August 2005

A boy named Sue; gender and country music; edited by Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold. University Press of Mississippi 2004 232p $50.00, pa $20.00
ISBN 1-57806-677-8; 1-57806-678-6; LC 2004-7354
This collection of essays examines the role gender has played in the creation and marketing of country music. The country music industry in Nashville, the popular and fan press, and the line dance crazes of the 1990s are among the subjects covered.

Brown, J. Andrew
Test tube envy; science and power in Argentine narrative. Bucknell Univ. Press 2005 262p (The Bucknell studies in Latin American literature and theory) $47.50
ISBN 0-8387-5613-1; LC 2004-27218
The author explores how texts by Argentinian writers have influenced scientific discourse and how popular science has helped shape the country’s writing for over one hundred years. Domingo Sarmiento, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Ana Maria Shua are some of the writers studied.

Congress and the Constitution; Neal Devins and Keith E. Whittington, editors. Duke Univ. Press 2005 320p (Constitutional conflicts) $84.95, pa $23.95
ISBN 0-8223-3586-7; 0-8223-3612-X; LC 2005-6505
Scholars in law and political science discuss the role of Congress in constitutional interpretation and how Congress and the courts respond to each other’s decisions.

Connections and collisions; identities in contemporary Jewish-American women’s writing; edited by Lois E. Rubin. University of Del. Press 2005 260p $46.50
ISBN 0-87413-899-X; LC 2004-21655
Contributors examine the creative development of Jewish women writers and the extent to which their Jewish background played a part in this development. Cynthia Ozick, Tova Reich, Nora Gold, and Joanne Greenberg are among the authors discussed.

Design with culture; claiming America’s landscape heritage; edited by Charles A. Birnbaum and Mary V. Hughes. University of Va. Press 2005 215p $49.50, pa $22.50
ISBN 0-8139-2329-8; 0-8139-2330-1; LC 2004-17412
Essays explore how early preservationists, landscape architects, and individual activists considered the value of historic landscapes as they planned and designed projects during thr years 1890-1950.

Douglas, Ellen
Witnessing. University Press of Mississippi 2005 198p $28.00
ISBN 1-57806-670-0; LC 2004-4848
The author shares her thoughts on how events, both personal and and historical, can influence the shape, theme, and structure of a writer’s story.

Faulkner and his contemporaries; edited by Joseph R.Urgo and Ann J. Abadie. University Press of Mississippi 2004 195p (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2002) $45.00
ISBN 1-57806-679-4; LC 2003-27612
Contributors compare various themes from texts by Faulkner against those of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and Walker Evans.

Grosz, Elizabeth
Time travels; feminism, nature, power. Duke Univ. Press 2005 257p $79.95, pa $22.95
ISBN 0-8223-3553-0; 0-8223-3566-2; LC 2005-323
Addressing issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure and desire, the author considers how rethinking time alters understandings of nature, culture, politics, and justice.

Holiness and masculinity in the Middle Ages; edited by P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis. University of Toronto Press 2005 227p pa $27.50
ISBN 0-8020-4892-7
This collection of essays discusses varying notions of holiness during the Middle Ages and how they were affected by such issues as kingship, social status, monasticism, mysticism, body, and age.

Horror film; creating and marketing fear; edited by Steffen Hantke. University Press of Mississippi 2004 261p $45.00
ISBN 1-57806-692-1; LC 2004-5373
Contributors explore how such factors as lighting, editing techniques, sound, camera and film equipment as well as marketing and distribution have influenced the reception of horror movies in American society.

Jorie Graham: essays on the poetry; edited by Thomas Gardner. The Univesity of Wisconsin Press 2005 305p (Contemporary North American poetry) $65.00, pa $24.95
ISBN 0-299-20320-4; 0-299-20324-7; LC 2004-12821
Essays investigate several topics running through Graham’s poems concerning the actions of the mind, the role of the body, and the pressures of material conditions on both the mind and body.

The limits of law; edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey. Stanford Univ. Press 2005 321p (The Amherst series in law, jurisprudence, and social thought) $60.00
ISBN 0-8047-5235-4; LC 2005-7944
Scholars from the fields of law, plitical science, and sociology discuss the structural limitations of the judicial system in dealing with such issues as terrorism, states of emergency, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and alien rights.

