Results by title

A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century. 

 

This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.

 

A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century.

This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.

Contributors

Borja Aguiló Obrador
Peter Balakian
William Barillas
Don Bogen
Neal Bowers
Nicholas Bradley
Luke Brekke
Russell Brickey
Katharine Bubel
Norman Chaney
Jeffrey Clapp
Lyn Coffin
Kristin M. Distel
Carrie Duke
Laura Duncan
Laura Gill
Patrick Gill
Christopher Giroux
William Heyen
Trenton Hickman
Michael Hinds
Edward Hirsch
Brooke Horvath
Marcel Inhoff
Walter Kalaidjian
Frank J. Kearful
Andrew David King
Marc Malandra
John J. McKenna
Aaron M. Moe
Sarah Kathryn Moore
Edward Morin
Marcia Noe
Camille Paglia
Jay Parini
Rod Phillips
Ronald Primeau
Adam Putz
Bernard Quetchenbach
David Radavich
John Rohrkemper
Brandon Rushton
Joseph T. Thomas Jr.
Jeff Vande Zande
David Wojahn

This exquisitely written biography of major American poet Theodore Roethke by his close friend and fellow writer Allan Seager was greeted with great enthusiasm in the literary community when it originally appeared in 1968. Kirkus Reviews found The Glass House “finely wrought, compassionate, intimate, and bound to be of inestimable value to all future Roethke scholars” in its exploration of Roethke’s life and its relationship to his art; critic Hugh Kenner called it “simply the best American biography.”
 
Biographer Allan Seager interviewed a number of Roethke’s friends and fellow writers, and he had access to the voluminous notes the poet left behind. Seager reveals the Theodore Roethke who existed behind the public persona – a complex, self-contradictory, gentle, often disturbed mysterious, and ruthlessly honest man. One of the book’s most moving passages is the defense of the poet’s role within the university, written by a colleague when Roethke was faced with the threat of dismissal. A committed teacher himself, Seager succeeds in doing justice to an often neglected aspect of Roethke’s achievement, his remarkable power as a teacher, and his unusual and committed teaching style.
 

Over sixty years ago, political scientist V.O. Key Jr. published his seminal work, Southern Politics in State and Nation. Key's book redefined the field of southern politics and remains one of the most cited and influential works in twentieth-century political science and southern history. In Unlocking V.O. Key Jr., prominent southern scholars in history, political science, and southern and American studies reconsider Key's analysis, debating his omissions as well as highlighting the timeless elements of his work. Charles Reagan Wilson, Kari Frederickson, and Pearl K. Ford argue that Key's exclusion of religion, violence, and African American political participation altered the field of southern politics. Keith Gaddie and Justin Wert draw attention to Key's methodological innovations, while Margaret Reid questions Key's limited and gendered vision of the southern electorate. Harold Stanley discusses the complexity of teaching Key in the twenty-first century. Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston argue for the role that class and the economy played in the realignment of the South with the Republican Party, while Dan T. Carter points to race as the driving factor in this major shift. Susan MacManus tracks immigration trends in the region to explain contemporary southern political behavior. Supported with a foreword by Byron E. Shafer that provides an overview of Key's major contributions as a political scientist, and concluding with Wayne Parent's discussion of Key and the contemporary student, Unlocking V.O. Key Jr. is a must-read companion to the classic Southern Politics in State and Nation.