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In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian–White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada–U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.

Suffused with wit, anger, perception, and wisdom, The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be “Indian” in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: “The issue has always been land.” With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America—broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes—sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.

The Invisible Dragon made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty—and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging.

With this revised and expanded edition, Hickey is back to fan the flames. More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.

Written with a verve that is all too rare in serious criticism, this expanded and refurbished edition of The Invisible Dragon will be sure to captivate a new generation of readers, provoking the passionate reactions that are the hallmark of great criticism.

A personal and cultural mediation, Philip D. Beidler’s The Island Called Paradise explores the fascinating ways Cuban history and culture have permeated North American consciousness, and vice versa.

In The Island Called Paradise, Philip D. Beidler shares his personal discovery of the vast, rich, and astonishing history of the island of Cuba and the interrelatedness of Cuba and the US.

Cuba first entered Beidler’s consciousness in the early 1960s when he watched with mesmerized anxiety the televised reports of the Cuban missile crisis, a conflict that reduced a multifaceted, centuries-old history between North America and Cuba to the stark duotones of Cold War politics. Fifty years later, when Beidler traveled to the US’s island neighbor, he found a Cuba unlike the nation portrayed in truculent political rhetoric or in the easy preconceptions of US popular culture. Instead he found an entrancing people and landscape with deep historical connections to the US and a dazzling culture that overwhelmed his creative spirit.

In twelve original essays, Beidler reintroduces to English-speaking readers many of the central figures, both real and literary, of Cuban and Cuban-American history. Meet Cecilia Valdés, the young mixed-race heroine of a 1839 novel that takes readers to the poor streets and sumptuous salons of Spanish colonial Cuba, and Narciso López, a real-life Venezuelan adventurer and filibustero who attempted to foment a Cuban uprising against Spain. Both would have been familiar figures to nineteenth-century Americans. Beidler also visits the twentieth-century lives of “the two Ernestos” (Ernest Hemingway and Che Guevara), and the pop-culture Cuban icon Ricky Ricardo.

A country not with one history but multiple layers of history, Cuba becomes a fertile island for Beidler’s exploration. Art, he argues, perpetually crosses walls erected by politics, history, and nationality. At its core, The Island Called Paradise renews and refreshes our knowledge of an older Atlantic world even as we begin to envision a future in which the old bonds between our nations may be restored.

When H. L. Mencken wrote about "the miasmatic jungles of Arkansas," he was referring to the relative obscurity and uncertain image that Arkansas has enjoyed—or suffered from—throughout its history. In these entertaining and sometimes quirky essays, Lancaster sheds light on that image by analyzing the stereotypes that have characterized the state since its very beginning.

“Apps is a man of ideas who is sensitive to the touch, the smells, and the feel of doing things by hand, today and a hundred years ago.”—from the foreword by Senator Gaylord Nelson

Originally published in 1970, The Land Still Lives is the first book by Wisconsin’s greatest rural philosopher, Jerry Apps. Written when he was still a young agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin, The Land Still Lives was readers’ first introduction to Jerry’s farm in central Wisconsin, called Roshara, and the surrounding community of Skunk’s Hollow. This special 50th-anniversary edition features a new epilogue, in which Jerry revisits his philosophy of caring for the land so it in turn will care for us. This is vintage Apps, essential reading for Jerry’s legions of fans—and for all who, like Jerry, wish “to develop a relationship with nature and all its mystery and wonder.”

The horrific tragedies of Central Africa in the 1990s riveted the attention of the world. But these crises did not occur in a historical vacuum. By peering through the mists of the past, the case studies presented in The Land Beyond the Mists illustrate the significant advances to have taken place since decolonization in our understanding of the pre-colonial histories of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo.

Based on both oral and written sources, these essays are important both for their methods—viewing history from the perspective of local actors—and for their conclusions, which seriously challenge colonial myths about the area.

In this abundant space and isolation, the energy lords extract their bounty of natural resources, and the curators of mass destruction once mined their egregious weapons and reckless acts. It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference, lush textures and inscrutable tensions. Here violence can push beauty to the edge of a razor blade. . . . Thus Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value—a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home.

Widely considered one of the most important voices in the Chicano literary canon, José Antonio Burciaga was a pioneer who exposed inequities and cultural difficulties through humor, art, and deceptively simple prose. In this anthology and tribute, Mimi R. Gladstein and Daniel Chacón bring together dozens of remarkable examples of Burciaga’s work. His work never demonstrates machismo or sexism, as he believed strongly that all Chicano voices are equally valuable.

