English Language and Literature: Faculty Books

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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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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
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)
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
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.