The author's purpose is to clear the ground for a systematic aesthetics of poetry consistent with the insights of our most influential contemporary literary critics. The book is concerned with those of the so-called "new critics" who are trying to answer the need, forced on them by historical and cultural pressures, to justify poetry by securing for it a unique function for which modern "scientism" cannot find a substitute.

This volume provides intensive analyses of work by critics of several persuasions: T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, and, for purposes of contrast, D. G. James, R. S. Crane, Elder Olson, and Max Eastman.

Allen Tate, the poet and critic, writes: "Mr. Krieger's book is the most searching in scholarship and the most profound in critical analysis of the existing books in this field."

Robert B. Heilman, critic and teacher, comments: "The author's knowledge of a complex field and his mastery of the analytical techniques which he is applying to a chosen set of critical positions are very impressive. He not only clarifies the positions of various contemporary critics by examining them in the light of the same set of general principles, but also provides some helpful, at times brilliant, insights into the works of various critics from the Greeks up to the present. He traces the history of concepts and thus establishes relationships among individual critics and critical schools."

Under Jini Kim Watson’s scrutiny, the Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore reveal a surprising residue of the colonial environment. Drawing on a wide array of literary, filmic, and political works, and juxtaposing close readings of the built environment, Watson demonstrates how processes of migration and construction in the hypergrowth urbanscapes of the Pacific Rim crystallize the psychic and political dramas of their colonized past and globalized present.

Examining how newly constructed spaces—including expressways, high-rises, factory zones, department stores, and government buildings—become figured within fictional and political texts uncovers how massive transformations of citizenries and cities were rationalized, perceived, and fictionalized. Watson shows how literature, film, and poetry have described and challenged contemporary Asian metropolises, especially around the formation of gendered and laboring subjects in these new spaces. She suggests that by embracing the postwar growth-at-any-cost imperative, they have buttressed the nationalist enterprise along neocolonial lines.

The New Asian City provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming metropolises of the Pacific Rim. In doing so, it demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development.

This is a book about the fishing industry in New England--its structure, its work, and the way it adjusts to change. It documents the recent economic experience of one of America's oldest industries, on that has recently been at the center of well-publicized boundary and trade disputes. The study blends customary sources of economic data with field interviews, original survey material, and analyses of economic institutions to provide a timely picture of the industry and its problems. This close examination reveals a rich array of adjustment mechanisms. Of particular interest is the contrast between capitalist, collective bargaining, and kinship practices governing jobs and income in the industry.

The authors also present new data on the skills, job attachment, and economic options of workers in key New England ports, particularly Gloucester and New Bedford. The fishing industry is concentrated in economically fragile ports, and the authors show the importance of a strong fishing industry and a growth economy for easing adjustment problems. The study develops a set of innovative recommendations for fisheries management and addresses policies for promoting stabilization and growth in port economies.

Harold Schechter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art--the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders and men of steel, and monsters from the ocean floor--and finds close connections between religious myth and popular entertainment.

In a trenchant critique of the full range of theoretical discourses that have come into favor in literary studies since the 1960s, Tony Hilfer demonstrates that none of the practitioners of these forms of criticism subject their own claims to the kind of suspicious scrutiny that they devote to their own objects of study. Assimilating the critiques that have been made of almost all of the major recent modes of criticism-Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, New Historicism, Foucaultian-Hilfer brings them acutely to bear on his central argument: that these methods systematically fail to live up to their own methodological scruples.

The problem Hilfer identifies is one of logical consistency, but also of moral and psychological implications, and it can be found operating across the whole spectrum of literary Theory. It is, however, as this book makes blindingly clear, not immune from scrutiny. With quiet erudition and consistent incisiveness, Hilfer shows how the various methods, while ostensibly at odds, actually fit together, all sharing the same peculiar structure and logic, and all wearing an identical set of ideological blinders. He offers examples of theorists-and assumptions-hard at work on particular texts, and again and again (often letting these theorists refute themselves) pinpoints the blindspots that have become endemic in the practice of Theory.

Written with great care and a deep commitment to the value and integrity of literary criticism and theory, this tonic work stands as a corrective to the misuse of theory, and a bracing reminder of how a critical approach works when it is well and judiciously applied.

Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction.  
 
In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois.
 
The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance. 