Best known for his books Weedee Peepo, Drink Cultura, and Undocumented Love, Burciaga was also a poet, cartoonist, founding member of the comedy troupe Cultura Clash, and a talented muralist whose well-known work The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes became almost more famous than the man. This first and only collection of Burciaga’s work features thirty-eight illustrations and incorporates previously unpublished essays and drawings, including selections from his manuscript “The Temple Gang,” a memoir he was writing at the time of his death. In addition, Gladstein and Chacón address Burciaga’s importance to Chicano letters.

A joy to read, this rich compendium is an important contribution not only to Chicano literature but also to the preservation of the creative, spiritual, and political voice of a talented and passionate man.

This volume includes ninety-two items from 1935, 1936, and 1937, including Dewey’s 1935 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, published as Liberalism and Social Action.

In essay after essay Dewey analyzed, criticized, and reevaluated liberalism. When his controversial Liberalism and Social Action appeared, asking whether it was still possible to be a liberal, Horace M. Kallen wrote that Dewey “restates in the language and under the conditions of his times what Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence affirmed in the language and under the conditions of his.”

The diverse nature of the writings belies their underlying unity: some are technical philosophy; other philosophical articles shade into social and political themes; social and political issues permeate the educational articles, which in turn involve Dewey’s philosophical ideas.

This volume includes all Dewey’s writings for 1938 except for Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Volume 12 of The Later Works), as well as his 1939 Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, and two items from Intelligence in the Modern World.

Freedom and Culture presents, as Steven M. Cahn points out, “the essence of his philosophical position: a commitment to a free society, critical intelligence, and the education required for their advance.”

Typescripts, essays, and an authoritative edition of Knowing and the Known, Dewey’s collaborative work with Arthur F. Bentley.

In an illuminating Introduction T. Z. Lavine defines the collaboration's three goals—the "construction of a new language for behavioral inquiry," "a critique of formal logicians, in defense of Dewey’s Logic," and "a critique of logical positivism." In Dewey’s words: "Largely due to Bentley, I’ve finally got the nerve inside of me to do what I should have done years ago."

"What Is It to Be a Linguistic Sign or Name?" and "Values, Valuations, and Social Facts,’ both written in 1945, are published here for the first time.

With the exception of Experience and Nature, (Volume 1 of the Later Works), this volume contains all of Dewey’s writ­ings for 1925 and 1926, as well as his 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems. A Modern Language Association’s Com­mittee on Scholarly Editions textual edi­tion.

The first essay in this volume, “The Development of American Pragmatism,” is perhaps Dewey’s best-known article of these years, emphasizing the uniquely American origins of his own philosophi­cal innovations. Other essays focus on Dewey’s continuing investigation of the “nature of intelligent conduct,” as, for example, his debate with David Wight Prall on the underpinnings of value, his study of sense-perception, and his support for outlawing of war. Also appearing here are Dewey’s final articles on the culture of the developing world, written for the New Republic after his travels to China, Turkey, and Mexico.

All of Dewey’s writings for 1927 and 1928 with the exception of The Public and Its Problems, which appears in Volume 2, A Modern Language Associ­ation’s Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition.

These essays are, as Sidorsky says in his Introduction, “framed, in great mea­sure, by those two poles of his philo­sophical interest: looking backward, in a sense, to the defense of naturalistic metaphysics and moving forward to the justification and to the implications for practice of an empirical theory.”

Dewey’s five essays on education are evidence of his continued interest in that field. Among them is the frequently quoted “Why I Am a Member of the Teachers Union,” which is still used by the American Federation of Teachers in its recruiting efforts. Other highlights of this volume include the famous ex­change between George Santayana and Dewey on Experience and Nature; an im­passioned condemnation of the mis­carriage of justice Dewey saw in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; and a series of six articles on the Soviet Union based on Dewey’s trip to that country in 1928.

With the exception of The Quest for Cer­tainty (Volume 4) this fifth volume brings together Dewey’s writings for the 1929–1930 period.

During this time Dewey published 4 books and 50 articles on philosophical, educational, political, and social issues. His philosophical essays include “What Humanism Means to Me” and “What I Believe,” both of which express Dewey’s faith in man’s potentialities and intel­ligence, and a lively Journal of Philoso­phy exchange with Ernest Nagel, Wil­liam Ernest Hocking, C. I. Lewis, and F. J. E. Woodbridge. Educational writings include The Sources of a Science of Education. The contents of this volume re­flect Dewey’s increasing involvement in social and political problems.

