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Never affiliated with any group or school, Anne Stevenson grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was educated at the University of Michigan where, in 1954, she won a Major Hopwood Prize for poetry. Since 1964 she has lived in the United Kingdom where a restless career as a mother, teacher, bookseller, and skep-tical enthusiast for some poetry has produced many volumes of verse, a highly controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, and two critical introductions to the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
Feminist critics will find much to invigorate and infuriate them in these essays. Stevenson believes that the "takeover" of poetry by critical theorists has, in recent years, all but brought about its demise in England and America. But she also fears that the media's doctrine of mass marketability may have a detrimental effect on the future of poetry. Her essays on Plath, Bishop, Irish poetry, and other subjects are as witty as they are challenging, upsetting many of the easy assumptions of our putatively "postmodern" era.
Anne Stevenson is the author of numerous books, including Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, The Other House, Four and a Half Dancing Men, and most recently, Collected Poems 1955- 1995.

No longer willing to accept naval blockades, the impressment of American seamen, and seizures of American ships and cargos, the United States declared war on Great Britain. The aim was to frighten Britain into concessions and, if that failed, to bring the war to a swift conclusion with a quick strike at Canada. But the British refused to cave in to American demands, the Canadian campaign ended in disaster, and the U.S. government had to flee Washington, D.C., when it was invaded and burned by a British army.

By all objective measures, the War of 1812 was a debacle for the young republic, and yet it was celebrated as a great military triumph. The American people believed they had won the war and expelled the invader. Oliver H. Perry became a military hero, Francis Scott Key composed what became the national anthem and commenced a national reverence for the flag, and the U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides," became a symbol of American invincibility. Every aspect of the war, from its causes to its conclusion, was refashioned to heighten the successes, obscure the mistakes, and blur embarrassing distinctions, long before there were mass media or public relations officers in the Pentagon.

In this entertaining and meticulously researched book by America's leading authority on the War of 1812, Donald R. Hickey dispels the many misconcep-tions that distort our view of America's second war with Great Britain. Embracing military, naval, political, economic, and diplomatic analyses, Hickey looks carefully at how the war was fought between 1812 and 1815, and how it was remembered thereafter. Was the original declaration of war a bluff? What were the real roles of Canadian traitor Joseph Willcocks, Mohawk leader John Norton, pirate Jean Laffite, and American naval hero Lucy Baker? Who killed the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and who shot the British general Isaac Brock? Who actually won the war, and what is its lasting legacy? Hickey peels away fantasies and embellishments to explore why cer-tain myths gained currency and how they contributed to the way that the United States and Canada view themselves and each other.

First published in 1503 in Lyons, Symphorien Champier’s The Ship of Virtuous Ladies helped launch the French Renaissance version of the querelle des femmes, the debate over the nature and status of women. The three books included in this edition include arguments for gender equality, and a catalogue of virtuous women modeled on Boccaccio’s Famous Women and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend. Titled “The Book of True Love,” book 4 is especially important in gender history, importing and transforming the male-centered Neoplatonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino for pro-woman ends.

"My husband was killed at the front right at the beginning of the war." Thus opens The Ship of Widows, the story of five women brought together in a large communal apartment by the vagaries of war in the year 1943. It spotlights the female experience of World War II: the fate of those not at the front, but still forced to fight as desperately to survive starvation, cold, and exhaustion, and to maintain homes and a country to which the soldiers can return. The Ship of Widows reveals an seldom-seen period of Russia's history and an understudied segment of its population—its women.