The first edition of May’s Short Story Theories (1976) opened with an essay entitled “The Short Story: An Underrated Art.” Almost two decades later, the short story suffers no such slight. Publishers and critics have become increasingly interested in the form, which has enjoyed a renaissance led by such writers as Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Mary Robison. An important part of this revival of interest, Short Story Theories has continued to attract a strong and loyal audience among students and teachers.

The New Short Story Theories includes a few basic pieces from the earlier volume—Poe’s Hawthorne review, Brander Matthew’s extension and formalization of Poe’s theories, and essays by Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bowen, and Nadine Gordimer—but most of the essays are new to the collection.

Addressing problems of definition, historical considerations, issues of technique, and cognitive approaches, essays include:
“The Tale as Genre in Short Story Fiction,” by W. S. Penn
“O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story,” by Suzanne C. Ferguson
“On Writing,” by Raymond Carver
“From Tale to Short Story,” by Robert F. Marler
“A Cognitive Approach to Storyness,” by Susan Lohafer

May’s new collection will continue to highlight the short story, to provoke debate, and to enrich our experience of a demanding and rewarding literary form.

The controversial and compelling figure of the New Woman in late Victorian fiction has garnered extensive scholarly attention, but rarely has she been investigated through the fascinating lens of the Gothic. Yet the presence of sinister Gothic elements is so widespread in the generally realisitic British novels that the term "New Woman Gothic" readily comes to mind. Drawing from and reworking Gothic conventions of Romantic and later literature, the New Woman version is marshaled during this tumultuous cultural moment of gender anxieties either to defend or revile the complex individual who sought improvements in educational, marital, and professional realms. 

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory traces the use of the trans feminine as an allegorical figure, from the practice's origins in nineteenth-century sexology through writings in the fields of psychoanalysis, Modernist fiction, and contemporary Queer Theory.
 
The book is the first to identify the process by which medical sources simplified the diversity of trans feminine experience into a single diagnostic narrative. It then demonstrates that this medical figure became an archetype for the "sexual anarchy" of the Modernist period in works by  Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and Jean Genet.
 
Thus illuminating the trans feminine's Modernist provenance, the book examines foundational works of Queer Theory that resuscitated the trans feminine allegory at the end of the twentieth century. Insightful and seminal, The New Woman debunks the pervasive reflex beginning in the 1990s to connect trans experience to a late twentieth-century collapse of sexual differences by revealing the Modernist roots of that very formulation.

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

The News from Poems examines a subgenre of recent American poetry that closely engages with contemporary political and social issues. This “engaged” poetry features a range of aesthetics and focuses on public topics from climate change, to the aftermath of recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the increasing corporatization of U.S. culture.

The News from Poems brings together newly commissioned essays by eminent poets and scholars of poetry and serves as a companion volume to an earlier anthology of engaged poetry compiled by the editors. Essays by Bob Perelman, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Wilner, and others reveal how recent poetry has redefined our ideas of politics, authorship, identity, and poetics.

The volume showcases the diversity of contemporary American poetry, discussing mainstream and experimental poets, including some whose work has sparked significant controversy. These and other poets of our time, the volume suggests, are engaged not only with public events and topics but also with new ways of imagining subjectivity, otherness, and poetry itself. 
 

In this second volume of the unparalleled exposition of Rousseau's life and works, Cranston completes and corrects the story told in Rousseau's Confessions, and offers a vivid, entirely new history of his most eventful and productive years.

"Luckily for us, Maurice Cranston's The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 has managed to craft a highly detailed account of eight key years of Rousseau's life in such a way that we can both understand and even, on occasion, sympathize."—Olivier Bernier, Wall Street Journal

Maurice Cranston (1920-1993), a distinguished scholar and recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of John Locke, was professor of political science at the London School of Economics. His numerous books include The Romantic Movement and Philosophers and Pamphleteers, and translations of Rousseau's The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.

The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.

In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.

Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.

"For other novelists the value of Henry James's Notebooks is immense and to brood over them a major experience. The glow of the great impresario is on the pages. They are occasionally readable and endlessly stimulating, often moving and are ocasionally relieved by a drop of gossip."—V. S. Pritchett, New Statesman

"The Notebooks take us into his study, and here we can observe him, at last, in the very act of creation at his writing table."—Leon Edel, Atlantic Monthly

"A document of prime importance."—Edmund Wilson, New Yorker

Focusing on Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval, George Sand, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust, The Novel Map: Mapping the Self in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction explores the ways that these writers represent and negotiate the relationship between the self and the world as a function of space in a novel turned map.