This volume also includes a collection of essays entitled The Educational Fron­tier, Dewey’s articles on logic, the out­lawry of war, and philosophy for the En­cyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and his reviews of Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, Martin Schutze’s Academic Illusions in the Field of Let­ters and the Arts, and Rexford G. Tugwell’s Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts.

This important collection of articles reflects the growing recognition that the study of women whose primary relation is to other women makes a vital contribution to feminist scholarship. A milestone in lesbian studies  - a field often trivialized, ignored, or denied, and always controversial - this volume enriches and enlarges our understanding of women in culture and society.

Once considered a period of decline, Late Antiquity (third through eighth centuries C.E.) is now seen as a creative period of transition between the ancient and medieval worlds. Ostensibly an "otherworldly" religion, Christianity became a powerful worldly cultural force. But this power was shaped and severely limited by a large number of factors, including its own highly diverse traditions, scriptures, practices, and theologies.
William Klingshirn and Mark Vessey have assembled some of the most influential scholars in the study of Late Antiquity to test the limits of Christianity. The sixteen essays in this collection investigate the ways in which the concept of "limits" (temporal, spatial, ideological, social, and cultural) can help us to understand the texture of Christianity during this formative period. Taken together, the essays in this volume constitute as yet the most sustained study of cultural transformations evoked by Robert Markus's phrase "the end of ancient Christianity."
This timely volume will interest students of early Christian history and theology, as well as historians of the Roman empire and early middle ages. Because it examines a formative period of western civilization, it will also speak to anyone who wonders why Christianity takes the form it does today.
Contributors include Gerald Bonner, Peter Brown, Virginia Burrus, John Cavadini, Elizabeth Clark, Paula Fredriksen, Sidney Griffith, David Hunter, Conrad Leyser, Paul Meyvaert, Oliver Nicholson, James O'Donnell, Philip Rousseau, Frederick Russell, Carole Straw, and Robert Wilken.
William E. Klingshirn is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin, The Catholic University of America. Mark Vessey is Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia.

The Linguistic Turn provides a rich and representative introduction to the entire historical and doctrinal range of the linguistic philosophy movement. In two retrospective essays titled "Ten Years After" and "Twenty-Five Years After," Rorty shows how his book was shaped by the time in which it was written and traces the directions philosophical study has taken since.

"All too rarely an anthology is put together that reflects imagination, command, and comprehensiveness. Rorty's collection is just such a book."—Review of Metaphysics

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
 
The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. Marianne Boruch’s essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of odd details or bothersome questions that would not quit—Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going? Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open?

Boruch’s intrepid curiosity led her to explore fields of expertise about which she knew little: aviation, music, anatomy, history, medicine, photography, fiction, neuroscience, physics, anthropology, painting, and drawing. There’s an addiction to metaphor here, an affection for image, sudden turns of thinking, and the great subjects of poetry: love, death, time, knowledge. There’s amazement at the dumb luck of staying long enough in an inkling to make it a poem at all. Poets such as Keats, Stevens, Frost, Plath, Auden, and Bishop, along with painters, inventors, doctors, scientists, composers, musicians, neighbors, friends, and family—all traffic blatantly or under the surface—and one gets a glimpse of such fellow travelers now and then.

 

A fearless, personal, and redemptive excavation of how women with mental illness have been stigmatized and abused in the name of treatment throughout history.

“There must have been more of us, hidden from sight, or slipping off the family tree like leaves in autumn, unnoticed.” Compelled by grief over the suicide of her beloved aunt and by her own bipolar diagnosis, Jacqueline Doyle set out to discover more about their shared disorder and the ways society has punished women it labels “mad.” Her genre-bending collection, The Lunatics’ Ball, grew into something larger than she expected: a collective (auto)biography combining her aunt’s story and her own with those of more than thirty “lunatic” forebears whose histories have been misrepresented or lost. Some are well known, such as Sylvia Plath, Nina Simone, and Zelda Fitzgerald—the latter who died in a locked room in a mental hospital fire. Others are lesser known, such as Lorina Bulwer, who stitched her story into enormous patchwork tapestries; Violet Gibson, incarcerated in an asylum for decades after attempting to assassinate Mussolini; and the writer Janet Frame, who narrowly escaped a lobotomy. In this fearless work that is equal parts imaginative brilliance and exacting historical inquiry, Doyle expands the boundaries of memoir and creates a new community in the face of stigma and repression.

The human presence that animates the personal essay is surely one of the most beguiling of literary phenomena, for it comes across in so familiar a voice that it’s easy to believe we are listening to the author rather than a textual stand-in. But the “person” in a personal essay is always a written construct, a fabricated character, its confessions and reminiscences as rehearsed as those of any novelist. In this first book-length study of the personal essay, Carl Klaus unpacks this made-up self and the manifold ways in which a wide range of essayists and essays have brought it to life.

By reconceiving the most fundamental aspect of the personal essay—the I of the essayist—Klaus demonstrates that this seemingly uncontrived form of writing is inherently problematic, not willfully devious but bordering upon the world of fiction. He develops this key idea by explaining how structure, style, and voice determine the nature of a persona and our perception of it in the works of such essayists as Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, E. B. White, and Virginia Woolf. Realizing that this persona is shaped by the force of culture and the impress of personal experience, he explores the effects of both upon the point of view, content, and voice of such essayists as George Orwell, Nancy Mairs, Richard Rodriguez, and Alice Walker. Throughout, in full command of the history of the essay, he calls up numerous passages in which essayists themselves acknowledge the element of impersonation in their work, drawing upon the perspectives of Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Scott Russell Sanders, Annie Dillard, Vivian Gornick, Loren Eiseley, James Baldwin, and a host of other literary guides.

Finally, adding yet another layer to the made-up self, Klaus succumbs to his addiction to the personal essay by placing some of the different selves that various essayists have called forth in him within the essays that he has crafted so carefully for this book. Making his way from one essay to the next with a persona variously learned, whimsical, and poignant, he enacts the palimpsest of ways in which the made-up self comes to life in the work of a single essayist. Thus over the course of this highly original, beautifully structured study, the personal essay is revealed to be more complex than many readers have supposed. With its lively analyses and illuminating examples, The Made-Up Self will speak to anyone who wishes to understand—or to write—personal essays.

Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s The Madness of Vision is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality.

In each of the nine essays that form The Madness of Vision Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s Saint Teresa and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s self-portrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s El Criticón; Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo; the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts.

The book, by a cultural anthropologist, tells the story of the Malayan Emergency through the cultural interpretations of modern conflict, and examines the counterinsurgency through the lens of the postwar British Empire. Souchou Yao’s penetrating and illuminating essays on the Malayan Emergency set standards of wide-ranging, evocative analysis. The book ranges across a vast canvas, from the protection of rubber and tin for a bankrupt post-war Britain, to the British military violence as a heritage of the Victorian Imperial Policing; from collective punishment to population resettlement of more than half a million Malayans. Throughout the book runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women in colonial Malaya. The Malayan Emergency is packed full of the myth of British liberalism and good sense. In truth, the counterinsurgency measures point to what Camus has described as ‘Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy …’ . Counter-insurgencies call for mobile security forces and humane, liberal measures – population relocation, civil reconstruction, good governance – in which Western governments specialize. These measures, affected as they did Malayan civilian life, are captured by the anthropologist’s art of ethnography and cultural analysis. Among the vignettes are ethnographic encounter with a woman ex-guerrilla, and the author’s remembrance of his insurgent-cousin killed in a police ambush. The book examines the Emergency afresh, and in the process brings into focus issues not normally covered by the disciplines: nostalgia and failed revolution, socialist fantasy and ethnic relations, the moral costs of modern counter-insurgency.

Gene Logsdon’s The Man Who Created Paradise is a message of hope at a time when the very concept of earth stewardship is under attack. The fable, inspired by a true story, tells how Wally Spero looked at one of the bleakest places in America—a raw and barren strip-mined landscape—and saw in it his escape from the drudgery of his factory job. He bought an old bulldozer and used the machine to carve patiently, acre by acre, a beautiful little farm out of a seemingly worthless wasteland.

Wally’s story is a charming distillation of the themes that the late, beloved Gene Logsdon returned to again and again in his many books and hundreds of articles. Environmental restoration is the task of our time. The work of healing our land begins in our own backyards and farms, in our neighborhoods and our regions. Humans can turn the earth into a veritable paradise—if they really want to.

Noted photographer Gregory Spaid retraced the trail that Logsdon traveled when he was inspired to write The Man Who Created Paradise. His photographs evoke the same yearning for wholeness, for ties to land and community, that infuses the fable’s poetic prose.

In The Mangle of Practice (1995), the renowned sociologist of science Andrew Pickering argued for a reconceptualization of research practice as a “mangle,” an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, this collection aims to extend the mangle’s reach by exploring its application across a wide range of fields including history, philosophy, sociology, geography, environmental studies, literary theory, biophysics, and software engineering.

The Mangle in Practice opens with a fresh introduction to the mangle by Pickering. Several contributors then present empirical studies that demonstrate the mangle’s applicability to topics as diverse as pig farming, Chinese medicine, economic theory, and domestic-violence policing. Other contributors offer examples of the mangle in action: real-world practices that implement a self-consciously “mangle-ish” stance in environmental management and software development. Further essays discuss the mangle as philosophy and social theory. As Pickering argues in the preface, the mangle points to a shift in interpretive sensibilities that makes visible a world of de-centered becoming. This volume demonstrates the viability, coherence, and promise of such a shift, not only in science and technology studies, but in the social sciences and humanities more generally.

Contributors: Lisa Asplen, Dawn Coppin, Adrian Franklin, Keith Guzik, Casper Bruun Jensen,Yiannis Koutalos, Brian Marick, Randi Markussen, Andrew Pickering, Volker Scheid, Esther-Mirjam Sent, Carol Steiner, Maxim Waldstein

The twenty-first century has been marked by an “oceanic turn” and by groundbreaking new research on the previously hidden depths of maritime life, literature, and culture. The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons builds upon these new areas of research as the first major volume of essays to explore Anglo-Saxon England’s complex relationship to its maritime history, economy, and sensibilities. Individual essays focus on maritime travel, Viking invasions by sea, littoral culture, the archeology of the whale, and literary mythologies of monstrous sea creatures, bringing together insights from a range of disciplines: archeology, history, literature, paleography, linguistics, art history, critical theory, geography, and cultural studies.

Composed over several decades, the essays here are remarkably fresh and relevant. They offer instruction for the student just beginning the study of folklore as well as repeated value for the many established scholars who continue to wrestle with issues that Wilson has addressed. As his work has long offered insight on critical mattersn--nationalism, genre, belief, the relationship of folklore to other disciplines in the humanities and arts, the currency of legend, the significance of humor as a cultural expression, and so forth--so his recent writing, in its reflexive approach to narrative and storytelling, illuminates today's paradigms. Its notable autobiographical dimension, long an element of Wilson's work, employs family and local lore to draw conclusions of more universal significance. Another way to think of it is that newer folklorists are catching up with Wilson and what he has been about for some time. As a body, Wilson's essays develop related topics and connected themes. This collection organizes them in three coherent parts. The first examines the importance of folklore. What it is and its value in various contexts. Part two, drawing especially on the experience of Finland, considers the role of folklore in national identity, including both how it helps define and sustain identity and the less savory ways it may be used for the sake of nationalistic ideology. Part three, based in large part on Wilson's extensive work in Mormon folklore, which is the most important in that area since that of Austin and Alta Fife, looks at religious cultural expressions and outsider perceptions of them and, again, at how identity is shaped, by religious belief, experience, and participation; by the stories about them; and by the many other expressive parts of life encountered daily in a culture. Each essay is introduced by a well-known folklorist who discusses the influence of Wilson's scholarship. These include Richard Bauman, Margaret Brady, Simon Bronner, Elliott Oring, Henry Glassie, David Hufford, Michael Owen Jones, and Beverly Stoeltje.

W. D. Howells (1837-1920) occupies a peculiar position in our current literary history. Situated on the periphery, he is one of whose "marginality" seems, nevertheless, to be a necessary counterpart to the "centrality" of other writers--such as his friends Henry James and mark Twin--who are more securely fixed in the canon. Paradoxically, Howells has been an indispensable man in the middle, linking such binary pairs as East/West, romance/realism, elitism/socialism, patriarchal canon/women writers. This volume brings together nine related essays by John W. Crowley. The first four center respectively on Howells and the Civil War, his attitudes toward women, his friendship with a homosexual writer, and the tragically short life of his daughter Winifred. Crowley's overarching purpose here is to establish Howells as perhaps the representative male writer of his time, within the gender codes of Victorian America. The last five chapters discuss Howell's later fiction, focusing on its intense concern with psychology an psychic phenomena. Crowley not only brings this relatively neglected work more fully into view, but also argues that Howells used the writing of this fiction as a process of psychological self-healing that resembles the self-analysis of Sigmund Freud during the same years.

Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us.
    Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read.
    All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.