Loesberg, Jonathan
A return to aesthetics; autonomy, indifference, and postmodernism. Stanford Univ. Press 2005 289p $65.00, pa $24.95
ISBN 0-8047-5115-3; 0-8047-5116-1; LC 2005-2880
Addressing the role of aesthetics in a postmodern critique of the Enlightenment, the author explores theoretical interpretations by Foucault, Bourdieu, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Matich, Olga
Erotic utopia; the decadent imagination in Russia’s fin de siecle. The University of Wisconsin Press 2005 340p $45.00
ISBN 0-299-20880-X; LC 2004-24547
In this study of Russian modernists’ theoretical beliefs that they were living in an age of decline, the author examines solutions proposed to overcoming death in the writings, letters, and diaries of Tolstoy, Zinaida Gippius, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov.

Nesbitt, Jennifer Poulos
Narrative settlements; geographies of British women’s fiction between the wars. University of Toronto Press 2005 146p $45.00
ISBN 0-8020-8986-0
The author, exploring how women writers, during the interwar period, used novels of place to determine relationships among themselves, space, and nation in England, focuses on works by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Newton, Adam Zachary
The elsewhere; on belonging at a near distance: reading literary memoir from Europe and the Levant. The University of Wisconsin Press 2005 397p $45.00
Through a compendium of literary forms (diary, memoir, fiction, travelogue), the author assesses the meaning of cultural, national, and familial identities, of memory and the dogma of place, and of the practice of reading midbar writing.

Persons and passions; essays in honor of Annette Baier; edited by Joyce Jenkins, Jennifer Whiting, and Christopher Williams. University of Notre Dame Press 2005 368p $53.00
ISBN 0-268-03263-7; LC 2005-10254
Contributors examine four main themes in Baier’s work in the area of philosophical naturalism: resistance to atomism, trust and mutual dependence, emotions as positive influences on judgment, and self-correction.

Physiognomy in profile; Lavater’s impact on European culture; edited by Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler. University of Del. Press 2005 258p $49.50
ISBN 0-87413-836-1; LC 2004-30869
Spanning the eighteenth- to the twentieth century, this collection of essays juxtaposes Lavater’s theories on how the configuration of facial features reveal qualities of one’s mind or character against the disciplines of art, photography, fiction, journalism, and medicine.

Reading medieval culture; essays in honor or Robert W. Hanning; edited by Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior. University of Notre Dame Press 2005 505p $37.50
ISBN 0-268-04111-3; LC 2005-12540
Covering a wide range of fields, contributors assess such topics as Anglo-Saxon England, the age of Chaucer, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism, and Italian Renaissance humanism and visual art.

Renaissance drama [2004]. Northwestern Univ. Press 2005 (New series 33) 246p $69.95

Schwartz, Frederic J.
Blind spots; critical theory and the history of art in twentieth-century Germany. Yale Univ. Press 2005 300p $37.50
ISBN 0-300-10829-X; LC 2004-23971
The author traces connections between the history of art and the discipline of aesthetics known as the Frankfurt School as practiced by such figures as Heinrich Wolfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Pinder, and Hans Sedlmayr.

Seelye, John
Jane Eyre’s American daughters; from The wide, wide world to Anne of Green Gables: a study of marginalized maidens and what they mean. University of Del. Press 2005 368p $57.50
ISBN 0-87413-886-8; LC 2004-21290
The author discusses the influence of Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic romance on the psyches of such writers as Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and L. M. Montgomery.

Tonsor, Stephen
Equality, decadence, and modernity; the collected essays of Stephen J. Tonsor; edited with an introduction by Gregory L. Schneider. ISI Books 2005 357p $30.00, pa $18.00
ISBN 1-932236-62-7; 1-932236-63-5; LC 2005-921727
In this critique of modernity, the author expounds on such topics as education, history, liberty, Marxism, and conservatism.

Warriors and scholars; a modern war reader; edited by Peter B. Lane, Ronald E. Marcello; foreword by Alfred F. Hurley. University of North Texas Press 2005 288p $24.95
ISBN 1-57441-197-7; LC 2005-5321
Military historians and military veterans present varying perspectives on World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and terrorism.

White, Roberta
A studio of one’s own; fictional women painters and the art of fiction. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press 2005 257p $46.50
ISBN 0-8386-4072-9; LC 2004-29577
The author explores the portrayal of women artists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels by British, American, Irish, and Canadian women writers. Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and Margaret Atwood are among the writers studied.