With the rise of the novel and of autobiography, the literary and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century France reconfigured both the ways literature could represent subjects and the ways subjects related to space. In the first-person works of these authors, maps situate the narrator within the imaginary space of the novel. Yet the time inherent in the text’s narrative unsettles the spatial self drawn by the maps and so creates a novel self, one which is both new and literary. The novel self transcends the rigid confines of a map. In this significant study, Patrick M. Bray charts a new direction in critical theory.

How has the form of the novel responded to the conditions now grouped under the term “neoliberalism”? These conditions have generated an explosion of narrative forms that make the past two decades one of the two or three most significant periods in the history of the novel. The contributors ask whether these formal innovations can be understood as an unprecedented break from the past or the latest chapter in a process that has been playing out over the past three centuries. In response to this question, they use a range of contemporary novels to consider whether conditions of multinational capitalism limit the novel’s ability to imagine a future beyond the limits of that world. Do novels that reject the option of an alternative world nevertheless reimagine the limits of multinational capitalism as the precondition for such a future? With these concerns in mind, contributors demonstrate how major contemporary novelists challenge national traditions of the novel both in the Anglophone West and across the Global South. This collective inquiry begins with a new essay by and interview with British novelist Tom McCarthy. 

Contributors
Nancy Armstrong, Jane Elliott, Matthew Hart, Nathan Hensley, Nicholas Huber, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, John Marx, Tom McCarthy, Vaughn Rasberry, Deisdra Reber, Lily Saint, Emilio Sauri, Rachel Greenwald Smith, Paul Stasi

The first collection of critical essays to focus specifically on the fiction produced by American novelists of the Depression era, The Novel and the American Left contributes substantially to the newly emerging emphasis on twentieth-century American literary radicalism. Recent studies have recovered this body of work and redefined in historical and theoretical terms its vibrant contribution to American letters. Casey consolidates and expands this field of study by providing a more specific consideration of individual novels and novelists, many of which are reaching new contemporary audiences through reprints.

The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional “American modernism” syllabi and research agendas.

The selected essays take up, among others, such “hard-core"” leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless “lost” novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and those interested in American cultural studies.

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in film, art, and dance as well as literature—to chart a new direction for the young artist struggling against what she perceived as the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of mid-twentieth-century fiction. Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel and discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as its influence on the development of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Young, and Djuna Barnes. In chapters devoted to the pursuit of the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the relationship between the diary and fiction, she addresses the materials, techniques, and nourishment of the arts, and the functions of art itself.

Originally published in 1968, The Novel of the Future remains a classic among both creative writers and literary scholars. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Nin biographer Deirdre Bair.

Too often, Steinbeck’s work has been studied piecemeal, even when the intention was for a rounded view. In this study, Howard Levant analyzes the patterns in Steinbeck’s work, taking an approach that permits a judgment of each novel in the context of a greater appreciation of the shape of Steinbeck’s long career.

The Novels of Theodore Dreiser was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Relying heavily on the manuscripts and letters in the Dreiser Collection of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Professor Pizer seeks to establish the facts of the sources and composition of each of Dreiser's eight novels and to study the themes and form of the completed works. In this study he relates what can be discovered about the factual reality of a novel to its imaginative reality. His interpretation of the novels avoids the suggestion that there is a single overriding theme or direction in Dreiser's work and emphasizes that Dreiser deserves examination primarily on the basis of the individuality and worth of each of his novels. A separate chapter is devoted to each of the novels: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The "Genius," The Financier, The Titan, An American Tragedy, The Bulwark, and The Stoic.

The Argentine scholar Noé Jitrik has long been one of the foremost literary critics in Latin America, noted not only for his groundbreaking scholarship but also for his wit. This volume is the first to make available in English a selection of his most influential writings. These sparkling translations of essays first published between 1969 and the late 1990s reveal the extraordinary scope of Jitrik’s work, his sharp insights into the interrelations between history and literature, and his keen awareness of the specificities of Latin American literature and its relationship to European writing. Together they signal the variety of critical approaches and vocabularies Jitrik has embraced over the course of his long career, including French structuralist thought, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Marxism.

The Noé Jitrik Reader showcases Jitrik’s reflections on marginality and the canon, exile and return, lack and excess, autobiography, Argentine nationalism, the state of literary criticism, the avant-garde, and the so-called Boom in Latin American literature. Among the writers whose work he analyzes in the essays collected here are Jorge Luis Borges, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Martí, César Vallejo, José Bianco, Juan Carlos Onetti, José María Arguedas, Julio Cortázar, and Augusto Roa Bastos. The Noé Jitrik Reader offers English-language readers a unique opportunity to appreciate the rigor and thoughtfulness of one of Latin America’s most informed and persuasive literary critics.

