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When the young Princess Sonshi became a Buddhist nun in the year 984, a scholar-official of the royal court was commissioned to create a guide to the Buddhist religion that would be accessible for her. He did so in the form of the illustrated works of fiction (monogatari) that appealed to women readers of her time and class. The text has survived in later manuscripts; the illustrations, if they ever existed, have not. This revised translation recreates Sonshi’s experience of receiving this multimedia presentation, with illustrations selected to help contemporary readers visualize its content and essays that provide context on the religious and cultural experience of the author. The Three Jewels is a unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience—especially for women—in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji.

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—In Search of Lost Time—is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership—well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust’s novel, and if one Googles “Proust,” the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000.
 The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust’s work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled “The Timelessness of Proust” conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays:

 “In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness,” Charles R.  Embry
    “Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence,” Glenn Hughes
“The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on      
     Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Thomas J. McPartland;
“Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in
     Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Paulette Kidder;
“Proust’s Luminous Memory and L’Homme Éternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning,”
     Michael Henry
“Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot’s Four Quartets and Proust’s In Search 
     of Lost Time,” Glenn Hughes

Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.

The year 1984 is just a memory, but the catchwords of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four still routinely pepper public discussions of topics ranging from government surveillance and privacy invasion to language corruption and bureaucratese. Orwell's work pervades the cultural imagination, while others of his literary generation are long forgotten. Exploring this astonishing afterlife has become the scholarly vocation of John Rodden, who is now the leading authority on the reception, impact, and reinvention of George Orwell—the man and writer—as well as of "Orwell" the cultural icon and historical talisman.

In The Unexamined Orwell, Rodden delves into dimensions of Orwell's life and legacy that have escaped the critical glare. Rodden discusses how several leading American intellectuals have earned the title of Orwell's "successor," including Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Christopher Hitchens, and John Lukacs. He then turns to Germany and focuses on the role and relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the now-defunct communist nation of East Germany. Rodden also addresses myths that have grown up around Orwell's life, including his "more than half-legendary" encounter with Ernest Hemingway in liberated Paris in March 1945, and analyzes literary issues such as his utopian sensibility and his prose style. Finally, Rodden poses the endlessly debated question, "What Would George Orwell Do?," and speculates about how the prophet of Nineteen Eighty-Four would have reacted to world events. In so doing, Rodden shows how our responses to this question reveal much about our culture's ongoing need to reappropriate "Orwell."

A visionary reckoning with prophecy, possession, and the grammar of liberation

A bold, experimental intervention in literary and theoretical discourse of colonialism and diaspora, The Web of Differing Versions engages with Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 Almanac of the Dead as literature, prophecy, and philosophy. Reid Gómez makes “The Indian Connection” that Silko prophesizes—Land Back!—and offers a prescient response to Silko’s enduring question: who has spiritual possession of the Américas?

Realizing the great capacity of Black and Native studies, Gómez crafts a visionary mode of scholarship that resists acknowledging conceptual, political, spiritual, formal, or linguistic borders. Rather than comparing or separating, she demonstrates how to stop telling things apart: Black|Indian, slavery|colonization, and writing|translation. Gómez shifts focus from racialized identities to the prophesied world itself, working with music, literature, and language to elaborate the connections that exist between racialized bodies, land, and sea as she emphasizes the ubiquity of escape, revolt, and beauty/hózhǫ́.

A theoretical composition, this book enacts a practice of re-visioning that uses Silko’s Almanac to challenge the limits of thought, language, and the very idea of scholarship. Attending the multiplicity of time into times, past into pasts, future into futures, The Web of Differing Versions offers a new grammar for a shared and violent world.

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The Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila’s phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman’s songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila’s writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman’s revolutionary poetry and his conception of democracy itself—an insight that was all but suppressed during the mid-twentieth century emergence of American literature as a field of study.

Highlights of this collection include Erkkila’s essays on pairings such as Marx and Whitman, Dickinson and Whitman, and Melville and Whitman. Across the volume, she demonstrates an international vision that highlights the place of Leaves of Grass within a global struggle for democracy. The Whitman Revolution is evidence of Erkkila’s remarkable ability to lead critical discussions, and marks an exciting event in Whitman studies.

Where nature meets democracy—John Dewey’s vision for a more connected world.

