Albee, Edward

Stretching my mind. Carroll and Graf 2005 294p $25

ISBN 0-7867-1621-5

Writings on the theater, literature, the visual arts, politics, and culture. Lee Krasner, Samuel Beckett, James Purdy, and Uta Hagen are among those discussed.

Bochner, Jay

An American lens: scenes from Alfred Stieglitz’s New York Seccession. MIT Press 2005 371p il $39.95

ISBN 0-262-02580-9; LC 2005-43347

Explores the importance of Stieglitz to the avant-garde community in America and to New York’s literary, theatrical, dance, and music worlds in particular.

Boyers, Robert

The dictator’s diction: the politics of novels and novelists. Columbia University Press 2005 218p $29.50

ISBN 0-231-13674-9; LC 2005-48475

Examines the role of the political imagination in shaping the works of such writers as W. G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Pat Barker, and V. S. Naipul.

Carson, Anne

Decreation: poetry, essays, opera. Knopf 2005 245p il $24.95

ISBN 1-4000-4349-2; LC 2004-63367

Includes essays on Samuel Beckett, Michelangelo Antonioni, Marguerite Porete, Simon Weil, Sappho, a solar eclipse, and the meaning and function of sleep.

The contest of language: before and beyond nationalism; edited by W. Martin Bloomer. University of Notre Dame Press 2005 274p $55, pa $30

ISBN 0-268-02190-2; 0-268-02191-0; LC 2005-25273

Contributors consider various contemporary and historical efforts to make a language dominant through textual, institutional, academic, and literary means.

Cox, John B.

Traveling south: travel narratives and the construction of American identity. University of Georgia Press 2005 252p $39.95

ISBN 0-8203-2765-4; LC 2005-8515

Writings by William Bartram, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Law Olmstead are discussed.

Critics and poets on Marianne Moore: "a right good salvo of barks"; edited by Linda Leavell, Christianne Miller, and Robin G.Schulze. Bucknell University Press 2005 266p $49.50

ISBN 0-8387-5616-6; LC 2005-637

Patricia Willis, Elizabeth Gregory, Elizabeth Wilson, Charles Berger, and Benjamin Friedlander are among the contributors.

Culture and authority in the baroque; edited by Massimo Ciavolella and Patrick Coleman. University of Toronto Press 2005 255p $70

ISBN 0-8020-3838-7

Scholars explore many aspects of the baroque, from politics to poetics, to rituals of musical, dramatic, and religious performance.

Friskics-Warren, Bill

I’ll take you there: pop music and the urge for transcendence. Continuum 2005 276p $24.95

ISBN 0-8264-1700-0; LC 2005-20280

Surveys the careers of 30 artists who articulate their spirituality through music. Johnny Cash, Madonna, Al Green, the Mekons, the Stooges, and Sleater-Kinney are among those profiled.

Gander, Forrest

A faithful existence: reading, memory, and transcendence. Shoemaker and Hoard 2005 149p $24

ISBN 1-59376-071-X; LC 2005-4763

Includes essays on Thomas Trahearne, Henry Dumas, Agha Shahid Ali, Vic Chesnutt, George Oppen, and Laura (Riding) Jackson, among others.

Grayling, A. C.

The mystery of things. Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2005 c2004 229p $25

ISBN 0-297-64559-5

Covers subjects as wide-ranging as Jane Austen’s Emma, the Rosetta stone, Shakespeare, the Holocaust, and the brain.

Hanson, Gillian Mary

Riverbank and seashore in nineteenth and twentieth century British literature. McFarland and Co. 2005 c2006 180p pa $32

ISBN 0-7864-2284-X; LC 2005-20848

Explores ways in which British authors, from Tennyson to Ted Hughes, from H. E. Bates to Jane Gardam, have made use of the physical environment of riverbank and seashore in their work.

Lautenbach, Ann

The night sky: writings on the poetics of experience. Viking 2005 261p $29.95

ISBN 0-670-03410-X; LC 2004-66146

Essays consider the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning in works by Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, John Currin, Gerhard Richter, and others.

