English Language and Literature: Faculty Books

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  Rival Wisdoms: Reading Proverbs in the Canterbury Tales

  Nancy Mason Bradbury

  In this elegantly written study, Nancy Mason Bradbury situates Chaucer’s last and most ambitious work in the context of a zeal for proverbs that was still rising in his day. Rival Wisdoms demonstrates that for Chaucer’s contemporaries, these tiny embedded microgenres could be potent, disruptive, and sometimes even incendiary.

  In order to understand Chaucer’s use of proverbs and their reception by premodern readers, we must set aside post-Romantic prejudices against such sayings as prosaic and unoriginal. The premodern focus on proverbs conditioned the literary culture that produced the Canterbury Tales and helped shape its audience’s reading practices. Aided by Thomas Speght’s notations in his 1602 edition, Bradbury shows that Chaucer acknowledges the power of the proverb, reflecting on its capacity for harm as well as for good and on its potential to expand and deepen—but also to regulate and constrict—the meanings of stories. Far from banishing proverbs as incompatible with the highest reaches of poetry, Chaucer places them at the center of the liberating interpretive possibilities the Canterbury Tales extends to its readers.

  Revelatory and persuasive, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and early modern English literature as well as those interested in proverbs and the Canterbury Tales.

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  The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

  Floyd Cheung and Frank Abe

  The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in time: the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy. A Penguin Classic This anthology presents a new vision that recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by the actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to deny Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. From nearly seventy selections of fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters emerges a shared story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization – all anchored by the key government documents that incite the action. The selections favor the pointed over the poignant, and the unknown over the familiar, with several new translations among previously unseen works that have been long overlooked on the shelf, buried in the archives, or languished unread in the Japanese language. The writings are presented chronologically so that readers can trace the continuum of events as the incarcerees experienced it. The contributors span incarcerees, their children born in or soon after the camps, and their descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences of mass incarceration for themselves and the nation. Many of the voices are those of protest. Some are those of accommodation. All are authentic. Together they form an epic narrative with a singular vision of America’s past, one with disturbing resonances with the American present. Source: Publisher

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  Postcolonial Servitude: Domestic Servants in Global South Asian English Literature

  Ambreen Hai

  Postcolonial Servitude explores how a new generation of contemporary global, transnational, award-winning writers with origins in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh engages with the complexities of domestic servitude as a problem for the nation and for the novel. Servitude, to be distinguished from slavery, is a distinctive and pervasive phenomenon in South Asia, with a long history. Unprotected by labor laws, subject to exploitation and dehumanization, members of the lower classes provide essential services to employers whose homes become the servants' workplace. South Asian literature has always featured servants, usually as marginal or instrumental. This book focuses on writers who make servants and servitude central, and craft new narrative forms to achieve their goals. Identifying a blind spot in contemporary postcolonial studies, this is the first full-length study to focus on domestic servants in Anglophone postcolonial or South Asian literature and to examine their political, thematic, and formal significance.

  Offering fresh readings of well-known early to mid-20th-century writers, this book shows how South Asian English fiction conventionally keeps servants in the background, peripheral but necessary to the constitution of an elite or middle class. It analyses closely the formal strategies, interventions, and modes of representation of five younger writers (Daniyal Mueenuddin, Romesh Gunesekera, Aravind Adiga, Thrity Umrigar, and Kiran Desai), who, it argues, pull servants and servitude into the foreground, humanizing servants as protagonists with agency, complex subjectivities, and stories of their own. Postcolonial Servitude reveals a cultural shift in the twenty-first century postcolonial novel, a new attentiveness, self-implication, and ethics, linked with a new poetics. Source: Publisher

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  Each Luminous Thing

  Stacie Cassarino

  From the boreal woods of Vermont to the coastal canyons of Southern California, Stacie Cassarino's highly anticipated second collection of poetry maps the parallel tracks of walking through shifting terrains and becoming a mother. Cassarino patiently explores the physical cadences of landscapes as they are superimposed with internal and linguistic navigations of desire, longing, loss, and love. Stepping into the natural world with a lens on earthly objects encountered through the seasons, Cassarino holds both sorrow and praise for their ephemerality, and for the fragility of human connection, and in doing so reconciles her own sense of home. These are quiet, resilient poems, reflective of the urgent grasp to preserve and fill the silences that live around and within us; they affirm the presence of beauty through solid facets of nature and through the enthralled body that announces its love, even as things come in and out of focus. Source: Publisher

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  The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence: A Memoir

  Pamela Petro

  For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth, literally “long field” in Welsh but famously hard to translate, means far more than its English approximation of “homesickness.” It is something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence.

  In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time.

  A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.” Source: the publisher

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  Fat Stories

  Susan Stinson

  The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields.

  Comprising over 20 chapters from a range of diverse and international contributors, the Reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that "gender" and "fat" always exist in connection with multiple other structures, forms of oppression, and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexualities, age, nationalities, disabilities, religion, and class.

  The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Body Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and Health.

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  The Sun Also Rises

  Ernest Hemingway and Michael Thurston

  This Norton Critical Edition includes:
  
  The text of Ernest Hemingway's best-known novel.
  
  Introduction and explanatory footnotes by Michael Thurston.
  
  A rich selection of background and contextual materials carefully chosen to enhance the reader’s understanding of and appreciation for Hemingway’s prose style and his famous 1926 novel. Topics include “Biographical and Autobiographical Background,” “Composition and Revision,” “Letters,” “On Postwar Paris and Expatriates,” “On Bullfighting,” and “Literary Influences.”
  
  Six major early reviews and ten recent critical essays.
  
  A chronology of Ernest Hemingway's life and work and a selected bibliography.

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  Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature

  Andrea Stone

  Canadian Association for American Studies Robert K. Martin Book Prize

  Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.

  Such portrayals of the healthy black self in early black print culture created a nineteenth-century politics of well-being that spanned continents. Even in conditions of painful labor, severely limited resources, and physical and mental brutality, these writers counter stereotypes and circumstances by representing and claiming the totality of bodily existence.

  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Source: Publisher

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  W.S. Merwin’s “Retirement”: Late Style and Themes in the 1990s and After

  Michael Thurston

  Lateness in a poet’s career has often focused critics on some significant turn: toward themes of mortality, away from earlier generic or formal constraint, and so on. In this chapter, I examine later work of W.S. Merwin, beginning with Travels (published in 1993, when Merwin was 65, the age often associated with retirement). In the volumes he produced in the 1990s and early 2000s, we do indeed find a late turn in Merwin’s work. Unsurprisingly, one thematic turn in this work is retrospective; Merwin looks back over his own life, sometimes with greater autobiographical candor than at earlier moments, and he takes up historical topics with some urgency. Intertwined with themes relating to the personal and public pasts is an increasing interest in the long poem, from “Testament” in The Vixen (1996) to “Lament for the Makers” in The River Sound. These two strains in Merwin’s later work fuse in the epic achievement of The Folding Cliffs (1998), his book-length narrative on nineteenth-century Hawaii, a book that secures his later style and that powerfully connects personal and historical memory, situating Merwin alongside such contemporaries as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.

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  On Recovering Early Asian American Literature

  Floyd Cheung

  Beginning in the early 1970s, scholars have been recovering an Asian American literary archive. The first anthologies of Asian American literature defined the field in divergent ways. Some focused on US-born writers and a politics of cultural nationalism. Others embraced a wider range of writers and a variety of political positions. The second wave of anthologies and scholarly discussions reacted against more limited views of Asian American literature and extended the field to encompass more women writers, genres such as poetry and drama, works written before the 1960s, and authors from beyond those of East Asian descent. Depending on the particular project, recovery has meant unearthing forgotten writings, revaluing discounted or discredited texts, or rethinking the sociopolitical context of works. Recovery continues today in print and digital editions released by both independent and mainstream publishers. Questions remain about which authors and works deserve recovery, and the stakes are high since inclusion in a canon can serve as a proxy for inclusion in a culture.

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  Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction

  James Fitzmaurice, Naomi J. Miller, and Sara Jayne Steen

  The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.

  Source: Publisher

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  The Garden in the Machine: Grace Lee Boggs’s Living for Change: An Autobiography and Detroit’s Urban-Agrarian Future

  Jina B. Kim

  'The Garden in the Machine: Grace Lee Boggs’s Living for Change: An Autobiographyand Detroit’s Urban-Agrarian Future" is chapter two of part one: Neoimperialisms, Neoliberalisms, Necropolitics in Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996-2020: Volume 4, edited by Betsy Huang, Victor Román Mendoza

  This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon with the effects of structures and networks of violence. Part Two tracks modes of intimacy - desires, loves, close friendships, romances, sexual relations, erotic contacts - that emerge in the face of neoimperialism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. Part Three traces the proliferation of genres in Asian American writing of the past quarter century in new and in well-worn terrains. Part Four surveys literary projects that speculate on future states of Asian America in domestic and global contexts.

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  The Book of Form and Emptiness

  Ruth Ozeki

  A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and learning to take charge of one's life, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being. Benny Oh is a fourteen year-old boy living in the Pacific Northwest who, shortly after his father dies, begins to hear voices. The voices belong to all the things around him, speaking. He doesn't understand what they are saying, but he can sense their emotional tone; many are angry and full of pain. Benny's voice-hearing is heightened because his depressed and lonely mother, Anabelle, is a hoarder. The first voices Benny hears belong to the things in Annabelle's growing hoard, but soon he is hearing voices not just at home, but on the street and at school. When he can't escape the voices, he starts to talk back to them. People begin to think he is mentally ill. Benny escapes to the public library whenever he can, and slowly a strange new world opens up to him as he gets to know its denizens. He meets and falls in love with a nineteen year-old freegan installation artist named 'The Aleph,' who introduces him to the 'Bottleman,' an older, homeless, Slovenian poet in a wheelchair who also hears voices. Benny discovers there are special places in the Library, anomalous or paranormal locations where 'things' happen. As the novel unfolds, Benny's attempt to deal with the voices and figure out what is real escalates as his mother faces eviction and custody issues, as both struggle to remake themselves and find their own power and agency. With its blend of sympathetic characters, a strong forward-moving plot, and a vigorous engagement with everything from our attachment to material possessions to the climate crisis, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki--brilliant, playful, poignant, humane, and heartbreaking.