"For me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience.
The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.
Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

The Odyssey is considered to be one of the greatest pieces of world literature. Its basic story--the homecoming of Odysseus--is widely known. Although it has often been translated, earlier versions do not give the reader the full sense of its oral epic nature as a song that came into being through a long tradition of sung performances before writing was widely practiced. When finally written down, it retained its oral-formulaic nature in ways that are clearly discernible, and which this translation successfully captures. Rodney Merrill strictly adheres to the use of dactylic hexameter, the meter by which the formulaic language of Homeric poetry is rendered as musical phrasing rather than as a simple repetition of ideas. Reading this version--especially aloud--will grant both students and teachers fresh insight into the nature of Greek epic and Homer's song about one of the most famous characters of all time.
This epic began life as the music composed by a "singer of tales," not as words on a page. As such, its meter allows for pleasing variations with a strong basic "beat," thus providing a rhythmic impetus that carries the story swiftly forward. The resulting "music" has important repercussions for the reader's perception of the many repeated elements that provide structure for the poem and bring out significant themes, just as the repetitions in a piece of music do.
This edition of the Odyssey includes selections for further reading, a list of proper names (with a guide to pronunciation), and three maps. It also provides introductory discussions of how the work came into being and was transmitted until it became the work we read, how it is divided into six "performance sessions" of four books each, and how the poem's various themes are developed. Rodney Merrill's Odyssey is thus an ideal edition for students, teachers, and general readers.
The audiobook is available on twelve cassettes, and is read by Rodney Merrill. This version will bring Homer's epic masterpiece to life like never before. Perfect for the car or classroom!
Rodney Merrill is retired and an independent scholar. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley.
Thomas R. Walsh, Senior Professor at Occidental College, has written articles on Homeric poetics, with a forthcoming book on anger in Homer.

Who killed Laius? Most readers assume Oedipus did. At the play’s end, he stands convicted of murdering his father, marrying his mother, and triggering a deadly plague. With selections from a stellar assortment of critics including Walter Burkert, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, this book reopens the Oedipus case and lets readers judge for themselves. The Greek word for tragedy means “goat song.” Is Oedipus the goat? Helene Peet Foley calls him “the kind of leader a democracy would both love and desire to ostracize.” The Oedipus Casebook readings weigh the evidence against Oedipus, place the play in the context of Greek scapegoat rites, and explore the origins of tragedy in the festival of Dionysus. This unique critical edition includes a new translation of the play by distinguished classics scholar Wm. Blake Tyrrell and the authoritative Greek text established by H. Lloyd-Jones and N. G. Wilson.

Ovid's Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) and its sequel Remedies for Love (Remedia Amoris) are among the most notorious poems of the ancient world. In AD 8, the emperor Augustus exiled Ovid to the shores of the Black Sea for "a poem and a mistake." Whatever the mistake may have been, the poem was certainly the Ars Amatoria, which the emperor found a bit too immoral.
            In exile, Ovid composed Sad Things (Tristia), which included a defense of his life and work as brilliant and cheeky as his controversial love manuals. In a poem addressed to Augustus (Tristia 2), he argues, "Since all of life and literature is one long, steamy sex story, why single poor Ovid out?" While seemingly groveling at the emperor's feet, he creates an image of Augustus as capricious tyrant and himself as suffering artist that wins over every reader (except the one to whom it was addressed).
            Bringing together translations of the Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Tristia 2, Julia Dyson Hejduk's The Offense of Love is the first book to include both the offense and the defense of Ovid's amatory work in a single volume. Hejduk's elegant and accurate translations, helpful notes, and comprehensive introduction will guide readers through Ovid's wickedly witty poetic tour of the literature, mythology, topography, religion, politics, and (of course) sexuality of ancient Rome.

Finalist, National Translation Award, American Literary Translators Association 

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others outline how we currently live and reveal the stress-points and mood-systems of the modern epoch.  In its focus on social games, depictions of violent and explosive persons, along with its cast of artists, reporters, detectives, and others who observe and report and reenact, the suspense mode creates and recreates modern systems of action and autonomy, and defines the self-turned world's practices and aesthetics. By epitomizing a reflexive, self-legislating, and autonomous world, a suspense art with humans in the systems epoch provides the models and sets the rules for our modern, official world.