Lessing, Doris

Time bites: views and reviews. HarperCollins 2005 c2004 376p $27.95

ISBN 0-06-083140-5; LC 2005-46266

These essays range from imagining the sex life of Tolstoy to Sufism, from reviews of classical books to commentaries on world politics.

Moorefield, Virgil

The producer as composer: shaping the sounds of popular music. MIT Press 2005 143p $21.95

ISBN 0-2621-3457-8

Traces the evolution of the producers role in popular music with discussions of works by Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, Quincy Jones, the Chemical Brothers, and others.

Plaskow, Judith

The coming of Lilith: essays on feminism, Judaism, and sexual ethics, 1972-2003; edited with Donna Berman. Beacon Press 2005 244p pa $19

ISBN 0-8070-3623-4; LC 2004-27039

Collects the authors scholarly and personal writings on both feminist theology and Jewish feminism.

Periklean Athens and its legacy: problems and perspectives; edited by Judith M. Barringer and Jeffrey M. Hurwit. University of Texas Press 2005 306p il $55

ISBN 0-292-70622-7; LC 2004-21789

Scholars offer a panorama of the art, architecture, history, culture, and influence of Periklean Athens.

Prose and cons: essays on prison literature in the United States; edited by D. Quentin Miller. McFarland and Co. 2005 280p pa $39.95

ISBN 0-7864-2146-0; LC 2005-16987

Readings of works by Norman Mailer, Robert Lowell, Edward Bunker, Asha Bandele, Raymond Federman, Kosmond Russell, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and others.

Rhetoric and reality in early Christianities; Willi Braun, editor. Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005 257p (Studies in Christianity and Judaism/Etudes sur le christianisme et la judaisme) $59.95

ISBN 0-88920-462-4

Contributors theorize about persuasion and discuss the relationship between the verbal performance of rhetoric and other performative modes in generating, sustaining, and transmitting a persuasive form of religiosity.

Science fiction America: essays on SF cinema; edited by David Jo Hogan. McFarland and Co. 2005 c2006 280p il $45

ISBN 0-7864-2149-5; LC 2005-4743

It came from outer space, Death race 2000, The iron giant, Starship troopers, Logan’s run, and the Flash Gordon serials, are among the films discussed.

A search for meaning: critical essays on early modern literature; edited by Paula Harms Payne. Lang, P. 2005 c2004 159p $55.95

ISBN 0-8204-7112-7; LC 2003-27815

Scholars offer evaluations of works by Dürer, Milton, Shakespeare, Messinger, Jonson, and Sidney.

Theology and the political: the new debate; Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek, editors; with an introduction by Rowan Williams. Duke University Press 2005 476p (SIC; 5) $99.95, pa $29.95

ISBN 0-8223-3460-7; 0-8223-3472-0; LC 2004-28227

Essays explore the spiritual dimensions of ontology, considering the relationship between ontology and the political in the thought of figures ranging from Plato to Marx, Levinas to Derrida, and Augustine to Lacan.

Updike, John

Still looking: essays on American art. Knopf 2005 222p il $40

ISBN 1-4000-4418-9; LC 2004-61568

Artists critiqued include Copley, Singleton, Heade, Horner, Eakins, Whistler, Ryder, Stieglitz, Hartley, Dove, Nadelman, Hopper, Pollock, and Warhol.

Warren, Joyce W.

Women money and the law: nineteenth-century fiction, gender, and the courts. University of Iowa Press 2005 373p $44.95

ISBN 0-87745-953-3; LC 2005-45704

Looks at public and private stories of individual women (including authors) within the context of American culture, assessing how legal and cultural traditions affected women’s lives, particularly with respect to racial and class differences, and analyzing ways in which women were involved in economic matters.

Young, Robert J.

An uncertain idea of France: essays and reminiscence on the Third Republic. Lang, P. 2005 261p $66.95

ISBN 0-8204-7481-9; LC 2004-20886

Provides perspectives on materials as disparate as French military doctrine and strategic planning, elite and popular mentalités, social biography and cultural propaganda.