  Provided by publisher.

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  The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Ninety-Two Days: Volume 22

  Douglas Lane Patey

  This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual
  variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.
  
  This is the first fully annotated, critical edition of the travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934), Evelyn Waugh's account of an arduous journey through British Guiana and northern Brazil that provided crucial material for what many consider his finest novel, A Handful of Dust. A biographical and
  historical introduction places the work in the context of Waugh's life, and among other travel books written about the area; discusses how the text evolved from manuscript to print; and connects it with other literary works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and with the persistent myth of
  the lost city of El Dorado. (From publisher)

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  The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

  Michael Gorra

  A New York Times Notable Book of 2020

  How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy.

  William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we

  reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon.

  Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age.

  Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.”

  Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

  Source: Publisher

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  Imperfect Alchemist

  Naomi J. Miller

  A marriage of dynasty: that is what is expected of Mary Sidney. A marriage to Sir Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to be precise. But Mary's sharp mind longs to work on her writing and translation projects, ideally alongside her brilliant brother Philip, and perhaps learn more of the alchemical arts at the elbow of the dazzling Walter Raleigh. Rose Commin, a young country girl with a surprising talent for drawing, is desperate to shrug off the slurs of witchcraft which have tarnished life at home. The opportunity to work at Wilton House, the Herbert's Wiltshire home, is her chance. Defying the conventions of their time, these two women, mistress and maid, will find themselves facing the triumphs, revelations and struggles that lie ahead by leaning on each other. (From publisher)

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  Martha Moody: A Novel

  Susan Stinson

  At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details—as well as the magic–of women's lives in the old west. Source: Publisher

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  Cripping East Los Angeles: Enabling Environmental Justice in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

  Jina B. Kim

  Chapter 18 of section three: Food Justice in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory edited by Stacy Alaimo

  Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability."
  
  Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

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  Arthur in Early Wales/Culhwch and Olwen

  Craig R. Davis

  Book summary:

  This volume offers newly translated texts that exemplify the two most important traditions of Arthurian literature in the Middle Ages. Encompassing such key works such as Lawman's Brut and Wace's Romance of Brut, written in Middle English and Old French, respectively, the Arthurian Epic Tradition depends on Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, written in Latin. Many modern readers are more familiar with Arthur and his fabled court as the centerpiece of a massive fictional tradition, well represented in the second part of this volume, including Chretien de Troyes's Story of the Grail, The Quest of the Holy Grail, and the Perlesvaus. These selections emphasize the connection between secular and religious understandings of chivalry that is the most distinctive quality of medieval Arthurian romance. Useful as a classroom text, the volume provides material for a semester's worth of study.

  Source: publisher

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  Gothic ‘Immigrants’ in the Roman Empire

  Craig R. Davis

  Book summary:

  Immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics today. But, the question involves more than politics and emotion; it includes such critical issues as law, justice, human rights, human dignity, and freedom. Strangers in This World is a collection that brings together an international consortium of scholars to reflect on the religious, political, anthropological, and social realities of immigration through the prism of the historical and theological resources, insights, and practices across an array of religious traditions. The volume, reflecting the diversity of religious cultures, is nevertheless unified in arguing that immigration is an important aspect of the major religions and is found at their core. The contributors unfold this important dimension of the religious traditions and explore the ways that the theme of immigration connects to vital points of theological reflection and practice in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Native American religious traditions. At root, the volume is about our collective journey together as immigrant peoples who have stories and settlements to share, as well as challenges and struggles to overcome, that may be faced through the resources our many faiths offer. Source: Publisher

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  A Mother from Hell: Love and Vengeance in Beowulf

  Craig R. Davis

  Vox Germanica celebrates the career and scholarship of James E. Cathey, who retired from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst after more than forty years of distinguished service. In this multifaceted Festschrift, colleagues from North America and Europe offer Cathey cultural and philological studies that complement his capacious interests in the languages and literary traditions of northwestern Europe. The studies range in time and place from Etruscan to the earliest Germanic inscriptions; from the literary monuments of Old English, Old Saxon, and Old Icelandic to modem works by Rilke, Cather, Wagner, and Søeborg; and from historical linguistics to recent changes in Norwegian phonology. Source: Publisher

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  Theories of History in Traditional Plots

  Craig R. Davis