Results by title

5448 books match the query 'History and criticism' and 250 start with w

cover of WEB OF FANTASIES: Gaze, Image, & Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

WEB OF FANTASIES

Gaze, Image, & Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Patricia B Salzman-Mitchell

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Drawing on recent scholarship in art, film, literary theory, and gender studies, A Web of Fantasies examines the complexities, symbolism and interactions between gaze and image in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and forms a gender-sensitive perspective. It is a feminist study of Ovid’s epic, which includes many stories about change, in which discussions of viewers, viewing, and imagery strive to illuminate Ovid’s constructions of male and female. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell discusses the text from the perspective of three types of gazes: of characters looking, of the poet who narrates visually charged stories, and of the reader who “sees” the woven images in the text. Arguing against certain theorists who deny the possibility of any feminine vision in a male-authored poem, the author maintains that the female point of view can be released through the traditional feminine occupation of weaving, featuring the woven images of Arachne (involved in a weaving contest in which she tried to best the goddess Athena, who turned her into a spider) and Philomela (who had her tongue cut out, so had to weave a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation).
     The book observes that while feminist models of the gaze can create productive readings of the poem, these models are too limited and reductive for such a protean and complex text as Metamorphoses. This work brings forth the pervasive importance of the act of looking in the poem which will affect future readings of Ovid’s epic.
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cover of WORLDS OF MEDIEVAL WOMEN: "CREATIVITY, INFLUENCE, AND IMAGINATION"

WORLDS OF MEDIEVAL WOMEN

"CREATIVITY, INFLUENCE, AND IMAGINATION"

CONSTANCE H. BERMAN

West Virginia University Press, 1985

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cover of Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature

Waging War on War

Peacefighting in American Literature

Giorgio Mariana

University of Illinois Press, 2015

The notion that war plays a fundamental role in the United States' idea of itself obscures the rich--and by no means naïve--seam of anti-war thinking that winds through American culture. Non-violent resistance, far from being a philosophy of passive dreamers, instead embodies Ralph Waldo Emerson's belief that peace "can never be defended, never be executed, by cowards."

Giorgio Mariani rigorously engages with the essential question of what makes a text explicitly anti-war. Ranging from Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, Waging War on War explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war text's formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. Mariani moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. warmaking and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, he shows how the ideal of nonviolence and a dislike of war have been significant, if nonhegemonic, features of American culture since the nation's early days.

Ambitious and nuanced, Waging War on War at last defines anti-war literature while exploring the genre's role in an assertive peacefighting project that offered--and still offers--alternatives to violence.

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cover of Waiting for Buddy Guy: Chicago Blues at the Crossroads

Waiting for Buddy Guy

Chicago Blues at the Crossroads

Alan Harper

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, British blues fan Alan Harper became a transatlantic pilgrim to Chicago. "I've come here to listen to the blues," he told an American customs agent at the airport, and listen he did, to the music in its many styles, and to the men and women who lived it in the city's changing blues scene. Harper's eloquent memoir conjures the smoky redoubts of men like harmonica virtuoso Big Walter Horton and pianist Sunnyland Slim. Venturing from stageside to kitchen tables to the shotgun seat of a 1973 Eldorado, Harper listens to performers and others recollect memories of triumphs earned and chances forever lost, of deep wells of pain and soaring flights of inspiration. Harper also chronicles a time of change, as an up-tempo, whites-friendly blues eclipsed what had come before, and old Southern-born black players held court one last time before an all-conquering generation of young guitar aces took center stage.
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cover of Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative

Waiting for the Sky to Fall

The Age of Verticality in American Narrative

Ruth Mackay

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative by Ruth Mackay traces the figures of flight, grievous falls, and collapsing towers, all of which haunt American narratives before and after 9/11. Mackay examines how these events prefigure 9/11, exploring the narrative residue left by the “end” of horizontal space—when settlers reached America’s Pacific Coast, leaving nowhere westward on the continent to go. She then continues into the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. This period of time marks an era of verticality: an age that offers a transformed concept of the limits of space, entwined with a sense of anxiety and trepidation.

With this study, Mackay asks: In what oblique ways has verticality leaked into American narrative? Why do metaphors of up and down recur across the twentieth century? With close readings of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and its film rendering There Will Be Blood, Allen Ginsberg’s poetic dissections of the nuclear bomb, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s imagining of flight in Almanac of the Dead, this interdisciplinary study culminates with a discussion of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Waiting for the Sky to Fall examines how vertical representation cleaves to, and often transforms the associations of, specific events that are physically and visually disorienting, disquieting, or even traumatic.
 
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cover of Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

Wake the Town and Tell the People

Dancehall Culture in Jamaica

Norman C. Stolzoff

Duke University Press, 2000

Jamaican dancehall has long been one of the most vital and influential cultural and artistic forces within contemporary global music. Wake the Town and Tell the People presents, for the first time, a lively, nuanced, and comprehensive view of this musical and cultural phenomenon: its growth and historical role within Jamaican society, its economy of star making, its technology of production, its performative practices, and its capacity to channel political beliefs through popular culture in ways that are urgent, tangible, and lasting.
Norman C. Stolzoff brings a fan’s enthusiasm to his broad perspective on dancehall, providing extensive interviews, original photographs, and anthropological analysis from eighteen months of fieldwork in Kingston. Stolzoff argues that this enormously popular musical genre expresses deep conflicts within Jamaican society, not only along lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion but also between different factions struggling to gain control of the island nation’s political culture. Dancehall culture thus remains a key arena where the future of this volatile nation is shaped. As his argument unfolds, Stolzoff traces the history of Jamaican music from its roots in the late eighteenth century to 1945, from the addition of sound systems and technology during the mid-forties to early sixties, and finally through the post-independence years from the early sixties to the present.
Wake the Town and Tell the People offers a general introduction for those interested in dancehall music and culture. For the fan or musicologist, it will serve as a comprehensive reference book.
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cover of Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

Waking Sleeping Beauty

Feminist Voices in Children's Novels

Roberta S. Trites

University of Iowa Press, 1997

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children.

Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression.

Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.

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cover of Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Woodland, Malcolm

University of Iowa Press, 2005

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens’s doubled stance toward the apocalyptic past: his simultaneous use of and resistance to apocalyptic language, two contradictory forces that have generated two dominant and incompatible interpretations of his work. The book explores the often paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham.

This study begins with an examination of the textual and generic issues surrounding apocalypse, culminating in the idea of apocalyptic language as a form of “discursive mastery” over the mayhem of events. Woodland provides an informative religious/historical discussion of apocalypse and, engaging with such critics as Parker, Derrida, and Fowler, sets forth the paradoxes and complexities that eventually challenge any clear dualities between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic thinking.

Woodland then examines some of Stevens’s wartime essays and poems and describes Stevens’s efforts to salvage a sense of self and poetic vitality in a time of war, as well as his resistance to the possibility of cultural collapse. Woodland discusses the major postwar poems “Credences of Summer” and “The Auroras of Autumn” in separate chapters, examining the interaction of (anti)apocalyptic modes with, respectively, pastoral and elegy.

The final chapter offers a perspective on Stevens’s place in literary history by examining the work of a contemporary poet, Jorie Graham, whose poetry quotes from Stevens’s oeuvre and shows other marks of his influence. Woodland focuses on Graham's 1997 collection The Errancy and shows that her antiapocalyptic poetry involves a very different attitude toward the possibility of a radical break with a particular cultural or aesthetic stance.

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, offering a new understanding of Stevens’s position in literary history, will greatly interest literary scholars and students.
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cover of Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook

Walled-Up Wife

A Casebook

Alan Dundes

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

For centuries, many Indo-European peoples have sung a poignant ballad about the tragic sacrifice of a female victim to ensure the successful completion of an important undertaking, such as the construction of a building, bridge, or well. The legend, and its many regional and stylistic variations throughout Eastern Europe and India, provides material for an original and engaging casebook of interpretations by folklorists, anthropologists, scholars of comparative religion, and literary critics.
    Alan Dundes brings together eighteen essays on this classic ballad, each introduced by his headnotes. Some contributors offer competing nationalistic claims concerning the ballad’s origin, claims now in dispute because of previously overlooked South Asian versions; Ruth Mandel examines gender and power issues in the ballad; Lyubomira Parpulova-Gribble presents a structuralist reading; Krstivoj Kotur proposes a Christian interpretation; Mircea Eliade advocates a myth-ritual reading of blood sacrifices with cosmogonic connections in the Romanian text; and other readings explore female victimization and heroism by seeing the ballad’s theme as a metaphor for marriage, a male-constructed trap seriously restricting women’s freedom and mobility. Dundes concludes the collection with his own feminist and psychoanalytic interpretations of the ballad, followed by suggestions for further reading.
    By emphasizing the ballad’s variant forms in diverse cultural contexts, analyzed from different disciplinary perspectives, this volume asks students of folklore to be aware of the multiplicity of approaches available to them in researching folk narrative.

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cover of Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

Walt Whitman and the Making of Jewish American Poetry

Dara Barnat

University of Iowa Press, 2023

Walt Whitman has served as a crucial figure within the tradition of Jewish American poetry. But how did Whitman, a non-Jewish, American-born poet, become so instrumental in this area of poetry, especially for poets whose parents, and often they themselves, were not “born here?”

Dara Barnat presents a genealogy of Jewish American poets in dialogue with Whitman, and with each other, and reveals how the lineage of Jewish American poets responding to Whitman extends far beyond the likes of Allen Ginsberg. From Emma Lazarus and Adah Isaacs Menken, through twentieth-century poets such as Charles Reznikoff, Karl Shapiro, Kenneth Koch, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, and Gerald Stern, this book demonstrates that Whitman has been adopted by Jewish American poets as a liberal symbol against exclusionary and anti-Semitic elements in high modernist literary culture. The turn to Whitman serves as a mode of exploring Jewish and American identity.
 
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cover of Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

Critiques

Charlton Laird

University of Nevada Press, 1983

Beginning in 1849, Alfred Doten recorded his life in minute detail for more than 54 years. His revealing daily accounts of the West's lusty mining frontier included tales of lynching, vigilante justice, shootings in the street, grand opera and theatre, stock manipulations, seances, musical soirees, and general "jollifications." Clark selected and edited the most valuable portions of Doten's massive diaries. He said he knew of no other account, fact or fiction, that so graphically presented the tragic course of a single representative life through the violent transformations brought about by the California Gold Rush and the Nevada Silver Boom.

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cover of Wanasema: Conversations with African Writers

Wanasema

Conversations with African Writers

Don Burness

Ohio University Press, 1985

There is a tendency to regard African literature as a homogenous product. Certainly it is true that African writers have created a vibrant, modern literature. Nevertheless, they come from specific societies and reflect vastly differing worlds. Wanasema attempts to show some of the many faces of African literature. Dramatists, poets and novelists speak in these pages. They write in French, English, Portuguese, Arabic and indigenous languages. Some are Christian; others are Muslim. A variety of subjects are discussed, including the status of women, history, religion, politics, dress and education. Taken together, the interviews in Wanasema suggest that Western students of Africa would do well to learn the languages of Africa. They suggest, too, taht there is a need to investigate further the relationship between Islamic North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and finally, that oral literature continues to be a vast marketplace for scholars. This book should interest African Studies specialists, of course, but also those whose concerns include literature, history and contemporary events in the non-Western world generally.
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cover of Wandering Stars: Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905-1940

Wandering Stars

Russian Emigré Theatre, 1905-1940

Laurence Senelick

University of Iowa Press, 1992

From the beginning of this century, wars, pogroms, revolution, and economic hardship have impelled Russian cultural figures to seek their fortunes abroad—and theatre people have been no exception. This movement was a windfall for Western Europe and North America, for often the most talented and exciting actors and directors put down roots in foreign lands. Their styles and messages were transmuted in the process, but the inspiration they provided was tremendous.
Now, Wandering Stars is the first book in any language to look closely at this theatrical emigration. Essays by Russian and American scholars and practitioners examine the ways in which the process of transplanting art distorted, magnified, or otherwise altered originals and how expectations on both sides led to disappointments and achievements. A particular strength of this collection is its attention to the question of the transmission of one culture to another.
The thirteen essays in Wandering Stars, originally presented at a landmark 1991 conference at Harvard University, approach a host of historical, cultural, and theatrical issues. The effects of the pioneer touring companies of Pavel Orlenev, Alla Nazimova, and, most significantly, the Moscow Art Theatre are traced. The fates of actors like Maria Germanova and directors like Theodore Komisarjevsky who settled in the West receive careful inquiry. The techniques and influences of charismatic teachers such as Michael Chekhov and Andrius Jilinsky are examined, and the fortunes of cabarets like the Chauve-Souris and experimental playwrights like Nikolay Evreinov are given careful study. In addition, essays analyze the fascination America has held for Russian artists throughout history and the problems which face any emigrant who tries to preserve the best of his or her culture in an alien environment.
With the continuing interest in interculturalism evinced in the academy, popular literature, and the media, Wandering Stars makes a vital and timely contribution to the ongoing inquiry and debate. This book should be of interest to all students of theatre and Russian life and all those with an abiding interest in the realities of a global society. 
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cover of Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture

Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture

Silvia Montiglio

University of Chicago Press, 2005

From the Archaic period to the Greco-Roman age, the figure of the wanderer held great significance in ancient Greece. In the first comprehensive study devoted to this theme, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture unearths the many meanings attached to this practice over the centuries. Employing a broad range of literary and philosophical texts, Silvia Montiglio demonstrates how wandering has been conceptualized from Homer's Odysseus—the hero "who wandered much"—in the eighth century BCE to pagan sages of the early Roman Empire such as Saint John the Baptist in the first century AD.

Attitudes toward wandering have evolved in accordance with cultural perspectives, causing some characterizations to persist while others have faded. For instance, the status of wanderers in Greek societies varied from outcasts and madmen to sages, who were recognized as mystical, even divine. Examining the act of wandering through many lenses, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture shows how the transformation of the wanderer coincided with new perceptions of the world and of travel and invites us to consider its definition and import today.
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cover of War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

War Echoes

Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production

Vigil, Ariana E

Rutgers University Press, 2014

War Echoes examines how Latina/o cultural production has engaged with U.S. militarism in the post–Viet Nam era. Analyzing literature alongside film, memoir, and activism, Ariana E. Vigil highlights the productive interplay among social, political, and cultural movements while exploring Latina/o responses to U.S. intervention in Central America and the Middle East. These responses evolved over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—from support for anti-imperial war, as seen in Alejandro Murguia's Southern Front, to the disavowal of all war articulated in works such as Demetria Martinez’s Mother Tongue and Camilo Mejia’s Road from Ar Ramadi. With a focus on how issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect and are impacted by war and militarization, War Echoes illustrates how this country’s bellicose foreign policies have played an integral part in shaping U.S. Latina/o culture and identity and given rise to the creation of works that recognize how militarized violence and values, such as patriarchy, hierarchy, and obedience, are both enacted in domestic spheres and propagated abroad.  
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cover of War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination

War Stars

The Superweapon and the American Imagination

H. Bruce Franklin

University of Massachusetts Press, 2008

In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. 

Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and Star Wars to a twenty-first century dominated by “weapons of mass destruction,” real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon—guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals—has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

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cover of Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts

Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts

Brad E. Kelle

SBL Press, 2014

New perspectives on Israelite warfare for biblical studies, military studies, and social theory

Contributors investigate what constituted a symbol in war, what rituals were performed and their purpose, how symbols and rituals functioned in and between wars and battles, what effects symbols and rituals had on insiders and outsiders, what ways symbols and rituals functioned as instruments of war, and what roles rituals and symbols played in the production and use of texts.

Features:

  • Thirteen essays examine war in textual, historical, and social contexts
  • Texts from the Hebrew Bible are read in light of ancient Near Eastern texts and archaeology
  • Interdisciplinary studies make use of contemporary ritual and social theory
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cover of Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850

Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850

Dianne Dugaw

University of Chicago Press, 1995

This interdisciplinary study uncovers a fascination with women cross dressers in the popular literature of early modern Britain, in a wide range of texts from popular ballads and chapbook life histories to the comedies and tragedies of aristocratic literature. Dugaw demonstrates the extent to which gender and sexuality are enacted as constructs of history.
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cover of Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England

Waste and the Wasters

Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England

Eleanor Johnson

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.

While the scale of today’s crisis is unprecedented, environmental catastrophe is nothing new. Waste and the Wasters studies the late Middle Ages, when a convergence of land contraction, soil depletion, climate change, pollution, and plague subsumed Western Europe. In a culture lacking formal scientific methods, the task of explaining and coming to grips with what was happening fell to medieval poets. The poems they wrote used the terms “waste” or “wasters” to anchor trenchant critiques of people’s unsustainable relationships with the world around them and with each other. In this book, Eleanor Johnson shows how poetry helped medieval people understand and navigate the ecosystemic crises—both material and spiritual—of their time.
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cover of Watching Wildlife

Watching Wildlife

Cynthia Chris

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammalsSo let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.—Bloodhound GangIt has never been easier for Americans to observe wild and exotic animals from the comfort and safety of their couches. Several cable channels—Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel—provide around-the-clock wildlife programming while the traditional networks regularly broadcast animal documentaries, late-night appearances by zoologists and their animal charges, and sensationalistic specials about animals attacking hapless humans. Though the ubiquity of animals on television is new, the genre of the wildlife documentary is as old as cinema itself.In Watching Wildlife, Cynthia Chris traces the history of the wildlife genre from its origins in precinematic, colonial visual culture to its contemporary status as flagship programming on global television and explores evolving beliefs about, and attitudes toward, animal subjects. Nature programming and films are consistently presented as real and unmediated reflections of nature. But in Chris's analysis of specific shows (Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and cable television's Crocodile Hunter) and film and television history (the colonial cinema, the launch of Animal Planet), she points out how—particularly in the genre's preoccupation with mating and the favoritism bestowed on certain species—documentary images of animals are and always have been about prevailing ideologies about human gender, sexuality, and race.Ultimately, Chris's sweeping and cogent account of the wildlife documentary incorporates this frequently overlooked genre into broader debates about media globalization, human-animal relations, and popular scientific discourse.Cynthia Chris is assistant professor of media culture at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.
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cover of Water Lilies: An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century

Water Lilies

An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century

Amy Kaminsky

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

Poetry and prose by Spanish women presented here in both English and Spanish.

A dazzling sampler, Water Lilies brings to light a rich and until now largely invisible version of Spanish literary history. These hard-to-find works, most translated for the first time, are printed on facing pages in Spanish and English and located within a critical, biographical, and historical overview.

Here are five centuries of writing by Spanish women, the unknown recovered from obscurity, the well-known seen as they rarely have been-in the context of a women’s literary history. Some of these writers, like Rosalía de Castro in “The Bluestockings” and Teresa de Cartagena in Wonder at the Work of God, question the relationship between the woman writer and the act of writing. Some, like the poet Carolina Coronado in “The Twin Geniuses: Sappho and Saint Teresa of Jesus,” overtly seek a literary tradition. Others, like Saint Teresa in her Life and Luisa Sigea in her poetry, provide touchstones for women in search of such a tradition.Legends and stories of women’s friendships, the inconstancy of men, and the love of God; Spain’s first autobiographical text; secular and religious poetry from medieval through recent times; an excerpt from one of the few chivalresque novels written by a woman; a full-length Golden Age comedia: this is the wide range of works Water Lilies comprises. Brought together for the first time, the writers articulate their resistance to, and their complicity in, a literary history that, until now, has tried to exclude them.
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cover of Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain, 1914–1940

Watteau's Shepherds

The Detective Novel in Britain, 1914–1940

LeRoy Lad Panek

University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

Detective stories should be examined from a literary point of view, with special attention to literary history and to materials and patterns from which the writers created their fictions. This book sheds new light into the fascinating field of detective fiction.
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cover of We Are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition

We Are the Stars

Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition

Sarah Hernandez

University of Arizona Press, 2023

After centuries of colonization, this important new work recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.

Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.
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cover of We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness

We Boys Together

Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness

Jeffery P. Dennis

Vanderbilt University Press, 2007

Teenage boys are wild about girls.When their hormones kick in at puberty, they can think of nothing else, and that"s the way it has always been-- right? Wrong. Before World War II, only sissies liked girls. Masculine, red-blooded, all-American boys were supposed to ignore girls until they were 18 or 19. Instead, parents, teachers, psychiatrists, and especially the mass media encouraged them to form passionate, intense, romantic bonds with each other.

This book explores romantic relationships between teenage boys as they were portrayed before, during, and immediately after World War II. The author takes the reader through a rich landscape of media -- sci fi pulps, comics, adventure stories, tales of teen sleuths, boys' serial novels, wartime bestsellers, and movies populated by many types of male adolescents: Boys Next Door, Adventure Boys, Jungle Boys, and Lost Boys. In Hollywood movies, Boys Next Door like Jackie Cooper, Ronald Sinclair, and Jimmy Lydon were constantly falling in love, but not with girls. In serial novels, Jungle Boys like Bomba, Sorak, and Og Son of Fire swung through the trees to rescue teenage boys, not teenage girls. In comic strips and on the radio, Adventure Boys like Don Study, Jack Armstrong, and Tim Tyler formed lasting romantic partnerships with other boys or men. Lost Boys like Frankie Darro, Leo Gorcey, and Billy Halop starred in dozens of movies about pairs of poor urban teenagers sticking together, with never a girl in sight.