American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be one with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey’s conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. The World in Which We Occur highlights this notion in order to define “pragmatist ecology,” a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural. Neil Browne finds this to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century.

To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues that disciplinary boundaries must be opened, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment.

Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey’s philosophy. Among other texts examined are John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson’s three books about the sea, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines’s The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies that we have become accustomed and affirm the principles of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic values go hand in hand.

In her work as poet, essayist, editor, dramatist, and public intellectual, Chicana lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga has been extremely influential in current debates on culture and identity as an ongoing, open-ended process. Analyzing the "in-between" spaces in Moraga's writing where race, gender, class, and sexuality intermingle, this first book-length study of Moraga's work focuses on her writing of the body and related material practices of sex, desire, and pleasure.

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano divides the book into three sections, which analyze Moraga's writing of the body, her dramaturgy in the context of both dominant and alternative Western theatrical traditions, and her writing of identities and racialized desire. Through close textual readings of Loving in the War Years, Giving Up the Ghost, Shadow of a Man, Heroes and Saints, The Last Generation, and Waiting in the Wings, Yarbro-Bejarano contributes to the development of a language to talk about sexuality as potentially empowering, the place of desire within politics, and the intricate workings of racialized desire.

Elena Poniatowska is one of Latin America's most distinguished and innovative living writers. Advocacy of women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, denunciation of the repression of that struggle, and a tendency to blur the boundaries between conventional literary forms characterize her writing practice.

Asserting that Poniatowska's writing has been uniquely shaped by her experience as a journalist and interviewer, Beth Jörgensen addresses four important texts: Palabras cruzadas (interviews), Hasta no verte Jesús mío (testimonial novel), La noche de Tlatelolco (oral history), and La "Flor de Lis" (novel of development). She also treats related pieces, including Lilus Kikus (short fiction), De noche vienes (short stories), Fuerte es el silencio (chronicles), and several of Poniatowska's essays. Her readings incorporate a variety of critical approaches within a feminist framework.

Smitten by the modernity of Cervantes and Borges at an early age, Carlos Fuentes has written extensively on the cultures of the Americas and elsewhere. His work includes over a dozen novels, among them The Death of Artemio Cruz, Christopher Unborn, The Old Gringo, and Terra Nostra, several volumes of short stories, numerous essays on literary, cultural, and political topics, and some theater.

In this book, Raymond Leslie Williams traces the themes of history, culture, and identity in Fuentes' work, particularly in his complex, major novel Terra Nostra. He opens with a biography of Fuentes that links his works to his intellectual life. The heart of the study is Williams' extensive reading of the novel Terra Nostra, in which Fuentes explores the presence of Spanish culture and history in Latin America. Williams concludes with a look at how Fuentes' other fiction relates to Terra Nostra, including Fuentes' own division of his work into fourteen cycles that he calls "La Edad del Tiempo," and with an interview in which Fuentes discusses his concept of this cyclical division.

One of the original "Duveneck boys" who studied in Munich at the Royal Academy, Theodore Wendel followed his mentor to Florence and Venice; he later went on to Paris and ultimately joined a colony of young artists at Giverny. The scenes and subject matter in the works he completed there are among the earliest by an American artist to adopt and evolve Impressionist strategies. Upon his return to America, he spent the next decades rendering scenes of the farmland and coast north of Boston that contemporary critics acclaimed as some of the best they had seen. Yet despite his talent and the significant accolades earned during his career, in the near-century following his death the recognition of his achievements has faded. The Artist Book Foundation is delighted to have the opportunity to remedy this siutation with its forthcoming monograph on the artist, Theodore Wendel: True Notes of American Impressionism.

Laurene Buckley's years of exhaustive research inform an engaging and detailed narrative of Wendel's time in Europe and his many years capturing the essence of the farms and fishing villages along the rural coast of Massachusetts. Thanks to her efforts, the book will feature many of his best works, a number of which are in private collections. An informative introduction by William H. Gerdts provides significant artistic context for Wendel and explains the artist's deft ability to draw the viewer into a scene. Concluding the monograph, an extensive chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography complete the scholarship on this long overdue tribute to a master of American Impressionism.

A major reconsideration of relations between new theories and old texts.

Medieval Studies/Literary Theory