October 2005
 

An American vein: critical readings in Appalachian literature; edited by Danny L. Miller, Sharon Hatfield, and Gurney Norman. Ohio University Press 2005 400p $59.95; pa $24.95

ISBN 0-8214-1589-1; 0-8214-1590-5; LC 2004-23207

Discusses such authors as Jesse Stuart, James Still, Jim Wayne Miller, Mary Lee Settle, Cormac McCarthy, Jo Carson, and John Crowley.

Balbus, Isaac D.

Mourning and modernity: essays in the psychoanalysis of contemporary society. Other Press 2005 194p pa $25.00

ISBN 1-59051-155-7; LC 2004-21692

Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Christopher Lasch, and Dorothy Dinnerstein are among the authors discussed, in addition to such topics as reparations for slavery and racism, the fantasies of omnipotence fostered by computer-mediated communication, and the way in which deep ecology and 12-step recovery programs contest omnipotence in the realms of production and consumption.

Britton, Wesley A.

Beyond Bond: spies in fiction and film. Praeger 2005 267p $49.95

ISBN 0-275-98556-3

The author discusses the history of espionage in literature, film, and other media, and examines the works of such authors and film directors as Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Brooks, Peter

Realist vision. Yale Univ. Press 2005 255p il $27.00

ISBN 0-300-10680-7; LC 2004-29501

Examines the works of Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, Zola, James, and Woolf, as well considering the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud.

Butt, Gavin

Between you and me: queer disclosures in the New York art world, 1948-1963. Duke Univ. Press 210p il $75.95; pa $21.95

ISBN 0-8223-3486-0; 0-8223-3498-4; LC 2004-229837

The author discusses the value of gossip in critical art history in the art world and sexual climate of the McCarthy era, while focusing on such artists as Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns.

Caplan, David

Questions of possibility: contemporary poetry and poetic form. Oxford Univ. Press 2005 165p $35.00

ISBN 0-19-516957-3; LC 2004-2168

Examines the particular forms that contemporary American poets favor and those they neglect, and covers the works of authors such as Charles Bernstein, Derek Walcott, Marilyn Hacker, and Agha Shahid Ali.

Coale, Samuel Chase

Paradigms of paranoia: the culture of conspiracy in contemporary American fiction. University of Alabama Press 2005 258p $40.00

ISBN 0-9173-1447-5; LC 2004-16479

The author covers the works of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, and Paul Auster.

Creeber, Glen

Serial television: big drama on the small screen. British Film Institute 2004 184p il $70.00: pa $27.95

ISBN 1-84457-020-7; 1-84457-021-5

The author analyzes the Sopranos, Queer as folk, Sex and the city, Twin peaks, This life, Prime suspect, Cold Lazarus, The kingdom, Holocaust, Heimat, and Roots.

Donoghue, Denis

The American classics: a personal essay. Yale Univ. Press 2005 295p $27.00

ISBN 0-300-10781-1; LC 2004-23264

Melville, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Twain are among the authors discussed.

Guyer, Paul

Kant’s system of nature and freedom: selected essays. Oxford Univ. Press 2005 384p $35.00

ISBN 0-19-927347-2

Looks at such topics as emprical law, systematicity, system of duties, ethics, and teleology.

The Jews and British romantism: politics, religion, culture: edited by Sheila A. Spector. Palgrave Macmillan 2005 334p $75.00

ISBN 1-4039-6454-8; LC 2004-52795

Essays demonstrate how the texts produced by the Jewish Enlightenment provided a significant resource for romantic intellectual revisionism, in much the same way that British romanticism provided the cultural basis through which the British-Jewish community was able to negotiate between the competing obligations to ethnicity and nationalism.

Keith, Jennifer

Poetry and feminine from Behn to Cowper. University of Delaware Press 2005 227p $46.50

ISBN 0-87413-891-4; LC 2005-1445

The author reviews the works of Dryden, Pope, Gray, Killigrew, and others.