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cover of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

We Gotta Get Out of This Place

The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War

Doug Bradley

University of Massachusetts Press, 2015

Rolling Stone's #1 Music Book of 2015

For a Kentucky rifleman who spent his tour trudging through Vietnam's Central Highlands, it was Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'.” For a “tunnel rat” who blew smoke into the Viet Cong's underground tunnels, it was Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze.” For a Black Marine distraught over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was Aretha Franklin's “Chain of Fools.” And for countless other Vietnam vets, it was “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die,” “Who'll Stop the Rain,” or the song that gives this book its title.

In We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Doug Bradley and Craig Werner place popular music at the heart of the American experience in Vietnam. They explore how and why U.S. troops turned to music as a way of connecting to each other and the World back home and of coping with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. They also demonstrate that music was important for every group of Vietnam veterans—black and white, Latino and Native American, men and women, officers and “grunts”—whose personal reflections drive the book's narrative. Many of the voices are those of ordinary soldiers, airmen, seamen, and marines. But there are also “solo” pieces by veterans whose writings have shaped our understanding of the war—Karl Marlantes, Alfredo Vea, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bill Ehrhart, Arthur Flowers—as well as songwriters and performers whose music influenced soldiers' lives, including Eric Burdon, James Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Country Joe McDonald, and John Fogerty. Together their testimony taps into memories—individual and cultural—that capture a central if often overlooked component of the American war in Vietnam.

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cover of We Rode the Rhythms as One: On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight

We Rode the Rhythms as One

On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight

Edited by Norman Minnick

University of Michigan Press, 2026

We Rode the Rhythms as One offers readers an immersive journey into the life and legacy of one of America’s most unorthodox and inspiring poets. More than just a literary analysis, this book captures the pulse of Etheridge Knight’s life, weaving together interviews, personal essays, letters, and critical pieces to form a vivid and multifaceted portrait. Through the voices of poets, scholars, students, and Knight himself, the book underscores the profound intersections of race, art, politics, and personal survival, revealing how Knight forged poetry from his struggles and shaped a community of voices from diverse backgrounds.

Knight’s story is one of transformation—an odyssey from hardship and incarceration to artistic prominence—anchored by his unwavering belief in the power of poetry to unite and heal. This comprehensive volume is also a historical and cultural exploration, situating Knight’s work amid the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ongoing fight for social justice. Readers will find themselves drawn to Knight’s unfiltered voice, his reflections on Black identity, and his insistence on making poetry accessible to all—whether through intimate letters or reflections on the sociopolitical climate that shaped his art. Suitable for poetry enthusiasts, scholars, and general readers alike, We Rode the Rhythms as One invites us to reconsider Knight’s enduring impact and the vital role of poetry in reflecting and reshaping human experience.
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cover of We Saw the Light: Conversations between New American Cinema and Poetry

We Saw the Light

Conversations between New American Cinema and Poetry

Daniel Kane

University of Iowa Press, 2009

By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community. Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Frank O’Hara joined Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Andy Warhol to hang out, make films, read poems, fight censorship, end racism, and shut down the Vietnam War. Their personal, political, and artistic collaborations led them to rethink the moving picture and the lyric, resulting in an extraordinary profusion of poetry/film hybrids.

Drawing on unpublished correspondences and personal interviews with key figures in the innovative poetry and film communities, Daniel Kane’s stunningly erudite and accessible work not only provides a fresh look at avant-garde poetry and film but also encourages readers to rethink the artistic scenes of the 1960s and today. We Saw the Light will reframe the very way we talk about how film influences poetry and force us to think anew about the radical ways in which art is created and in turn influences subsequent work.
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cover of We See with the Skin: On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology

We See with the Skin

On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology

Roshanak Kheshti

Duke University Press, 2026

Roshanak Kheshti opens her book with a line from one of Zora Neale Hurston’s earliest stories: “we see with the skin.” From this brief but potent line, Kheshti examines how Hurston’s understanding of Black skin as both seen and seeing offers radical insight into racialized perception and Black consciousness. Kheshti follows Hurston’s travels across the back woods of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana as a filmmaker and sensory ethnographer of the African diasporic spiritual practice of hoodoo. Through her travels, Hurston encountered a sensibility that could animate the object status of being colored with the power of a return gaze. Kheshti considers both how Hurston poetically exploited the synesthetic logic at the heart of race thinking—being colored—and how her embodied performance ethnography catalogued an outside to that logic. We See with the Skin is an original mapping of Hurston’s synesthetic theory and its broader implications for understanding minoritarian perception and thought.
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cover of We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moveran: Biography of a Song of Struggle

We Shall Not Be Moved/No nos moveran

Biography of a Song of Struggle

David Spener

Temple University Press, 2016

The activist anthem “We Shall Not Be Moved” expresses resolve in the face of adversity; it helps members of social movements persevere in their struggles to build a better world. The exact origins of the song are unknown, but it appears to have begun as a Protestant revival song sung by rural whites and African slaves in the southeastern United States in the early nineteenth century. The song was subsequently adopted by U.S. labor and civil rights activists, students and workers opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain, and by Chilean supporters of that country’s socialist government in the early 1970s. 

In his fascinating biography, We Shall Not Be Moved, David Spener details the history and the role the song has played in each of the movements in which it has been sung. He analyzes its dissemination, function, and meaning through a number of different sociological and anthropological lenses to explore how songs can serve as an invaluable resource to participants in movements for social change.

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cover of We Take Care of Our Own: Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen

We Take Care of Our Own

Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen

June Skinner Sawyers

Rutgers University Press, 2024

We Take Care of Our Own traces the evolution of Bruce Springsteen’s beliefs, beginning with his New Jersey childhood and ending with his most recent works from Springsteen on Broadway to Letter to You. The author follows the singer’s life, examining his albums and a variety of influences (both musical and nonmusical), especially his Catholic upbringing and his family life, to show how he became an outspoken icon for working-class America—indeed for working-class life throughout the world. In this way, the author emphasizes the universality of Springsteen’s canon and depicts how a working-class sensibility can apply to anyone anywhere who believes in fairness and respect. In addition, the author places Springsteen in the historical context not only of literature (especially John Steinbeck) but also of the art world (specifically the work of Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper). Among the themes explored in the book include community, a sense of place, America as the Promised Land, the myth of the West, and, ultimately, mortality.
 
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cover of We Wanna Boogie: The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers

We Wanna Boogie

The Rockabilly Roots of Sonny Burgess and the Pacers

Marvin Schwartz

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2014

Rock and roll pioneer and Newport native Sonny Burgess is a member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. In this book full of personal interviews and remembrances, Burgess and his band tell of their original recordings for Sun Records in the 1950s; their shows with greats such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis; and their success in the contemporary rockabilly revival. This also is the history of a once prominent and spirited Delta community of extensive agricultural wealth. Newport was home to numerous music clubs that hosted national artists as well as illicit backroom gambling. Burgess is a product of this history, and his vivacious music is shaped by his hometown and the dramatic transformation of southern rural life it witnessed.
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cover of We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics

We Who Love to Be Astonished

Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics

Laura Hinton

University of Alabama Press, 2001

The first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works

We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.

The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.

The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.

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cover of We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill: An Oral History

We're the Light Crust Doughboys from Burrus Mill

An Oral History

By Jean A. Boyd

University of Texas Press, 2003

The Light Crust Doughboys are one of the most long-lived and musically versatile bands in America. Formed in the early 1930s under the sponsorship of Burrus Mill and Elevator Company of Fort Worth, Texas, with Bob Wills and Milton Brown (the originator of western swing) at the musical helm and future Texas governor W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel as band manager and emcee, the Doughboys are still going strong in the twenty-first century. Arguably the quintessential Texas band, the Doughboys have performed all the varieties of music that Texans love, including folk and fiddle tunes, cowboy songs, gospel and hymns, commercial country songs and popular ballads, honky-tonk, ragtime and blues, western swing and jazz, minstrel songs, movie hits, and rock 'n' roll.

In this book, Jean Boyd draws on the memories of Marvin "Smokey" Montgomery and other longtime band members and supporters to tell the Light Crust Doughboys story from the band's founding in 1931 through the year 2000. She follows the band's musical evolution and personnel over seven decades, showing how band members and sponsors responded to changes in Texas culture and musical tastes during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. Boyd concludes that the Doughboys' willingness to change with changing times and to try new sounds and fresh musical approaches is the source of their enduring vitality. Historical photographs of the band, an annotated discography of their pre-World War II work, and histories of some of the band's songs round out the volume.

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cover of We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

We-Narratives

Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

Natalya Bekhta

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Winner, 2021 Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction analyzes a storytelling form shaped by the pronoun “we,” probing the tensions between individuality and collectivity in more recent narratives in English. Despite a growing interest in collective characters and the we-form in narratology and beyond, narrative theory has not yet done justice to the plural voice in fiction. In fact, the formulation of a poetics of collective expression needs clear theoretical conventions and a reassessment of established concepts in order to approach plural voices and agents on their own terms. We-Narratives addresses this demand by distinguishing between indicative and performative uses of the first-person plural pronoun in fiction and by identifying formal and rhetorical possibilities of stories told by group narrators.

What does it mean for a multitude to speak as one? How can a truly collective narrative voice be achieved or lost? What are its aesthetic and political repercussions? In order to tackle these questions, Bekhta reads a range of contemporary novels and short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides, Joshua Ferris, Toby Litt, Zakes Mda, Joyce Carol Oates, and Julie Otsuka. She also focuses on narrative innovation by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, and Susan Sontag. These narratives feature group protagonists and narrators and therefore offer insight into collective narrative discourse and focalization, construction of communal knowledge and unreliability. We-narrative, taken as a distinct storytelling form, illuminates fiction’s expressive potential and nuances models of narrative analysis.
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cover of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Weak Planet

Literature and Assisted Survival

Wai Chee Dimock

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Vulnerability. We see it everywhere. In once permanent institutions. In runaway pandemics. In democracy itself. And most frighteningly, in ecosystems with no sustainable future. Against these large-scale hazards of climate change, what can literature teach us? This is the question Wai Chee Dimock asks in Weak Planet, proposing a way forward, inspired by works that survive through kinship with strangers and with the nonhuman world.

Drawing on Native American studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities, Dimock shows how hope can be found not in heroic statements but in incremental and unspectacular teamwork. Reversing the usual focus on hegemonic institutions, she highlights instead incomplete gestures given an afterlife with the help of others.  She looks at Louise Erdrich’s and Sherman Alexie’s user-amended captivity narratives; nontragic sequels to Moby-Dick by C. L. R. James, Frank Stella, and Amitav Ghosh; induced forms of Irishness in Henry James, Colm Tóibín, W. B. Yeats, and Gish Jen; and the experimentations afforded by a blurry Islam in works by Henri Matisse, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Langston Hughes.  Celebrating literature’s durability as an assisted outcome, Weak Planet gives us new ways to think about our collective future.
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cover of Weimar Under the Palms: Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood

Weimar Under the Palms

Pacific Palisades, German Exiles, and the Invention of Hollywood

Thomas Blubacher

Brandeis University Press, 2025

The story of the German exiles—and cultural titans—who settled in Pacific Palisades and influenced American culture. 
 
In the early twentieth century, Pacific Palisades was home to America’s most modern film studio of the time as well as the proposed site of the world’s largest Christian center. But by the end of the 1920s, the Los Angeles neighborhood had become the refuge of the rich and beautiful as German and Austrian filmmakers, among them Salka and Berthold Viertel, settled there. They were soon followed by cultural and intellectual giants of the Weimar Republic who were fleeing Europe, such as Max Reinhardt, Hanns Eisler, or Max Horkheimer. These great minds turned Pacific Palisades into a “Weimar under the palm trees.” Though many were successful in exile—including Vicki Baum, Thomas Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger—others felt as if they were in a “sun prison” far from home.
 
Recounting a story of glamor and great minds, Thomas Blubacher tells of the history of German-speaking exiles that is still alive there today, going on a foray through the film industry, taking us on a journey to this special place that was so recently devastated by fire. Many of the homes in this book have now gone, but Marta Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann house still stand as a testament to luck, resilience, and history.
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cover of Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town

Welcome 2 Houston

Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town

Langston Collin Wilkins

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space.

A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

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cover of West African Pop Roots

West African Pop Roots

John Collins

Temple University Press, 1992

"Collins-Lowry gives persuasive examples of how employment gains made by Blacks in the 80's were rather more marginalized than we like to think." --Publishers Weekly Against the backdrop of increasing ambivalence in the federal government commitment to race-based employment policies, this book reveals how African-Americans first broke into professional and managerial jobs in corporations during the sixties and offers in-depth profiles of their subsequent career experiences. Two sets of interviews with the most successful Black executives in Chicago's major corporations are used to demonstrate how the creation of the Black business elite is connected to federal government pressures and black social unrest that characterized the civil Rights movement in the sixties. Black Corporate Executives presents, first hand, the dilemmas and contradictions that face this first wave of Black managers and reveals a subtle new employment discrimination. Corporations hired these executives in response to race-conscious political pressures and shifted them into "racialized" positions directing affirmative action programs or serving "special" markets of minority clients, customers, or urban affairs. Many executives became, as one man said, "the head Black in charge of Black people." These positions gave upper-middle-class lifestyles to those who held them but also siphoned these executives out of mainstream paths to corporate power typically leading through planning and production areas. As the political climate has become more conservative and the economy undergoes restructuring, these Black executives believe that the importance of recruiting Blacks has waned and that the jobs Blacks hold are vulnerable. Collins-Lowry's analysis challenges arguments that justify dismantling affirmative action. She argues that it is a myth to believe that Black occupational attainments are evidence that race no longer matters in the middle-class employment arena. On the contrary, Blacks' progress and well-being are tied to politics and employment practices that are sensitive to race.
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cover of West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization

West African Screen Media

Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization

Boukary Sawadogo

Michigan State University Press, 2019

The culturally rooted comic traditions of koteba theater and joking kinship have shaped West African comedies through various forms of humor. Débrouillardise (hustle) has turned the urban scene into a comic scene, a site for individual realization. To highlight the ever-growing production and success of comedies and other popular genres, West African Screen Media: Comedy, TV Series, and Transnationalization explores the distribution and reception of selected productions by emphasizing the public’s strong resonance with local stories and a character-based comedy involving popular comedians. In contrast to art films or “auteur films” that tend to be confined to the festival circuit, comedies and popular genres reach a far wider audience through local distribution networks, satellite TV channels, pirated DVDs, and online distribution platforms. This book engages a discussion of contemporary African media productions as seen outside the usual frameworks of cinéma engagé, the art house, or auteur approaches. While examining production and distribution through the lenses of proximity, appropriation, and transnationalization, this volume invites readers to reconsider the way genre films, as well as other kinds of productions, have been previously evaluated and in doing so addresses the critical neglect of comedy and other popular genres in the scholarship on African cinema.
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cover of West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers

West of the Border

The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers

Noreen Groover Lape

Ohio University Press, 2000

Expanding the scope of American borderland and frontier literary scholarship, West of the Border examines the writings of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century Native, African, Asian, and Anglo American frontier writers. This book views frontiers as “human spaces” where cultures make contact as it considers multicultural frontier writers who speak from “west of the border.”

James P. Beckwourth, a half-black fur trader; Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Paiute translator; Salishan author Mourning Dove; Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge; Sui Sin Far, an Anglo-Chinese short story writer, and her sister, romance novelist Onoto Watanna; and Mary Austin, a white southwestern writer- each of these intercultural writers faces a rite of passage into a new social order. Their writings negotiate their various frontier ordeals: the encroachment of pioneers on the land; reservation life; assimilation; Christianity; battles over territories and resources; exclusion; miscegenation laws; and the devastation of the environment.

In West of the Border, Noreen Groover Lape raises issues inherent in American pluralism today by broaching timely concerns about American frontier politics, conceptualizing frontiers as intercultural contact zones, and expanding the boundaries of frontier literary studies by giving voice to minority writers.

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cover of Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing In North American West

Western Subjects

Autobiographical Writing In North American West

Gioia Woods

University of Utah Press, 2005

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cover of Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Westerns

Making the Man in Fiction and Film

Lee Clark Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 1996

A history of the Western in fiction and on film that shows how it reflects the changing obsessions and fears of American culture

Few genres are so closely identified with America as the Western. In this wide-ranging examination of the Western and its appeal, Lee Clark Mitchell ranges from the novels of James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L'Amour, and from classic films like Stagecoach to spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollar to show how Westerns helped assuage a series of crises in American culture. This landmark book shows that the Western owes its perennial appeal not to unchanging conventions but to the deftness with which it responds to the obsessions and fears of its audience. And no obsession, Lee Mitchell argues, has figured more prominently in the Western than what it means to be a man. 
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cover of Whale

Whale

K.L. Evans

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An entirely fresh approach to Moby Dick, by way of Ludwig Wittgenstein

The aim of this thoroughly unconventional work is to demonstrate that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations share the same projects and are, in effect, one and the same book. Confounding and improbable as such an enterprise might seem, Whale! not only successfully reveals the vital intersections between Melville and Wittgenstein but also, more important, makes a compelling argument for why such intersections are essential to understanding common political projects in literature and philosophy.

Written with grace, passion, and wit, Whale! manages to produce a startling and remarkably original reading of one of the most written-about and interpreted books in the American canon. K. L. Evans explores Melville’s vast work as a tale not of vengeance but of affection, and Ahab’s near-pathological agitation as indicative of his refusal to accept the world as unknowable. Between Ahab and the whale, Evans traces a longing for connection and meaning and finds a forceful response to the skeptical view that language is bankrupt and knowledge is uncertain. In Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick, Whale! discovers a way to reconnect matter with meaning, object with knowledge.
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cover of What Are Poets For?: An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

What Are Poets For?

An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Gerald L. Bruns

University of Iowa Press, 2012

Conceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns’s magisterial What Are Poets For? explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores.

Naturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses—for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth.What Are Poets For? is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.
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cover of What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan

What Did You Hear?

The Music of Bob Dylan

Steven Rings

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Named one of PopMatters’ Best Books of 2025! Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
 
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
 
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.
 
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds. 

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cover of What Goes Around Comes Around

What Goes Around Comes Around

edited by Kimberly J. Lau, Peter Tokofsky, and Stephen Winick

Utah State University Press, 2004

In this collection of essays prominent folklorists look at varied modern uses and contexts of proverbs and proverbial speech, some traditional and conventional, others new and unexpected. After the editors' introduction discussing the history and status of attempts to define proverbs, describing their contemporary circulation, and acknowledging the especially important work of paremiologist Wolfgang Meider, the contributions examine the continuing pervasiveness and idiomatic relevance of proverbs in modern culture.
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cover of What Is A Poet?

What Is A Poet?

Hank Lazer

University of Alabama Press, 1987

This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.

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cover of What Is Contemporary Art?

What Is Contemporary Art?

Terry Smith

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today’s multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art?

Smith argues that the most recognizable kind is characterized by a return to mainstream modernism in the work of such artists as Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, as well as the retro-sensationalism of figures like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. At the same time, Smith reveals, postcolonial artists are engaged in a different kind of practice: one that builds on local concerns and tackles questions of identity, history, and globalization. A younger generation embodies yet a third approach to contemporaneity by investigating time, place, mediation, and ethics through small-scale, closely connective art making. Inviting readers into these diverse yet overlapping art worlds, Smith offers a behind-the-scenes introduction to the institutions, the personalities, the biennials, and of course the works that together are defining the contemporary. The resulting map of where art is now illuminates not only where it has been but also where it is going.

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cover of What Is Pastoral?

What Is Pastoral?

Paul Alpers

University of Chicago Press, 1997

One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished literary historian Paul Alpers argues that pastoral is based upon a fundamental fiction—that the lives of shepherds or other socially humble figures represent the lives of human beings in general.

Ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Hardy and Frost, this work brings the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the twentieth century. Pastoral reemerges in this account not as a vehicle of nostalgia for some Golden Age, nor of escape to idyllic landscapes, but as a mode bearing witness to the possibilities and problems of human community and shared experience in the real world.

A rich and engrossing book, What Is Pastoral? will soon take its place as the definitive study of pastoral literature.

"Alpers succeeds brilliantly. . . . [He] offers . . . a wealth of new insight into the origins, development, and flowering of the pastoral."—Ann-Maria Contarino, Renaissance Quarterly
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cover of What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82

What Is Post-Punk?

Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82

Mimi Haddon

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Popular music in the US and UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s was wildly eclectic and experimental. “Post-punk,” as it was retroactively labeled, could include electro-pop melodies, distorted guitars, avant-garde industrial sounds, and reggae beats, and thus is not an easily definable musical category.

What Is Post-Punk? combines a close reading of the late-1970s music press discourse with musical analyses and theories of identity to unpack post-punk’s status as a genre. Mimi Haddon traces the discursive foundations of post-punk across publications such as Sounds, ZigZag, Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and NME, and presents case studies of bands including Wire, PiL, Joy Division, the Raincoats, and Pere Ubu. By positioning post-punk in relation to genres such as punk, new wave, dub, and disco, Haddon explores the boundaries of post-punk, and reveals it as a community of tastes and predilections rather than a stylistically unified whole. Haddon diversifies the discourse around post-punk, exploring both its gender and racial dynamics and its proto-industrial aesthetics to restore the historical complexity surrounding the genre’s terms and origins.
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