Results by title

What do Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Hayden have in common? They are among the impressive array of American writers who have contributed to the legacy of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the last one hundred years. 

To commemorate this esteemed institution’s centennial, Welcome to the Mountain recreates the experience of being in a writerly community that celebrates literature and invests in literary apprenticeship. This volume, edited by Lauren Francis-Sharma and Jennifer Grotz, comprises an extraordinary sampling of work from the historical to the contemporary, including lectures and readings first delivered at Bread Loaf. Its expansive range showcases everything from highly celebrated texts to rarer pieces and insightful musings by Toni Morrison, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Randall Kenan, Czesław Miłosz, Julia Alvarez, and so many more.

Welcome to the Mountain tells the endless and thrilling stories of how writers become writers and how literary traditions evolve through our conversations with each other. Through this extraordinary book, we invite readers to make themselves at home in the rich landscape of American letters.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wild animal story emerged in Canadian literature as a distinct genre, in which animals pursue their own interests—survival for themselves, their offspring, and perhaps a mate, or the pure pleasure of their wildness.

Bringing together some of the most celebrated wild animal stories, Ralph H. Lutts places them firmly in the context of heated controversies about animal intelligence and purposeful behavior. Widely regarded as entertaining and educational, the early stories—by Charles G. D. Roberts, Ernest Thompson Seton, John Muir, Jack London and others—had an avid readership among adults and children. But some naturalists and at least one hunter—Theodore Roosevelt—discredited these writers as "nature fakers," accusing them of falsely portraying animal behavior.

The stories and commentaries collected here span the twentieth century. As present day animal behaviorists, psychologists, and the public attempt to sort out the meaning of what animals do and our obligations to them, Ralph Lutts maps some of the prominent features of our cultural landscape.

Other selections include essays by Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, and Ralph H. Lutts.

Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

De uses film tropes to examine the ways women directors and film entrepreneurs claim creative control within the contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and global capitalism. The region’s fictional cinemas have become staging grounds for postcolonialism, with colonial and local hierarchies merged into new imperial formations. De’s analysis shows how the gendered intersections of inequity and opportunity shape women’s fiction filmmaking while illuminating the impact of state and market formations on the process.

Innovative and essential, Women’s Transborder Cinema examines the works of South Asia’s women filmmakers from a regional perspective.

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.

Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.

The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

This edited collection arises from the belief that the field of writing studies, with its deep engagement in the power of language, is uniquely positioned to open new pathways for international scholarly dialogue in writing studies and beyond. Integrating diverse theoretical traditions—including discourse studies, language pedagogy, educational psychology, educational management, and critical sociolinguistics—the editors have brought together work from key Latin American scholars published over the past two decades. The result is a book that points to future directions for the increasingly global field of writing studies. The collection includes work by Natalia Ávila Reyes, Charles Bazerman, Paula Carlino, Valentina Fahler, Ivone Inés Jakob, Judith Kalman, Angela B. Kleiman, Vera Lúcia Lopes Cristovão, Anna Rachel Machado, Jonathan Marine, Juan David Martínez Hincapié, Paulina Meza, Violate Molina Natera, Désirée Motta-Roth, Estela I. Moyano, Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux, Lucía Natale, Federico Navarro, Giovanni Parodi, Luisa Pelizza, María Cecilia Pereira, Pablo Rosales, Daniela Paula Stagnaro, Alicia Vázquez, René Venegas, and Virginia Zavala.