Latin American Shakespeares: edited by Bernice W. Kliman and Rick J. Santos. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press 347p $57.50

ISBN 0-8386-4064-8; LC 2004-28746

The authors looks at Shakespeare performances and adaptations in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

Madness and creativity in literature: edited by Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton. Palgrave MacMillan 2005 244p $69.95

ISBN 1-4039-2199-7; LC 2004-53147

Contributors discuss such topics as literature in medicine, madness in Medieval literature, and authors such as Cowper, Wordsworth, and Mann.

Middleton, Peter

Distant reading: performance, readership, and consumption in contemporary poetry. University of Alabama Press 2005 241p (Modern and contemporary poetics) $64.00

ISBN 0-8173-1442-3; 0-8173-5151-5; LC2004-14701

The author investigates reading interactions of voice and text, phonology, physiology and psychology, and the sociology of the poetry reading.

Milosz, Czeslaw

Legends of modernity: essays and letters from occupied Poland, 1942-1943; translated from the Polish by Madeline G.

Levine introduction by Jaroslaw Anders. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 266p $25.00

ISBN 0-374-18499-2; LC 2005-40950

The author discusses themes inspired by the works of Defoe, Balzac, Gide, Stendhal, and Nietzsche.

Montgomery, Marion

On matters southern: essays about literature and culture, 1964-2000; edited by Michael M. Jordan; foreward by Eugene D. Genovese. McFarland 2005 214p pa $35.00

ISBN 0-7864-2224-6; LC 2005-13992

The author discusses the importance of place in southern letters, the differences between southern and northern fiction, and pays tribute to Andrew Lytle, Madison Jones, M.E. Bradford, and Walker Percy.

Peraino, Judith A.

Listening to the sirens: musical technologies of queer identity from Homer to Hedwig. University of California Press 2006 355p $49.50

ISBN 0-520-21587-7; LC 2005-6234

Essays consider the musical creatures, musical gods and demigods, musical humans, and music-addled listeners who have been associated with behavior that breaches social conventions.

Postcolonail studies and beyond: edited by Ania Loomba . . . [et al.]. Duke Univ. Press 2005 499p $89.95; pa $24.95

ISBN 0-8223-3523-9; 0-8223-3511-5; LC 2004-28255

Contributors examine the key features of the ideologies and history of colonialism, the relationship of colonial discourse to literature, challenges to colonialism, and recent developments in post-colonial theories and histories in the writings of contemporary theorists, including Edward Said, Abdul JanMohamed, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak.

Rereadings: edited by Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2005 244p $22.00

ISBN 978-0-374-34942-7; 0-374-34942-3; LC 2005-40018

Essays analyze the works of J. D. Salinger, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, and others.

Rosenblatt, Louise

Making meaning with texts: selected essays. Heineman 2005 156p pa $19.00

ISBN 0-325-00768-3; LC 2004-25566

The author covers the transactional theory of reading in three parts - theory, practice: education and practice: criticism.

Simply lasting: writers on Jane Kenyon: edited by Joyce Peseroff. Graywolf Press 2005 178p pa $17.00

ISBN 1-55597-429-5; LC 2005-925168

Presents personal remembrances and critical assessments by the poets Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Jean Valentine and Donald Hall (Kenyon's widower), among others.

Sundquist, Eric J.

Strangers in the land: Blacks, Jews, and post-Holocaust America. Harvard Univ. Press 2005 662p $35.00

ISBN 0-674-01942-3; LC 2005-47033

Explores how reactions to several interlocking issues became critical to black-Jewish relations such as the biblical Exodus, the Holocaust, Zionism, and the state of Israel, as well as analyzing the fiction of Bernard Malamud, Paule Marshall, Harper Lee, William Melvin Kelley, Saul Bellow, John A. Williams, Lori Segal, Anna Deavere Smith, Julius Lester, and Philip Roth.

Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism; edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. Columbia Univ. Press 2005 230p $49.50

ISBN 0-231-13038-4; LC 2004-55102

Essays investigate the changing patterns of anthropomorphism across different time periods and settings, as well as their transformative effects, both figuratively and literally, upon animals, humans, and their interactions.

Zagajewski, Adam

A defense of ardor; translated by Clare Cavanagh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2004 198p $24

ISBN 0-374-13670-0; LC 2004-53246

The author discusses art, society and history, as well as the works of Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz.