August 2006

After the pain; critical essays on Gayl Jones; Fiona Mills, editor; Keith Mitchell, assistant editor. Peter Lang 2006 (African American literature and culture) 266p pa $29.95
ISBN 0-8204-7838-5; LC 2006-8938
Contributors analyze Jones’s literary career, from her use of language and music to interpretations of her representation of sexuality and gender to examinations of the connections between Latin America and African Americans.

The Architecture of modern mathematics; essays in history and philosophy; edited by Jose Ferreiros and Jeremy J. Gray. Oxford Univ. Press 2006 442p $69.50
ISBN 0-19-856793-6; LC 2005-36586
Focusing on the history and philosophy of modern mathematics, this volume reconsiders such topics as the creation of modern topology, axiomatics, intuition, geometry, and empiricism in light of recent historical research.

Arming slaves; from classical times to the modern age; edited by Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan. Yale Univ. Press 2006 368p pa $35.00
ISBN 0-300-10900-8; LC 2005-26285
This collection of essays surveys the practice of entrusting slaves with the use of deadly force, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, West and East Africa, the United States, Latin America, and the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East.

Arnedo-Gomex, Miguel
Writing rumba; the Afrocubanista movement in poetry. University of Va. Press 2006 (New World studies) 217p $55.00, pa $21.50
ISBN 0-8139-2541-X; 0-8139-2542-8; LC 2005-30903
The author discusses the evolution of afrocubanista poetry as a reflection of the union of black and white Cubans, specifically within the sociocultural environment of 1920s and 1930s Cuba.

Crouch, Stanley
Considering genius; writings on jazz. Basic Civitas Books 2006 359p $27.50
ISBN 0-456-01517-4; LC 2006-2225
Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Ornette Coleman are among the jazz artists considered.

Deleuze and space; edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. University of Toronto Press 2005 (Deleuze connections) 245p pa $29.95
ISBN 0-8020-9390-6
Noted scholars in spatial research explore the importance of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts (as well as those of his colleague, Felix Guattari) for the analysis of contemporary architecture, the environment, contemporary film, and emerging political and cultural formations.

Dickens studies annual, v36; essays on Victorian fiction; edited by Stanley Friedman, Edward Guiliano, Anne Humpherys, and Michael Timko. AMS Press 2005 368p $137.50

Guercio, Gabriele
Art as existence; the artist’s monograph and its project. The MIT Press 2006 378p $50.00
ISBN 0-262-07268-8; LC 2005-54485
Investigating the origins of the monograph on individual artists, the author traces its formal development from Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century Lives of the painters, sculptors, and architects, to its apogee in the nineteenth century and decline in the twentieth.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt
The character of criticism. Routledge 2006 195p $85.00, pa $24.95
ISBN 0-415-97132-2; 0-415-97133-0; LC 2005-36248
The author explores, through detailed portraits of such critics as Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, and Edward Said, the complex ways in which human character is expressed in criticism.

Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson
Cinematic savior; Hollywood’s making of the American Christ. Praeger 2006 159p $39.95
ISBN 0-275-98489-3; LC 2006-2723
Considering the life of Jesus as portrayed in such films as King of kings, The Greatest story ever told, Jesus of Nazareth, The Last temptation of Christ, and The Passion of the Christ, the author draws parallels in Hollywood filmmaking and societal themes of temptation, suffering, and triumph.

Jackson, Robert
Seeking the region in American literature and culture; modernity, dissidence, innovation. Louisiana State Univ. Press 2005 174p $44.95
ISBN 0-8071-3062-1; LC 2004-27259
Addressing American literature since the Civil War, the author surveys American cultural history through a selection of works by Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison.

Konstan, David
The emotions of the ancient Greeks; studies in Aristotle and classical literature. University of Toronto Press 2006 422p $85.00
ISBN 0-8020-9103-2
The author discusses how classical representations and analyses of the emotions of the ancient Greeks corresponded to a world of extreme competition for status, focusing on the attitudes, motives, and actions of others as the driving forces of emotion.

LaBelle, Brandon
Background noise; perspectives on sound art. Continuum 2006 316p $85.00, pa $24.95
ISBN 0-8264-1844-9; 0-8264-1845-7; LC 2005-36728
John Cage, Max Neuhaus, Maryanne Amacher, and Bill Fontana are among the figures discussed in this historical overview of auditory culture.

Lust for life; on the writings of Kathy Acker; edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronell. Verso 2006 120p pa $19.95
ISBN 1-84467-066-X
Peter Wollen, Barrett Watten, and Leslie Dick are among the contributors who consider the works of the transgressive postmodernist.

Queering the popular pitch; edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga. Routledge 2006 308p $95.00, pa $29.95
ISBN 0-415-97804-1; 0-415-97805-X; LC 2005-30587
This collection of essays explores the queer iconography found in film musicals, videos, Latin House, cabaret, and poetry. Among the issues covered are race and ethnicity, the body in music, and the use of popular music in power politics.

Recording and reordering; essays on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diary and journal; edited by Dan Doll and Jessica Munns. Bucknell Univ. Press 2006 (The Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture) 248p $47.50
ISBN 0-8387-5630-1; LC 2005-18059
Contributors, examining the forms, uses, and discursive practices of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diaries and journals, address questions of authorship, audience, and matters of narrative and literary construction.

Renaissance drama [2006]; embodiment and environment in early modern drama and performance; edited by Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. Northwestern Univ. Press 2006 (New series 35) 222p $69.95

The Resisting muse: popular music and social protest; edited by Ian Peddie. Ashgate 2006 228p $99.95, pa $29.95
ISBN 0-7546-5113-4; 0-7546-5114-2; LC 2005-12323
Contributors examine the various ways popular music has been deployed as anti-establishment and how such opposition both influences and responds to the music produced. Among the artists referenced are: Bono, Eminem, Lil’ Kim, Goldie, and Robert Plant.

Sacred and secular in medieval and early modern cultures; new essays; edited by Lawrence Besserman. Palgrave Macmillan 2006 (New Middle Ages) 238p $69.95
ISBN 1-4039-6732-6; LC 2005-48705
Scholars assess interconnections between sacred and secular phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and early modern periods with special focus on Old English poetry, troubadour lyrics, twelfth-century romance, the Gregorian Reform, and Middle English lyrics.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer
Novel beginnings; experiments in eighteenth-century English fiction. Yale Univ. Press 2006
pa $30.00
ISBN 0-300-11031-6; LC 2005-24209
In this study of the early history of the English novel, the author investigates a wide range of forms and themes, including romans a clef, Providential narratives, political allegories, Gothic romances, and psychological thrillers.

Stinson, Russell
The reception of Bach’s organ works; from Mendelssohn to Brahms. Oxford Univ. Press 2006 232p $45.00
ISBN 0-19-517109-8; LC 2005-11111
The author examines how four nineteenth-century composers¾Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms¾borrowed from Bach’s organ music in
creating their own masterpieces.

Thomas Hardy reappraised; essays in honour of Michael Millgate; edited by Keith Wilson. University of Toronto Press 2006 304p $65.00
ISBN 0-8020-3955-3
Contributors address questions of biblical and literary allusiveness, narrative and poetic theory and practice, cultural and historical context, as well as Hardy’s place and influence in the modern world.

Wakefield, Sarah R.
Folklore in British literature; naming and narrating in women’s fiction, 1750-1880. Peter Lang 2006 (Studies on themes and motifs in literature, v80) 176p $64.95
ISBN 0-8204-6340-X; LC 2005-24266
In this exploration of works by Sarah Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Anne Thackeray, Jean Ingelow, and Sydney Owenson, the author discusses how folklore provided a metaphor for insecurity in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women’s writing.

Wertheimer, Eric
Underwriting; the poetic of insurance in America, 1722-1872. Stanford Univ. Press 2006 187p $50.00
ISBN 0-8047-5089-0; LC 2005-36648
The author, assessing the relationship between insurance and literature, as well as how property and text were linked in early America, examines the lives and works of five American authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Benjamin Franklin, Noah Webster, Phillis Wheatley, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Wild colonial girl; essays on Edna O’Brien; edited by Lisa Colletta and Maureen O’Connor. The University of Wis. Press 2006 (Irish studies in literature and culture) 175p $60.00, pa $24.95
ISBN 0-299-21630-6; 0-299-21634-9; LC 2005-22818
Contributors explore the literary, political, and cultural importance of O’brien’s significant contributions to the field Irish women’s literature. Among the topics covered are motherhood, sexuality, religion, marriage, patriarchy, and Catholicism.